The open-air exhibition: Ochon-daek house and the 1970s street
House built 1848; street reconstruction of the 1970s
The museum's grounds are an exhibition in themselves. Paths lead past stone figures of the twelve zodiac animals, tomb guardians, a water wheel, an ox-driven millstone, stacked stone prayer piles, and a pit for burying kimchi jars through the winter, all of the furniture of a traditional village set out under the trees below the pagoda. Two ensembles deserve a longer stop. The first is Ochon-daek, a complete house from Yeongdeok in North Gyeongsang province, built in 1848 for a branch of the Nam family and lived in until the 1980s. The family donated it, and in 2010 it was taken apart, moved to Seoul and rebuilt here, with its inner courtyard, wooden floors and heated ondol rooms furnished as they would have been.
The second is Memory Lane, a street of shops as they looked in a Seoul neighbourhood of the 1970s and early 1980s. There is a school classroom with a pump organ and a coal briquette stove, a stationery shop selling toys and snacks, a comic book rental store, a barbershop, a tearoom with a record player, a photo studio, a tailor, an electronics repair shop and a public bathhouse. You can walk in and sit down. Look at the prices on the packages and the posters on the walls, and notice how quickly Korea moved from this world to the one outside the museum gate.
Both ensembles record ways of living that vanished within a generation, which is the museum's core purpose. Korean visitors of a certain age tend to linger in the street with a mixture of laughter and nostalgia, while the house shows the older rural world their parents left behind. The stone figures nearby, including the stubby dol hareubang from Jeju Island, mark the older layer of village belief that underlies both.
Did You Know? The Ochon-daek house was lived in continuously by the same family from 1848 until the early 1980s before it was dismantled and rebuilt in the museum grounds.
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