Jungmyeongjeon Hall

Jungmyeongjeon Hall is a small Western-style brick building in central Seoul where Emperor Gojong was forced to sign the 1905 Eulsa Treaty that ceded Korea's diplomatic rights to Japan. The building was originally part of Deoksugung Palace's Western pavilions (built in the early 1900s as a two-story Renaissance-style structure with red brick and stone accents) and has since been restored as a museum focused on that single, devastating moment in Korean history. The exhibits are compact but well-translated into English, walking through the lead-up to the treaty (the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, the Taft-Katsura Agreement, the Japanese ultimatum), Gojong's later attempts to revoke it through the 1907 Hague Special Envoy Mission, and the treaty's role in triggering the 1907 forced abdication and 1910 annexation. Plan about forty minutes inside. Free entry. The hall sits just outside Deoksugung's wall (5-minute walk from the palace's Daehanmun main gate), so combine it with the main palace and the Seoul Plaza area for a focused half-day on late-Joseon and colonial-era Seoul. The Seoul Museum of History (10 minutes on foot) extends the modern-era coverage.