At around 6 p.m. on the 11th, a sign was hung right next to the entrance door of the Dongyang Inn in Samdo 2-dong, Jeju-si. When the door was opened, the shoe rack was full of long-necked walkers with dust. The hallway was dark. Only the television sound from the room could be heard faintly between the faded wooden floor and the wall.
Cho Soon-yeo (80 years old, female), who has run the Dongyang Inn since 26 years ago, told reporters, “We don’t accept ordinary guests.” The house was torn down, so no one who slept every day received it. I only got the monthly rent. Usually only day laborers live. These days, there are no work or customers. There are 13 rooms, but only three people live there, he said.
The splendor of the past was gone. Only old airline promotional posters with “Fly Korean To Bangkok” and “Fly Korean To Hong Kong” on the wall side by side can confirm the past.
Jeju’s first hotel…”A few Japanese colonial era compromise structures left.
Dongyang Inn is Jeju’s first hotel built in 1938 during the Japanese colonial period. The area around Dongyang Inn, a luxury hotel in the past, was the busiest area in Jeju Island, where fairies, shopping malls, and government offices were concentrated. Tamna Inn, which was right next to Dongyang Inn, was the place where movie stars of the time, including Park No-sik and Shin Young-kyun, stayed when they came to Jeju in the 1970s.
Oriental inns are also rare in the architectural style of Japanese colonial era. It is a compromise building that combines Japanese and Korean food. There are rooms on both sides of the corridor and a wide living room inside. If you go up the stairs on the second floor next to the living room, rooms are lined up on both sides along the hallway. There is a public restroom in the middle of the stairs.
The rooms are generally about 4㎡ and are large enough for adult men (185cm tall). In particular, the room marked “special room” in front of the old wooden door has a bathroom with a bathtub, which was extremely rare at the time. President Rhee Syng-man stayed in the special room after giving a public speech at the nearby Gwandeokjeong Square in the 1950s.
Kim Tae-il, a professor of architecture at Jeju National University, said, “In the case of the Oriental Inn, the inside of the building is made of wood and there is a toilet in the room. It is common now, but extremely rare at the time. To date, there are some wooden houses built during Japanese colonial era, but few accommodations remain. It is a building with scarcity and timeliness,” he explained.
Expanding roads, removing parts of buildings, and flying tiles in the typhoon. 제주도 호텔 추천
Although it is worth preservation, the damage to Dongyang Inn is accelerating. In 2016, part of the entrance to the Dongyang Inn was lost as the road in front of the inn, which only one car could barely pass, was expanded to a fire road. Where it disappeared was a stylishly designed poch (a roof-covered part protruding outside the entrance).
Tamna Inn, which was right next to Dongyang Inn, was also transformed as part of the building was demolished due to road expansion. Now, it stands in a ridiculous way with a door on the outer wall of the second floor of the building.