Jongmyo Shrine occupies a walled, wooded precinct in central Seoul, yet its atmosphere differs sharply from the surrounding streets. This is not a palace or a royal tomb. It is the Confucian sanctuary where ancestral tablets of Joseon kings and queens—and, later, Korean emperors and empresses—were enshrined and where state rites were performed. The buildings and open courtyards were designed for ceremony, procession and solemn remembrance rather than domestic life.
The Joseon dynasty established Jongmyo in 1395, three years after the dynasty’s founding and as the new capital was being organized at Hanyang, today’s Seoul. The placement followed a Confucian principle that set the royal ancestral shrine to the left of the palace and the state altar to the right. The shrine therefore expressed the moral and political order of the new state in the capital’s layout. Its purpose was practical as well as symbolic: royal ancestors were honored through prescribed rites believed to sustain continuity between generations.
