The Secret Garden of Biwon

According to the guide books, Autumn is the best time to visit to Korea due to its cool temperature and the trees which 'erupt in a magnificent array of reds, yellows and oranges'. Crikey. So we thought we'd better take advantage of this and visit somewhere leafy so we could experience this magnificent array. We'd heard great things about the 'Secret Garden of Biwon' at the UNESCO world heritage Cheongdeokgung palace, so we headed down.

Cheongdeokgung is a palace in Seoul where the Kings and Queens lived during the 1400's. Unfortunatley, during one of the many Japanese invasions of Korea, the Japanese burnt down all of the palaces in Seoul, leaving Cheongdeokgung in ruins....until restoration rebuilt it to its (almost) original state.

Cheongdeokgung is the only palace in Korea where you cannot walk around alone - you must be in a tour group. And we had missed all of the English tours. Sigh. Ok so Korean tour it is! But we soon found this to be quite handy.....it meant that the whole area was deserted except for our tour group, and if you could just sneak away from the group.........mangificent array here we come! Occasionally we bumped into an old security guard, but they either looked terrified of having to communicate with a foreigner so stayed away, or they were super excited about the rare opportunity to practice their English, and so gave us as many informative pointers to the palaces as they could summon without breaking a sweat.

So we had the 'Secret Garden' almost to ourselves.... and it was magificent. I don't know why our trees don't turn that colour in England, but they don't. The gardens were filled with solitary wooden pagodas, often beside a lotus pond...which apparently each had different uses...such as writing poetry, having parties, and floating goblets of wine in the water.

Between us, Lee and I managed to take over 200 photos....which in hindsight was rather excessive, especially as they were all of trees. But it shows how beautiful the place was to make us do it! OK so one more picture of a tree......(what will we do with the other 198?).....