That building where you buy clothes in Dongdaemun — what it was before

Anyone who’s bought clothes in Dongdaemun has walked past the aging three-story arcade stretched along the south bank of Cheonggyecheon. Gray facade layered with signs, bolts of fabric piled on stair landings, delivery motorbikes up on the sidewalk. Its name is Pyeonghwa Market. Built in 1962, still selling clothes today. And on a November day in 1970, a 22-year-old tailor stood on the street in front of it, holding a copy of the Labor Standards Act.

Tourist maps tend to leave this story out. But the three places it lives — the Pyeonghwa Market building, the statue on Beodeul-dari, and the memorial hall at 105 Cheonggyecheon-ro — all sit squarely inside the Dongdaemun shopping district. You can cover them all in a 20-minute walk.

That building where you buy clothes — what was it before?

Pyeonghwa Market was built by war refugees. During the Korean War, people who had come south set up sewing machines in shacks along Cheonggyecheon and started making clothes to sell. Close to 60 percent of those street vendors were from the North. After a series of fires wiped out the stalls, the vendors received a plot of land from the Seoul city government and raised a three-story building in 1962. They named it Pyeonghwa — “peace” — hoping for reunification. When it opened, it was the largest wholesale clothing market in East Asia.

The building’s structure is the heart of this story. The ground floor held shops; the second and third floors were sewing factories. Factory owners split each floor’s ceiling height in half, turning one level into two. The upper half became what people called the darakbang — attic rooms. With ceilings barely 1.5 meters high, you couldn’t stand upright. There was essentially no ventilation, so fabric dust hung in the air all day. A survey in 1970 found an average of 29.4 workers crammed into roughly 22 square meters of floor space. That comes out to 0.76 square meters per person — about the size of a small desk.

Most of the workers were teenage girls. The youngest were thirteen or fourteen, called sida — sewing assistants. They arrived before dawn and sat at their machines late into the night. A day’s pay was about enough for a cup of coffee. Lung disease was common.

What happened in front of Pyeonghwa Market on November 13, 1970?

Jeon Tae-il was born in Daegu in 1948 and came to Pyeonghwa Market at seventeen. He started as a sida, worked his way up to sewing machine operator, then became a tailor. In 1968, he discovered that a law called the Labor Standards Act existed. An eight-hour workday. One day off per week. Regular health checkups — none of it observed inside Pyeonghwa Market.

The labor code was dense with Chinese characters and hard to parse. In his diary he wrote, “I wish I had a college-student friend.” A letter he drafted to the president noted that most of Pyeonghwa Market’s workers were teenage girls, and that they worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

What came next is the real ending to this story. His mother, Yi So-seon, refused to hold the funeral unless eight demands — including improved working conditions and the right to form a union — were met. Two weeks later, on November 27, the Cheonggye Clothing Labor Union was founded with an office on the rooftop of Pyeonghwa Market. Five hundred and sixty members, fifty-six delegates. Most were teenage girls who had been running sewing machines in the darakbang. Yi So-seon went on to spend the next forty years on the front lines of labor activism and became known across Korea as the mother of workers.

Why does the statue on Beodeul-dari stand over water?

The bridge crossing Cheonggyecheon at Cheonggye 6-ga, right in front of Pyeonghwa Market, is Beodeul-dari. When the Cheonggyecheon restoration project finished in 2005, a bronze bust was installed at the bridge’s center. Workers had raised the funds for it to mark the 35th anniversary of his death. Since 2012, the bridge has also carried the name Jeontaeil-dari, and the sign now shows both.

The statue is just the upper body, emerging from the bridge deck. If you get the angle right, it looks like he’s standing on the water of Cheonggyecheon itself. His gaze is fixed toward Pyeonghwa Market. The building where he worked fills the frame, exactly as it was.

Look down too. The bridge floor is set with roughly 3,800 bronze plaques, each about the size of a brick. Citizens who donated to the statue fund each had one engraved — some with just a name, some with short letters. That you’re meant to walk over them says a lot about what this bridge is.

How to visit the Jeon Tae-il Memorial Hall

From Beodeul-dari, follow Cheonggyecheon upstream and you’ll reach the Jeon Tae-il Memorial Hall at 105 Cheonggyecheon-ro, Jongno-gu. It opened on April 30, 2019. Yi So-seon had campaigned for it for 38 years. She died in 2011, never seeing the doors open.

Pause at the facade before you go in. The entire outer wall is a text panel — a handwritten letter Jeon Tae-il meant to send to a labor inspector, reproduced at scale. You can read it from the street without stepping inside.

The building has six floors. Floors 1 through 3 are the memorial space; floors 4 through 6 house worker support services. The permanent exhibition is on the third floor, titled Jeon Tae-il’s Dream, and After. You follow his belongings, his diaries, his original petitions — and at the end, you walk into a full-scale recreation of a 1960s Pyeonghwa Market sewing workroom. They built the ceiling at the actual darakbang height. It’s the kind of room that tells your body, before your brain, that you cannot stand up in here. The figure you read about — 0.76 square meters per person — stops being a number and becomes something physical.

🏛️ Jeon Tae-il Memorial Hall — visitor info (per the official website)

Guided tours can be booked through the website. Korean is standard; if you’re coming with someone who needs English, it’s best to call ahead. Even if you take your time, the exhibition runs about 40 to 50 minutes.

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How to fit this into a shopping day

You don’t need to set aside a separate day for this. Start at DDP, head west along Cheonggyecheon, and the four stops line up in order, with Gwangjang Market waiting at the end. It’s a stretch you can slide neatly between Dongdaemun shopping and an evening in Euljiro.

🚶 Dongdaemun → Gwangjang Market walking route (~2 km · about 2 hr 30 min with stops)

The walking path sits about four to five meters below street level, so it stays cooler than the roadside even in summer. Stairs to the surface are spaced throughout, so you can bail out anywhere along the way. One heads-up: the path may close on heavy-rain days. If that happens, just walk Cheonggyecheon-ro at street level instead.

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