Suanbo: a history of hot springs and public bathing in Korea

01

Three different histories

Suanbo, in today’s Chungju in North Chungcheong Province, has a well-documented place in Korea’s bathing history. Its hot spring turns up in old geography records, and later sources describe bath buildings, commercial bathhouses, inns and the growth of a resort town.

It helps to keep three things apart: when the spring is first mentioned, when bath buildings went up, and when modern tourism arrived. Some familiar lines about Suanbo, like “first recorded in 1018,” “Korea’s first hot spring” and “the kings’ hot spring,” look different once you do.

02

The Goryeosa: what does 1018 actually mean?

An early mention comes in volume 56 of the Goryeosa (History of Goryeo), in the geography entry for Jangyeon County.

The entry says Jangyeon was once Goguryeo’s Sangmo County, and that in the ninth year of King Hyeonjong (1018) it took its recorded name and came under Chungju. A separate line then notes that there is a hot spring there.

So the spring was known and recorded. But the year 1018 belongs to the change of name and administration. The passage doesn’t say the spring was found, first used or turned into a bathhouse that year.

The Goryeosa was also compiled in the Joseon period, long after 1018. The safest way to put it is that the hot spring is recorded in the Goryeosa’s geography section. Calling 1018 the year it was discovered reads more into the passage than it says.

03

Early Joseon: a nine-bay building

The Annals of King Sejong give more detail, in their geography section under Yeonpung County in Chungju.

The entry puts the hot spring 20 ri north of the county seat, west of Anbu post station, and records a building of nine kan. A kan is a traditional unit of building width, the space between two columns, so it shouldn’t be read as nine separate rooms or guest rooms.

That means the spring had a building beside it by the early Joseon period. It was already more than a natural pool in the open.

The entry doesn’t describe how the baths were laid out, what the pools looked like or whether men and women bathed separately. Nine bays on their own can’t tell us that.

04

A bath by the main road

Where Suanbo sits also matters.

The Federation of Korean Cultural Centers cites Seong Hyeon’s Yongjae Chonghwa, which describes a hot spring beside the main road near Anbu post station in Chungju, with water that was lukewarm rather than very hot. The Annals of King Sejong also place the spring by Anbu station.

So the spring sat near a road travelers used, within reach of the transport network of the time.

That’s a fair basis for talking about travel and bathing together. It isn’t evidence that every scholar heading to the capital for the civil-service exams stopped here. That would need more specific records.

05

From spring to bathhouse business

The Chungbuk Research Institute’s regional archive tells how Suanbo went from simple bathing shelters to bigger bathhouses and inns.

This timeline is the archive’s modern reconstruction of local history. We haven’t checked it against original building permits, business records or newspapers of the time.

06

What the timeline shows

Over these years the warm water that came out of the ground became a town built around bathhouses and paid services. The separate baths for Koreans and Japanese in the early 1900s are a reminder that bathing also reflected the unequal society of the time.

07

When was the well drilled?

The sources don’t agree on every date.

A Korea Tourism Organization article puts the first use of modern drilling equipment in 1926. The Chungbuk Research Institute archive and the North Chungcheong tourism site say 1929. Until records from the time show whether these are two stages of the work or one later mistake, “the late 1920s” is the safer answer.

This doubt is only about one step in the modern story. The much older records of the spring and its buildings stand on their own.

08

After 1945: honeymoons, family trips and presidents

After the war, Suanbo became more and more about domestic travel.

The Korea Tourism Organization describes it as a popular honeymoon spot in the 1970s and a big family-holiday destination in the 1980s. A bath became part of a trip, with a night or two at an inn.

The National Archives of Korea writes about visits by Presidents Syngman Rhee and Choi Kyu-hah. Rhee planted a commemorative tree near the entrance to the hot-spring area, and Choi spent holidays in Suanbo.

In 1997 Suanbo was named a special tourism zone, which North Chungcheong provincial assembly records confirm.

09

One shared water supply

Modern Suanbo manages its hot-spring water together.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes a central supply system with storage tanks that protects the source and keeps the supply steady. Each bathhouse is connected to the same shared system instead of running entirely on its own.

A bathhouse needs more than tubs and a changing room. Someone has to collect, store and pipe the water, and in Suanbo the whole town shares that job.

10

Checking the familiar claims

• “A hot spring used for 30,000 years.” Tourism material says the spring is about 30,000 years old. How old a spring is and how long people have bathed in it are different questions, so this doesn’t mean people have been bathing here for 30,000 years.
• “Korea’s first hot spring.” This also comes from promotional material. “First” could mean first to flow, first written down, first found or first run as a business, and the sources don’t settle any of them for the whole country.
• “The hot spring of King Taejo and King Sukjong.” Tourism and local culture accounts link both kings to Suanbo, but we couldn’t find the original records that put either of them here. The one entry we found in the Annals of King Taejo, for the 25th day of the fourth lunar month of 1393, says only that the king came back from a hot spring, without naming it. The royal connection belongs to the later accounts that make it.

11

Suanbo’s place in the story

Suanbo doesn’t need to be the first, the oldest or a king’s favorite to matter. Its record is long on its own: a spring noted in the Goryeosa, a nine-bay building in early Joseon, a spot by a main road, bathhouses run as businesses, then honeymoons, family holidays and organized tourism.

Over those centuries the spring gained buildings, then customers, then inns and a shared water system. Follow it and you can see how a Korean hot-spring village became a modern bath town.

12

Sources

• Goryeosa and Annals of King Taejo: Korean History Database (db.history.go.kr) and Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (sillok.history.go.kr)
• Annals of King Sejong, geography section: sillok.history.go.kr
• Yongjae Chonghwa: Federation of Korean Cultural Centers (ncms.nculture.org)
• 1885–1945 timeline and drilling date: Chungbuk Research Institute archive (archive.chungbuk.re.kr)
• Drilling date, honeymoons and family trips: Korea Tourism Organization (korean.visitkorea.or.kr)
• 30,000 years, “first hot spring” and drilling date: North Chungcheong tourism (tour.chungbuk.go.kr)
• Presidential visits: National Archives of Korea (theme.archives.go.kr)
• 1997 special tourism zone: provincial assembly records (clik.nanet.go.kr)
• Shared water supply: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (encykorea.aks.ac.kr)