By Giacomo Lee, author of Funereal. http://giacomolee.net/

Working in South Korea, I am not only lucky enough to fly over to neighboring countries like Japan and Taiwan without crossing hemispheres, but also able to compare heritage between the countries of East Asia, especially with regards to that of my new home on the peninsula. When travelling in the Kansai region of Japan for example, I was struck most by colours — the orange hue of Fushimi Inari Taisha (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto, the gold sheen of Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺), and often wondered back to the red and green temples I’d see on a regular basis in and out of Seoul. Perhaps most temples in Japan look the same too, so the ones that stood out in Kansai were those different to the island nation’s usual brown and white style. These were the famous ones that drew in the tourists.

Back home, the best known temples of Korea include Bongeunsa Temple (봉은사) in Seoul, Bulguksa (불국사) in the historical city of Gyeongju, and the spectacular Haedong Yonggungsa (해동 용궁사) by the sea in Busan city. These lovely places bring in the crowds without deviating from the standard red and green palate mentioned earlier. I was curious therefore if there were any temples which didn’t follow the template, and whether they were well known or not by Koreans and tourists alike. Enter Seoul’s Suguksa Temple.

Running across the colour spectrum using the web, I only came across Suguksa by googling ‘gold temple’, and finding a single intriguing image with the name of the temple and nothing more. Another search yielded only the name of its nearest station via a French-only wikipedia guide to the brown 6th line of Seoul’s subway system. Luckily though, like many Buddhist temples in Korea, Suguksa has an official homepage, and one short metro ride later, I was face to face with this most secret of the two golden temples found in South Korea (a smaller one resides very openly behind a train station in the Gyeongsangnam-do capital of Changwon, and you can find a gold pagoda in Cheongju also).