Naksan Temple Update

The government plans to spend 8.8 billion won to repair Naksan Temple in Gangwon province that was heavily damaged from last month’s forest fire, according to the Korea Times:

Brian from Gangwon Notes provides his insights on this issue here.

I actually had a chance to visit Naksan Temple last weekend and was generally amazed first by the devastation of the forest fire. The fire really was quite large and destroyed civilian buildings could be seen, along with scorched cars, not to mention the thousands of acres of blackened trees.

Secondly I was amazed more damaged wasn’t caused by the fire in the Naksan area in general. The civilian community in the Naksan area seemed to fare pretty well considering the cicumstances. I saw many homes, restaurants, and hotels that had scorched trees right along the sides of the buildings but the structures never caught fire. I don’t know if that is due to the firefighters or property owners protecting there own property, but the damage could have been worse. The Naksan Temple on the other hand was heavily damaged:

The Korea Times article made mention about deforesting 20-30 meters around Buddhist Temples in the future to create a fire break. You can see in the below picture workers have already begun deforesting some areas of the temple:

Brian disagrees with the deforestation idea and I tend to agree with him. The Naksan Temple already had a large fire break in place, Highway 7, but that didn’t help protect the temple as the flames obviously were able to jump over the highway. I tend to like the trees around the temples here and it would be a shame if all the temples in Korea have to be deforested because of this one incident.

I for one however couldn’t understand how this fire got so out of hand to begin with. With the amount of available water to fight the fire, along with the Highway 7 fire break you would think the temple could of have been protected. Especially since the home and business owners near the temple were able to protect their properties. Maybe man power was an issue but with the heavy military presence man power shouldn’t have been issue. It was probably inexperience in dealing with a large forest fire. Large forest fires are not very common in Korea so hopefully this was a wake up call that maybe the fire fighters and the soldiers need more training on how to contain these types of fires. I’m confident the appropriate Korean authorities will learn from this incident to improve in the future.

The good news is that the reconstruction at the temple is moving quickly:

Many of the buildings at Naksan Temple have already been reconstructed and workers are moving really fast to clean up debris and dead trees. With the quick pace the workers are moving to repair the temple, I estimate that the temple’s structures will all be fully repaired before the end of the year from what I saw.

Not all of the temple is scorched however, and is worth visiting now:

The monks at Naksan Temple are extremely friendly. Usually when visiting the various temples in Korea the monks are usually quiet and keep to themselves. For whatever reason various monks came up to me while at Naksan Temple and thanked me in broken English for visiting the temple and tried to explain different areas of the temple to me. So please visit the temple and support the reconstruction work going on because Naksan Temple was a really beautiful site before the fire and I am confident it will be that way again in the future.