Warm Feet | Suite101.com

As any Korean can tell you, people dwelling in the Land of the Morning Calm are likely to experience pretty harsh winters and uncomfortably hot and humid summers. Summer temperatures can be as high as 35 degrees celsius, with winter temperatures dropping as far as 20 degrees below freezing. These weather variations are directly linked to the development of the traditional style of Korean housing—there was obviously a great deal to be gained from developing a method of keeping warm. One of the most innovative technologies developed in Korea lends itself to just this task. The ondol (this translates as “warm stone”) floor, which dates back as far as the fifth century, was key in heating the Korean household. The typical Korean house through the Choson dynasty consisted of three major rooms: a living room, a kitchen, and a second room (toilet facilities were set apart from the living quarters). Each of these rooms was heated by an ondol, an under-floor heating system. Most people in the United States and Europe would equate an under-floor system such as this with the Roman hypocaust system, and while the basic principle is similar, the Korean ondol relies on warm water, not air, to heat the floor stones. In past centuries, the warmth of the floor was controlled by burning firewood in a kitchen stove or on an outdoor hearth. Producing more heat was merely a matter of adding more logs to the fire. Of course, while this system of burning wood to fuel the ondol worked fine in the past, it isn’t exactly suited to modern life in Korea. This is not to say the traditional ondol system has disappeared from Korean. Rather, the heating system has been refined and adapted to take advantage of the technology available. For instance, the conductivity of ondol pipes has been enhanced by companies such as Poongsan that develop corrosion-resistant copper alloy tubes for today’s ondol floors. Other companies like Melatone and Eagon focus on improving the top layers of the ondol system, developing surfaces that are water-resistant and will resist buckling because of the heat produced by the conduits of hot water. One might think that the ondol is in danger of disappearing with today’s high-rise culture. The traditional house is becoming an anachronism in the metropolitan areas of South Korea, yet the ondol is not. Even in high rises, this system of combating winter temperatures is employed. Funnily enough, one of the first Y2K reports to come out of Korea stated that 902 households in a high-rise apartment complex in the outskirts of Seoul were left without heat because the computer controlling the water supply for the building’s ondol malfunctioned with the arrival of the year 2000. In point of fact, the ondol has become a rallying point for the tourist business in South Korea. Do you want to stay at Hotel Lotte? $240US will get you a standard room, but if you cough up $10US more, you can get an ondol room. Paradise Hotel Dogo promises that hot spring water is piped into each of it 119 guestrooms. You can choose a standard (Western) double or a standard ondol for 70,000 won, should you want to stay at the same hotel favored by the late president Park Chung-Hee. These examples detail luxury hotels; however, you may get a more "authentic" ondol experience if you stay in a yogwan (Korean inn). Today’s yogwan provides western beds, but if you look hard enough, you can find an establishment that still offers a yo (mattress) and quilt for sleeping. The ondol is just one more example of the facility the Korean people have for merging the traditional with the technological. Over the past several decades, the Korean peoples have proved themselves nothing if not adaptable, and the persistence of traditions through change is yet another facet of this characteristic.