“They say you made bank if you owned land back then?”
-Excerpt- The area in Dohwa-dong, Incheon, where Seonin Academy was built, was originally 'Buddha Mountain,' 152m above sea level. It was packed with Chinese cemeteries and shantytowns for refugees who fled from the North.
Baek In-yeop started massive construction to build schools here. During the process, if a resident refused to move, he would dig up everything around them, leaving only that one house standing on a literal cliff. Or, he’d buy a house in the middle of the village, half-demolish it to make a 'haunted house,' and scare the neighbors into selling their homes for dirt cheap. He even bulldozed the Chinese cemetery during the expansion, which eventually blew up into a diplomatic crisis.
Apparently, the dug-up Chinese graves contained so many gold rings on the corpses that elementary and middle school kids would rush to Buddha Mountain right after school to scramble and fight each other for the rings.
-End of excerpt- Source: Incheon City Official Blog
Even if you didn't live through that era, kids born in the 80s and 90s who grew up nearby often heard rumors from their elders about excavators showing up in the middle of the night to seize their land.
How is it 'my house' or 'my land' when they’re literally smashing it with hammers while you're sleeping...
"Users debunk the romanticized idea of old-school land ownership, sharing grim stories of forced seizures, state-sponsored thuggery, and the reality of squatter rights."
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