Choga

Choga (초가, "grass house") is the traditional Korean house roofed with thatch, and by extension the thatched roof itself. It is one of the two main classes of traditional Korean housing, alongside the giwa house with its clay-tile roof. From prehistory until the mid-20th century choga was the typical home of farmers and working people across the peninsula.

Materials

Choga houses were built of straw, timber and earth. Rice straw was the most common roofing material because it was cheap and abundant after the harvest; wheat straw or strong grasses could also be used. Walls were first of wattle and daub, sticks plastered with clay mixed with chopped straw, and later of rammed earth, which gave better thermal mass and earthquake resistance. The thatched roof was built much larger than the rooms beneath it, and gourds and pumpkins were sometimes grown on top.

Maintenance

Rice straw rots quickly in wet weather, so roofs were re-thatched every one to three years depending on the local climate, usually before the summer monsoon. Re-thatching was a community effort. At Nakan Eupseong in Suncheon, about 300 thatched houses are still re-roofed every year after the rice harvest, using thatch woven by hand by local artisans.

History

Choga probably evolved from Neolithic dwellings dug into the ground and roofed with grass, which developed into earth-walled houses and then timber post-and-beam houses. Mumun-period pit houses had thatched roofs. Rice-straw thatching is associated with the spread of rice cultivation in the Three Kingdoms period, from which the earliest written mention of choga also dates.

Decline

Choga began to disappear in the 1960s amid rapid industrialisation, housing shortages and standardised building methods. The Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), launched in 1970, replaced thatched houses across the countryside with orange-tiled houses, and by the 1980s thatched roofs had largely been replaced by cement and slate, much of it asbestos-cement.

Regional variants

• Jeju chojip - lower thatched houses built to withstand strong island winds, behind dry-stone walls (chukdam) through which the wind can pass.

Preservation

Thatched houses survive in Hahoe and Yangdong folk villages (UNESCO World Heritage), at Nakan Eupseong, in the Korean Folk Village replica settlement and in protected heritage houses.