The Iron Fortress Crumbles
The sharp-eyed war correspondents did everything in their power to paint a damning picture. Once ID Group announced it would demolish the residence and redevelop the site, they tried to manufacture images of violent eviction to smear its reputation. In the end, they failed completely.
Crash! The human chain the reporters had formed collapsed in an instant under the charge of the burly men. The sheer difference in physical presence made any resistance laughable from the start.
“You uneducated gangster bastards!”
“Guarantee our right to survive! Are you telling us to freeze to death in the middle of winter?”
The social affairs reporters, who seemed to have done their share of protesting during university, shouted with all their might. That was all they could do. They were met with the heavy thud of a body check from the bull-like men and sent rolling across the ground.
The true irony was that many of the articles written by these very men had taken sharp aim at professional protesters. They had often argued that such agitators clung to redevelopment zones and hindered social progress, so the authorities needed to actively protect investors if the national economy was to advance.
Not only the social affairs desk but the entire editorial stance of Daehan Ilbo had always been pro-business and pro-capital. Yet today the situation was completely reversed. The newspaper that had always positioned itself as the superior party had been reduced to the inferior one. At the same time, it was forced to adopt the exact attitude it had most despised, and naturally it was being physically suppressed by hired enforcers.
What made the scene truly interesting was that even now, tricks were being played. Despite the enormous compensation and additional taxes hanging over Daehan Ilbo, the owner’s family remained staggeringly wealthy. They had hidden far too many assets. That was why, during this forced execution, they had also hired their own enforcers and hidden them among the reporters.
Thanks to that, the reporters’ human chain crumbled quickly, though some still put up a respectable fight. The violent images the Daehan Ilbo owners had so desperately wanted were created, yet not a single person felt any sympathy for them.
Other media outlets had come to cover the scene. The demolition of the Heukseok-dong company housing carried considerable symbolic weight, so both newspapers and broadcasting stations had dispatched crews. However, their cameras were not focused on the reporters being dragged away like animals, but on the demolition itself.
Even the two newspapers that usually shared Daehan Ilbo’s conservative leanings kept their distance. Under the cold indifference of everyone involved, Daehan Ilbo’s resistance collapsed without meaning.
Once the people were cleared away, the heavy machinery moved in. With a deep rumble, the bulldozer advanced first and smashed through the iron gate of the residence. The iron fortress of Daehan Ilbo—the same paper that had dominated the seventies and eighties under the nickname “President of the Night”—crumbled pathetically.
In the middle of a biting winter wind, anyone who called the sight refreshing might have been mistaken for a pervert.
“Ah! How refreshing!”
That was exactly what Yoo Jae-won said. He watched the demolition from right in front of the Heukseok-dong residence, the words slipping out naturally. Of course the refreshment was purely psychological. In reality it was a brutally cold winter, so he never left the car, but watching the spectacle from across the river posed no problem at all.
Once the siege ended, the heavy equipment was deployed without hesitation. Since Yoo Jae-won had acquired not only the building but every piece of furniture and interior item inside it at auction, there was nothing wrong with smashing them all to pieces.
Still, he did not demolish recklessly. The hired enforcers entered the house first, followed by people wearing slightly different attire.
“Just in case there are artworks of historical value, we brought specialists with us,” explained Choi Kang-wook, who had taken the seat beside Yoo Jae-won for the first time in a while.
The meticulous vice chairman had considered every possibility—people hiding inside, art pieces the owner’s family might have concealed—and had even brought in antique experts.
As expected, they found something. After the enforcers and specialists went in, objects began to be carried out. They were packed in blue moving boxes, so Yoo Jae-won could not see the contents, but there were quite a few of them.
After about ten minutes of boxes being moved out, nothing more appeared. The bulldozer and excavator that had idled their engines roared back to life and began tearing the residence down.
“Grandfather will be pleased, won’t he?”
“Of course. He’ll say from heaven that this is exactly what the chairman should do.”
Choi Kang-wook answered immediately. The bad blood between Jeon Myeong-heon and Daehan Ilbo was already legendary. They had clashed on far more than just Han River view rights. The fiercest collision had come when Jeon Myeong-heon first ran for president. For Daehan Ilbo’s influence to continue, the conservative candidate Kim Young-sam needed to win and extend conservative rule. They had believed Jeon Myeong-heon’s candidacy would split the conservative vote and guarantee failure.
Their judgment had been fairly accurate. When Jeon Myeong-heon actually ran, Kim Young-sam’s real vote count fell far below expectations.
Yoo Jae-won had now placed a definitive period at the end of that long hostility.
“We should have seized the rotary presses and the headquarters building as well.”
If it had been Grandfather Jeon Myeong-heon, he would have done exactly that. But President Kim Dae-jung seemed to find an all-out war with Daehan Ilbo too burdensome and had been somewhat passive about asset seizures. The Blue House claimed press freedom had to be protected and therefore the presses could not be stopped, but to Yoo Jae-won it was clearly just reluctance.
Choi Kang-wook nodded in understanding.
When Yoo Jae-won was twelve, a Daehan Ilbo reporter’s excessive hunger for an exclusive story had caused a car accident that nearly killed him. From that day on, ill feelings had piled up, so the vice chairman understood why his chairman was so hostile toward the paper.
It was not an incorrect assessment. Yet the animosity Yoo Jae-won felt toward Daehan Ilbo was far greater. It included all the compound interest accumulated across his previous life.
That was why Yoo Jae-won stayed until the old Western-style house had completely collapsed into rubble. After watching such a satisfying spectacle for the first time in a long while, the knot in his chest finally came undone. He hoped many more refreshing sights lay ahead.
The next day.
“Chairman! It’s a jackpot!”
Yoo Jae-won had received the call from Vice Chairman Choi Kang-wook the moment the clock struck nine. He had been preparing to head out to the ID Electronics semiconductor plant in Daejeon with Tiffany and Dr. Lisa Su’s team. The call was completely unscheduled.
“A jackpot?”
Since the word could not mean bad news, Yoo Jae-won asked lightly.
“A jackpot erupted from the basement of the company housing.”
The company housing in question was the Daehan Ilbo residence that had been so refreshingly bulldozed the day before. What kind of jackpot could possibly be hiding there?
Yesterday, along with the enforcers, an antique specialist had gone in first and removed anything that looked plausible, packing it into blue moving boxes. The items had then been taken for professional appraisal, only to turn out worthless. The seemingly valuable paintings were sophisticated fakes, and the ceramics were judged to be modern reproductions.
Thinking about it, the result was obvious. Had the asset seizure been carried out immediately, things might have been different. But the time between the confirmation of damages and the actual seizure had been long. Korea was no longer under military dictatorship; every procedure had to follow proper legal channels. That had given Daehan Ilbo plenty of time to prepare.
Anyone with half a brain would have used that time to move valuable items out and replace them with junk. Even if every miscellaneous object from those boxes was added together, the total appraisal value did not even cover the antique expert’s dispatch fee.
Yet Choi Kang-wook was calling it a jackpot.
“While clearing the collapsed debris, we discovered a basement.”
“A basement?”
“Yes. What’s even more surprising is that this basement does not appear on any blueprints registered with city hall.”
“Tell me the details.”
The story that followed was fascinating. The demolition crew had carried out Yoo Jae-won’s order to raze everything without hesitation. The work had therefore proceeded boldly and finished quickly. While clearing the rubble afterward, they had found the hidden basement.
There had been an original basement used as a boiler room and storage, but beneath it lay another, secret one.
“What was inside that makes you call it a jackpot?”
“Around ten pieces of celadon and white porcelain, plus dozens of old paintings and calligraphies. The appraisers say the celadon appears to be from the Goryeo Dynasty. The white porcelain resembles both Jingdezhen ware and Goryeo white porcelain. We’ll need to determine whether the Jingdezhen pieces are from the Ming or Song period. Ah, we haven’t completed a proper investigation of the paintings and calligraphies yet. There are many items and their storage condition is poor, so we must proceed carefully. There’s also a small Buddha statue. It really is a jackpot.”
Goryeo was famous for celadon, but more pieces had survived than most people realized. Low-quality examples could still be bought for around a hundred thousand won. Goryeo white porcelain, however, was genuinely rare. Produced right after white porcelain technology arrived from the Ming Dynasty, it showed slightly lower technical perfection. Its color was not milky white but slightly yellowish, like plaster. Nevertheless, it offered direct insight into Goryeo ceramic techniques and therefore carried immense historical value. Very few examples remained, so its market price was whatever the market would bear.
Jingdezhen white porcelain also held high value. Song Dynasty pieces would easily fetch hundreds of millions of won, while Ming examples were still excellent. Moreover, the number of paintings and calligraphies far exceeded the ceramics. It was a literal treasure vault.
“They removed everything from the house, so why was the basement left untouched?”
“This is still speculation, but…”
Choi Kang-wook offered his theory cautiously. The current owner of Daehan Ilbo was second-generation. He had inherited both the newspaper and this residence. Although the founder was known as Mr. Bang, there was more to the story. Daehan Ilbo had originally been a nationalist paper founded in the late Joseon period. During the Japanese colonial era, when the paper fell into hardship, Mr. Bang—who had become rich overnight after discovering a gold mine at Gyodong—acquired it. The editorial direction changed dramatically afterward.
Mr. Bang’s refined hobby had been collecting Oriental antiques. The items found in the hidden basement were very likely part of his collection. Because the handover had not been done properly, they had been forgotten and only discovered now.
Choi Kang-wook’s reasoning made sense. If the family had known about the hidden basement, they would certainly have moved the items inside. Furthermore, the entrance had been plastered over with cement, making it completely invisible. It had only been revealed when the concrete shattered during excavation. The basement could never have been found before the house was torn down.
“Then who holds legal ownership?”
“It belongs to you, Chairman. There’s no need to complicate it. The auction covered all rights to the company housing, which you acquired through legitimate means. If these were relics buried in the ground and unearthed during construction, we would need to consult the Cultural Heritage Administration. Since they came from a basement, both the legal team and I agree there is no issue.”
“That’s excellent.”
Yoo Jae-won could not help thinking that doing good deeds truly brought good fortune.
“How should we handle them? If we sell all the ceramics and paintings, we could recover a significant portion of the auction price.”
But Yoo Jae-won was in no danger of running out of money. ID Group’s performance in 2000 remained rock-solid. Although ID Technology was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the Xbox project, it had not fallen into deficit. ID Office, the T-Touch Phone, and Livepod continued to sell strongly, while new internet technologies like AdSense kept creating fresh revenue streams. The profits from supplying the Prism system to the CIA had been enormous. The subsidiaries were earning even more than ID Technology. ID Investment generated steady returns, and ID Entertainment, with its string of new releases, was handling huge sums. The brightest star was Android Inc., whose release of ME had pushed both sales and net profit to record highs.
In addition, the three billion dollars the Korean government had repaid early—citing its graduation from the IMF—had flowed back into Yoo Jae-won’s account. Even though it was only thirty percent of the original amount, it exceeded the net profit of most major Korean corporations. The time had come to focus on investing in future growth rather than simply making money.
Besides, Yoo Jae-won had never been particularly interested in cultural relics. His eyes were always on the future—IT, electricity, and electronics. The conclusion was that there was no need to sell the items, yet he also had no desire to keep them at home.
Then a good idea occurred to him.
“The Deokjin School Foundation’s university opens next year, doesn’t it? We could build a small museum there and exhibit them.”
A few years earlier, Yoo Jae-won had suggested to his father, Yoo Bong-man, that he establish a university. He had forgotten all about it, but apparently preparations were complete. The school would accept new students from this year’s college entrance exam takers and begin normal operations in March of next year. With Choi Kang-wook’s dedicated support and considerable help from the government, a specialized engineering university with a quota of six hundred freshmen had been completed. Its name was, of course, Deokjin University of Technology—shortened to Deokjin Tech—and it was located in Siheung-dong, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul.
Even an engineering school could benefit from a modest museum. If the collection from the basement proved insufficient, they could simply purchase additional Korean relics currently circulating overseas.
“An excellent decision. I’ll make the arrangements immediately.”
Choi Kang-wook responded positively at once. These relics had been trapped in darkness for so long; if exhibiting them now could impress and inspire the public, that in itself would be a good deed.
Having hit the jackpot first thing in the morning, Yoo Jae-won headed down to the semiconductor plant in Daejeon with a genuinely light heart.