Korea's First Korean-Run Bakery: The Rise of Modern Breakfast Bread in 1914
Creatrip Team
a month ago
In 1914, a new bakery opened in Gwangjang Market (current Dongdaemun) in Seoul—Ham Seong-hwan Confectionery—recently confirmed by the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History as the first bakery run by a Korean. The shop made breads, pastries, caramel, gum and syrup, and became popular for a treat then called "waetteok" (왜떡). By 1938 the bakery’s annual sales were large enough to buy roughly 9,250 sacks of rice, showing early Koreans’ strong taste for bread. Bread culture had been introduced earlier in the late 19th century by Japanese bakeries (producing hybrid Japanese-Western sweets called "wayō-kashiten" (화양과자)), and many Koreans learned baking skills through producing bread for Japanese military supplies. During the 1920s–30s, “modern boys and girls” adopted sliced bread as a breakfast item. After liberation in 1945 some Japanese-owned bakeries were taken over by Koreans, forming long-lived shops like Iseongdang in Gunsan and Taegukdang in Seoul. Wartime rationing and controls sharply reduced the number of bakeries by the early 1940s, and records for Ham Seong-hwan’s shop disappear after 1943.
