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Walk a little bit from the Jeong-dong intersection in Jung-gu, Seoul down toward the walkway along the stonewall surrounding Deokdsugung Palace, and you will get to a large red-brick building opposite the Canadian Embassy in Korea. This is the Ewha Centennial Hall and there is a small stone sign at the entrance to the underground parking lot which reads 'The Site of Songtag Hotel," the first modern hotel ever built in Seoul in the late 19th century.

Antoinette Sontag (1854~1925) was a French-German woman who came to Korea in 1885 with the family of Weber, the first Russian Minster to Korea. She was in her early thirties when she took charge of entertaining foreign guests at the Royal Household Administration. She earned trust from King Gojong and his wife for her excellent foreign language and social skills. In 1895, she received a gift from King Gojong, a house in Jeongdong, which quickly emerged as a place for social gathering for Koreans and foreigners, and was also used as a meeting place for the Chongdong Club, an organization that brought together and united pro-American enlightenment forces at that time.

The Chongdong Club gave birth to the Independence Association, which was officially launched in 1896. From that point until the Independence Hall was built in 1897, this place was used as the base of the anti-Japanese movement by major figures of the Independence Association. The 'Sontag Guest House' or the 'Hanseong Guest House,' as it was called, was rebuilt and renovated into a two-story brick building in 1902. It also served as a 'private hotel' run by the Royal Household Administration. But once the Russian forces became weak after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, it lost its glory. But it remained in existence and in 1905 provided a room for Ito Hirobumi (伊藤博文) when he came to Korea as a special ambassador with full authority from Japan to get Korea to sign the Eulsa Treaty (Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty).

A meeting place for major politicians that also provided accommodation for foreign visitors to Korea, Sontag Hotel was taken over by another foreigner in 1909. Sontag also returned home in France in the same year, and died in 1925. Sontag Hotel's building site was sold in 1917 and used as the dormitory of the Ewha Academy, until it was rebuilt as the Frey Hall in 1922, complete with classrooms, dormitories, labs, and other attached facilities of the Ewha Academy. It was burned down, but later, in 2006, transformed into the Ewha Centennial Hall, which still exists today.

As the first modern building in late 19th-century Korea that also introduced the Western culinary culture to the country, Sontag Hotel must have been perceived as a symbol of the glamorous Western culture and civilization. But what makes Sontag Hotel a historic site that should be remembered for a long time to come is that those who shaped the turbulent history of modern Korea stayed there and it has the memory of what they did.

Source of Reference: The Independence Hall of Korea "Historic Sites of Independence Movement in Seoul" - The Site of Sontag Hotel
http://sajeok.i815.or.kr/ebook/ebookh01/book.html
culturecontent.com - Mrs. Sontag and Sontag Hotel
http://www.culturecontent.com/content/contentView.do?search_div=CP_THE&search_div_id=CP_THE010&cp_code=cp0434&index_id=cp04340057&content_id=cp043400570001