• Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.29-38
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• 2010

A moat is a pond or waterway paved on the outside of a fortress that is one of the facilities to prevent enemy from approaching the fortress wall or classify it as the boundary space, and this study was undertaken to find out the characteristics of the moat that was existed in the East and the West from ancient time to medieval time with the following result. First, the moat in the East was installed of natural moat and artificial moat at the same time while the moat in the West had the fortress built in naturally advantageous site to use natural most substantially more. Second, the moats of Korea were smaller in scale compared to other countries (Japan, China and the Western countries). Third, the fortresses in the East were built to protect towns or royal palace while the West had the fortress to protect the residence of kings, lords, great wealthy persons and the like, and they were used jointly with the natural moat and artificial moat to defend against the infiltration of enemy. Fourth, the Pungsujiri in the Orient is one of the numerous ideologies forming the supplementary ideologic system of Korean people that could not be denied as the perception that influences on Korean people after the Silla Dynasty, and this Pungsujiri was considered when determining the location of the castle. The moat surrounding the castle had the role to keep the good energy in the castle from escaping away. Fifth, the Ha-Ha technique in the west was designed to prevent the external power from infiltration by digging the ditch on the place applicable to the boundary of the garden site, rather than the fence. While walking around along the water-side path without knowing the existence of this ditch, when the road is discovered with the cut off in the ditch, people had the exclamation without actually recognizing such astonishment. It was originally the dike for military purpose during the medieval time that was designed to look into the garden without physical boundary surrounded with the vertical fence in the garden that by having the deep ditch like shape on the boundary line of the garden which was designed to form the farm by preventing various types of cattle from coming inside the garden and bring in the garden element for farms, forestry, agricultural land and the like.