Bangudae Petroglyphs — petroglyph
Ulsan Petroglyph Museum · CC BY-SA 3.0

Bangudae Petroglyphs

  • 2 min read
  • 35.604° N 129.178° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • One carving shows a mother grey whale carrying her calf on her back, the way the species lifts its young to the surface to breathe.
  • Hunting scenes show curved boats holding roughly five to seventeen people, tied by lines to harpooned whales and to floats on ropes.
  • A whale bone with a harpoon point still lodged in it, found at the Hwangseong-dong site in Ulsan, confirms that whales were hunted here in the Neolithic.
  • The panel is regarded as the oldest known depiction of whaling anywhere in the world.
  • Whales are carved by pecking out the whole body, while most land animals are only outlined, a difference read as a sign of different periods.
  • Three sea turtles at the upper left of the panel seem to lead a group of whales swimming behind them.
  • Several carved animals, on land and at sea, are shown as pregnant, which researchers link to wishes for food and fertility.
  • The name Bangudae combines Korean words for shell, turtle and platform, because the cliff resembles a turtle's back.
  • The carvers even distinguished deer species: the endemic Korean water deer is drawn rounder, the roe deer with a more angular rump.
  • In comparing East Asian rock art, ICOMOS found comparable whale and fishing scenes only at Pegtymel in Chukotka and in Russian Karelia.

Why it is worth it

On a sheer rock face above a bend of the Daegokcheon stream in Ulsan, someone began carving whales around seven thousand years ago — and people kept adding to the panel for millennia. The main surface at Bangudae Terrace is only about eight metres wide and five high, yet it holds some three hundred engraved figures, among the richest prehistoric image walls in East Asia. It was found in 1971 by a university team investigating Buddhist sites, a year after the same researchers had recorded geometric carvings at Cheonjeon-ri, about two kilometres upstream.

What makes Bangudae remarkable is its subject. Whales account for more than a quarter of the figures, and they are drawn with such attention that specialists can tell species apart: right whales, humpbacks, grey whales and sperm whales. Around them are people in boats, harpoons, lines and floats — a rare prehistoric record of whale hunting. Tigers, leopards, wolves, deer and wild boar fill the land zone of the rock, alongside hunters with bows and a few human figures in what look like ritual poses. Whale bones found at coastal Neolithic sites nearby support the idea that the carvers knew these animals at first hand.

The images were not made in one campaign: the valley's rock art records a sequence stretching from around 5000 BCE to the ninth century CE. Together with the Cheonjeon-ri rock and its geometric patterns, the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 2025 under the name Petroglyphs along the Bangucheon Stream; it is also listed as National Treasure No. 285. A dam built downstream in the 1960s floods the rock for part of every year, and protecting the carvings has become one of Korea's longest-running conservation debates. The Ulsan Petroglyph Museum, a whale-shaped building opened in 2008 near the site, displays full-size replicas that make the fine engravings far easier to read.

Getting there

The petroglyphs are in Daegok-ri, Eonyang-eup, Ulju County, about 15 km from central Ulsan. Ulsan Airport (USN) is about 16 km away. The rock itself is fenced off and viewed from a platform across the stream, where a telescope helps pick out the carvings; a footpath leads there from the Ulsan Petroglyph Museum. Low water, when the rock is exposed, shows the panel best.

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in South Korea 21The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Rock Art Sites 5The Most Remarkable Rock Art Sites 16The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Bangudae (Daegok-ri) Petroglyphs are pre-historic engravings on flat vertical rock faces on the riverside of the Daegokcheon (Bangucheon) stream, a branch of the Taehwa River, which runs eastward and joins the East Sea at Ulsan. They are the National Treasure of South Korea No. 285 and were registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2025.

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