The address for South Korea’s presidential office is changing again, moving from Yongsan back to the Blue House after three years and seven months. The move has triggered a series of relocations, including Defense Ministry units displaced by the original move.
But President Lee Jae Myung’s return to the Blue House, also known as Cheong Wa Dae, is more than a logistical reset.
It revives the old, unresolved question of whether the Blue House enables leadership or entrenches isolation. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol used the latter to justify the Yongsan relocation, arguing that the space itself made an accessible presidency structurally impossible.
The move is now visibly underway. On Monday morning, the presidential office held its daily briefing with its press corps in the Cheong Wa Dae complex for the first time since May 2022. That was when Lee’s disgraced predecessor Yoon led the office’s relocation to Yongsan-gu, Seoul, which is 6 kilometers south of Cheong Wa Dae in Jongno-gu.
According to Cheong Wa Dae, all presidential briefings will be taking place in Chunchugwan starting Monday. It is located about 500 meters away from the main hall, houses a briefing room, and provides seating for the presidential press corps members.
It is one of many changes in the weekslong relocation process that kicked off Dec. 8, a day after the presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik announced plans for Lee and his secretaries to “move back to where the president used to be, and where the president is supposed to be.”
Some Cheong Wa Dae staff had already relocated before the presidential press corps arrived on Monday. The entire process is set to be completed by the end of this year, but Cheong Wa Dae has not confirmed when President Lee will begin working in the presidential complex.
According to the presidential office, Lee’s workspace will be in both Cheong Wa Dae’s main hall and Yeomingwan. A Cheong Wa Dae official added that this will enable the president’s closer communication with his aides ― chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik, director of national security Wi Sung-lac and chief secretary of national policy Kim Yong-beom ― by having their workspace in the same building.
The official residence inside the Cheong Wa Dae complex, which sits to the east of its main hall, is still under renovation, meaning the presidential residence will likely move to the Cheong wa Dae complex from Hannam-dong in Yongsan-gu in the first half of 2026, according to Cheong Wa Dae.
Carrying historical significance as the seat of the presidency in South Korea’s modern history since 1948, when the nation’s first president Syngman Rhee began ruling the country, the presidential complex began to be called Cheong Wa Dae in 1960.
As the complex is hard to reach for ordinary people, some say the site secludes the president from public life in a country that experienced dictatorship for decades.
This was how Yoon floated his plan to move the office to where the headquarters of the Ministry of National Defense used to be, and where the official residence of the Foreign Minister was, both in Yongsan-gu, Seoul.
Yoon’s relocation plan was touted as a move to tackle such issues by bringing the presidential office closer to the people. But it also faced backlash for its costly plan to do so and lack of public consensus on the matter, given the relocation took place only two months after his announcement of doing so as the then president-elect.
Lee, who was inaugurated in June, two months after Yoon’s ouster for his botched martial law imposition, said during his presidential election campaign that he would return the presidential office to Cheong Wa Dae once he wins the presidency.
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