There are three hwacha replicas on view in Seoul -- two at the war memorial, and one at the Deoksugung palace. The Deoksugung hwacha and one of the memorial hwachas are set up to fire singijeong (rocket arrows). These replicas both actually work. There's also a non-working but rarer bolt-firing hwacha at the memorial. Photos are big but appear small on the page... so the page may take a while to load.

The Deoksugung Hwacha

In the photo above, you can see that wires have been positioned across the launch tubes to keep the singijeon from falling out of the hwacha backwards. Very wise.

The War Memorial Hwachas

The war memorial's singijeon hwacha is the most-photographed hwacha replica and there are already reasonable photos of it on the internet. My contribution is therefore to photograph it from underneath -- as you can see, there isn't much of interest going on there. At least this page provides photographic evidence of that fact. This is much more interesting. Everyone thinks of hwacha as 'rocket launchers' but in fact the most interesting feature of the design was its modularity. The other hwacha at the war memorial is fitted with chongtonggi, little cannons which each fire three finned bolts. You might notice, by the way, that I'm not very good at taking photographs. The bolt-firing hwacha was equipped with an array of 'samchongtong' or 'triple guns', short bronze cannon that each fired a group of three bolts. The objects in the photo above do seem to be samchongtong, but the bolt is much too big.