The first time I walked from Insa-dong into Ikseon-dong I did it by accident. I had spent an hour looking at calligraphy brushes I was never going to buy, came out the wrong end of a side street, crossed under the road at Jongno 3-ga, and ended up in an alley so narrow that two people with backpacks had to take turns. It took about twelve minutes. I had assumed the two areas were a subway ride apart, because every guide I had read treated them as separate outings.
They are not. They share a station. And once you know that, the whole afternoon reorganizes itself, because the walk between them passes three or four things worth stopping for that nobody puts on a list.
Same station, opposite temperaments
Insa-dong sits at 39-1 Insadong-gil in Jongno-gu. The official Seoul tourism office lists it as 418 metres from Exit 5 of Anguk Station on Line 3, and 438 metres from Exit 5 of Jongno 3-ga Station, which is served by Lines 1, 3 and 5. Ikseon-dong is at 17 Donhwamun-ro 11ga-gil, 141 metres from Exit 4 of that same Jongno 3-ga Station.
So the two are roughly a four-hundred-metre triangle around one interchange. Neither has an entrance gate, opening hours or an admission fee. They are streets.
What separates them is age and scale. Insa-dong is a long commercial spine with cross-alleys, wide enough for delivery trucks, built around galleries, paper shops, tea houses and souvenir stalls. Ikseon-dong is a block of 1920s housing where the lanes are shoulder-width and every third door is a café that used to be somebody's front room. One reads as a market. The other reads as a neighbourhood that agreed to let you in.
Why Ikseon-dong's alleys are that narrow
This is the part I find more interesting than the coffee. The alleys are narrow on purpose, and the purpose was politics.
The area was built out from the 1920s, with the heaviest construction in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A developer named Jeong Se-gwon bought up large aristocratic hanok lots, demolished them, and packed the ground with small hanok instead — some of the surviving parcels date to 1929 and 1930. He was doing it during the Japanese colonial period, when Korean residents were being pushed out of the northern half of the old city, and building dense affordable Korean housing was a way of holding ground.
That is the whole explanation for the layout. You are not walking through a preserved village. You are walking through what was, at the time, budget housing built fast and tight, and the tightness is exactly what makes it photograph well a century later. I like knowing that. It changes the feeling of the place from quaint to stubborn.
It came very close to not existing
In 2004 the area was designated an urban environment improvement zone, which in practice means scheduled for redevelopment. In 2010 the Seoul city planning committee rejected the redevelopment proposal, citing the preservation of the hanok. Residents pushed back again in 2013. The improvement zone designation was finally lifted on 10 May 2018, and an Ikseon district unit plan zone was designated the same day.
The cafés and bars that people come for now started appearing between late 2014 and early 2015, while the redevelopment question was still open. A television documentary in February 2016 pushed it into wider awareness. So the version of Ikseon-dong you will see is about a decade old, sitting inside buildings that are about a century old, and the gap between those two numbers is fourteen years of arguments about whether to knock it down.
Insa-dong is older, and the antiques arrived later than you expect
Insa-dong occupies what were the Joseon-era districts of Gwaninbang and Gyeongpyeonbang. Five hundred years ago this was where government officials lived, which is a very different origin from a shopping street.
The antique trade grew up after the colonial period, when household goods from those families circulated onto the market. In the 1960s foreign residents were calling the area "Mary's Alley." The 1988 Seoul Olympics is the event that turned it into a destination for international visitors, and the shape it has today — galleries and craft shops interleaved with tourist retail — dates largely from then. Ssamziegil, the spiral shopping building near the middle that most people end up walking through, opened in 2004.
One detail worth looking up for: the Starbucks on the main street uses a Hangul sign rather than the Latin logo. It is the kind of small municipal insistence that tells you the street has rules about itself.
Insa-dong also runs as a car-free street on Sundays. The Seoul tourism office lists this without publishing exact hours, so treat it as "Sunday is the walking day" rather than planning around a specific start time.
Three free things inside the same walk
These are the stops that make the Insa-dong to Ikseon-dong walk worth doing slowly. All three cost nothing.
Jogyesa Temple, at 55 Ujeongguk-ro, is 413 metres from Exit 2 of Jonggak Station on Line 1. It is open 24 hours and free, and it is the only traditional temple in the centre of Seoul. Founded in 1910, it is the head temple of the Jogye Order, runs the Lotus Lantern Festival, and offers templestay programmes. Walking in off Jongno and finding a working temple courtyard rather than a museum is a genuinely odd transition.
Unhyeongung, at 464 Samil-daero, is 103 metres from Exit 4 of Anguk Station on Line 3 — closer to the exit than most convenience stores. Open 09:00 to 19:00 with last entry at 18:30, closed Mondays except when Monday is a public holiday, free. This was the private residence of Heungseon Daewongun and the house where Gojong lived before taking the throne. His wedding to Empress Myeongseong took place here. Traditional wedding ceremonies are re-enacted on weekends. It is smaller and quieter than the palaces, and I would rather spend forty minutes here than an hour queuing at Gyeongbokgung.
Tapgol Park, at 99 Jong-ro, is 249 metres from Exit 1 of Jongno 3-ga and 413 metres from Exit 3 of Jonggak. Hours are 09:00 to 18:00 from March through October and 09:00 to 17:00 from November through February. Free. It was Seoul's first modern park, built on the site of the Goryeo-era Heungboksa temple, proposed in 1897 by Gojong's financial adviser and officially opened in 1920. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud at the octagonal pavilion here on 1 March 1919, making this the starting point of the March First Movement. The ten-storey Wongaksa Pagoda stands in the grounds.
Three Korean sentences worth having ready
Nobody here needs you to speak Korean. Insa-dong staff deal with visitors all day, and most Ikseon-dong counters will switch to English before you finish your first word. But there are three moments on this exact walk where a Korean sentence changes the answer you get back, and all three are short enough to learn on the subway ride over.
사진 찍어도 될까요? — sa-jin jji-geo-do doel-kka-yo? — "May I take a photo?" Ikseon-dong's alleys look like a film set, and about half of what you are pointing a camera at is somebody's shopfront or somebody's front door. Asking costs two seconds. I have not once been refused. A yes usually comes back as 네 (ne) or 그럼요 (geu-reom-yo).
얼마나 기다려야 해요? — eol-ma-na gi-da-ryeo-ya hae-yo? — "How long is the wait?" Weekend afternoons in Ikseon-dong run on paper waiting lists by the door, and the number you hear decides your afternoon. 삼십 분 (sam-sip bun, thirty minutes) is fine. 한 시간 (han si-gan, one hour) is not, when there are dozens of other cafes inside a four-minute walk.
구경만 해도 될까요? — gu-gyeong-man hae-do doel-kka-yo? — "Is it all right if I just look?" This is the Insa-dong one. The small craft and antique shops on the side lanes are often one person behind a counter, and walking in without a word can feel like you have already agreed to buy something. This sentence takes that pressure off. It also, for reasons I cannot explain, tends to make the owner more talkative rather than less.
Pronunciation is forgiving. Korean carries no stress accent, so give every syllable the same weight and you will be understood. The part that matters is the 요 (-yo) on the end — it is what makes all three polite, and dropping it is the one slip that would actually land wrong.
How I would actually spend the afternoon
Come out at Anguk Exit 4 and start with Unhyeongung, because it closes and the streets do not. Walk down into Insa-dong from the north end, which means you are moving with the slope and against the tour groups, who tend to come up from Jongno. Give the main street forty minutes and the side alleys another forty — the tea houses and the smaller galleries are all one turn off the spine, and the spine itself is the least interesting part.
Cut west to Jogyesa when you want ten minutes of quiet, then come back east across Jongno to Tapgol Park before it closes. Finish in Ikseon-dong after dark, which is when the alleys are at their best and also when they are most crowded — those two things arrive together and there is no version where you get one without the other.
One honest warning about Ikseon-dong: the popular cafés run queues on weekend evenings, and the lanes are too narrow for a queue to stand anywhere sensible. If you are there on a Saturday night, pick the third-best-looking place rather than the one with people outside it. The buildings are all the same age.
Tomorrow: an introduction to experiencing K-pop in Seoul — where the entertainment company buildings are, how pop-up and merchandise shops work, and how a foreign visitor actually buys a concert ticket.
Sources
- Visit Seoul (official Seoul tourism site) — Ikseon-dong Hanok Village address and Jongno 3-ga Exit 4 distance: english.visitseoul.net
- Visit Seoul — Insa-dong address, Anguk and Jongno 3-ga exit distances, Sunday car-free street: english.visitseoul.net
- Visit Seoul — Jogyesa Temple address, Jonggak Exit 2 distance, 24-hour free access, founded 1910: english.visitseoul.net
- Visit Seoul — Unhyeongung hours (09:00–19:00, last entry 18:30), Monday closure, free admission, Anguk Exit 4 distance: english.visitseoul.net
- Visit Seoul — Tapgol Park seasonal hours, free admission, exit distances, 1919 March First Movement: english.visitseoul.net
- Wikipedia, "Ikseon-dong" — 1920s development by Jeong Se-gwon, 1929–1930 parcels, 2004 designation, 2010 committee rejection, zone lifted 10 May 2018, café growth from late 2014: en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Insa-dong" — Gwaninbang and Gyeongpyeonbang origins, "Mary's Alley" in the 1960s, 1988 Olympics, Ssamziegil opened 2004, Hangul Starbucks sign: en.wikipedia.org
