Descendants of the Sun | Taebaek Drama Set — The Base Camp Rebuilt on a Dead Coal Mine

Yoo Si-jin kneels in the rubble of a collapsed building and ties Kang Mo-yeon's shoelace. It is the image the whole series was sold on: a soldier on one knee in a disaster zone, doing something small. The disaster zone is Tongni, a neighbourhood of Taebaek in Gangwon that spent a century digging coal. When the Hanbo mine closed, it left behind exactly what a production needs to build a war-torn country — flat industrial ground, black spoil, structures with nothing left inside them. The crew put the fictional nation of Uruk on top of it in 2015. Then they tore it down. The original open set was demolished in November 2015, weeks after the shoot wrapped and months before anyone knew the show would become what it became. Taebaek City spent 370 million won rebuilding it and reopened in August 2016. What you walk through today is a municipal reconstruction of a film set of a country that does not exist — three removes from anything real, and people still come. Inside are the Medi Cube field hospital, the barracks, the emergency room, military trucks and a helicopter parked outside. The desk will lend you a combat uniform or a medical-corps coat. Behind Dongbaeksan Station, about a kilometre north, the old coal storage yard is where Seo Dae-young ran the hell-training drill. Stand at the edge of that yard and look up. The mountain behind is still black in patches where the spoil never grew over. The show borrowed a real ruin to play a fictional one, and the ruin is the part that was here first. 116-44 Tonggol-gil, inside Tongni Tantan Park. 09:00–18:00, closed Mondays, adults ₩9,000. The photo shows Dongbaeksan Station, the rail stop you arrive at.