Goblin | Deoksugung Stone Wall Road — Where the Goblin and the Reaper Bickered

The romance gets the beach and the buckwheat field. The friendship gets this walk.

A nine-hundred-year-old goblin and a grim reaper who cannot remember his own name share a house, bicker constantly, and are plainly the emotional centre of the show. The stone wall path along Deoksugung is where they do the bickering — two men in long coats going nowhere in particular, in step, arguing.

The path runs beside the palace's grey perimeter wall on Deoksugung-gil, past Donddeokjeon, and continues into Jeongdong-gil. Embassies, a Methodist church from 1897, the Seoul Museum of Art. A few hundred metres in which the traffic noise falls away entirely. The famous local superstition holds that couples who walk it break up — which explains why the production sent two friends down it rather than the lovers.

This stone gets used a lot. If you have memories on this Blox for Reborn Rich or Extraordinary Attorney Woo, it is the same wall; three different productions used it for three completely different registers, which is a decent argument that the path is the most versatile few hundred metres in Seoul.

Come in the second half of November for the ginkgo drop, or after dark once the palace closes and the wall lighting comes up. City Hall Station Exit 1, wall on your right.

Walk it with someone you argue with comfortably. The scene works because neither of them is going anywhere, and neither is in a hurry, and after a few hundred years that turns out to be what company means.

Cover photo: Deoksugung, by Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.