Hotel del Luna|Mokpo Modern History Museum — The Consulate That Played a Hotel for the Dead

The building sits on the east shoulder of Yudalsan and looks down on Mokpo's old port streets. Japan raised a consulate here in 1900. The city later put the same rooms to work as Mokpo Modern History Museum 1. The address is 6 Yeongsan-ro 29beon-gil.

Hotel del Luna needed a facade that living people would walk past without seeing a palace. Gu Chan-seong's first look at Jang Man-wol's house was this Renaissance pile, stretched at night into a hotel only the dead could check into. The museum still opens as a museum. The hill is still a hill. Fans stand on the same terrace and take the frame the drama used.

You climb from the old downtown. The brick and the columns do not pretend to be Myeongdong. That is the point. In the story the hotel was always a disguise. On the ground it is a public history house that happens to photograph like a night palace.

Photo: Mobius6, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.