Lovely Runner | Hwahongmun — The Confession Under Seven Arches

Suwoncheon slides under Hwahongmun through seven stone arches and keeps going. The gate is the northern watergate of Hwaseong Fortress, finished in the 1790s so a stream could enter a walled city without opening a hole an army could use. The pavilion on top is wood. The water is louder than the traffic if you stand on the footbridge just downstream.

That bridge is the spot. In Lovely Runner, Sun-jae brings Sol here after fireworks and an Olympic broadcast and tells her the thing he has been carrying. VisitKorea and the Korea JoongAng Daily both send fans to the walkway in front of the gate, not the gatehouse itself. Wikipedia puts the structure at 37.2875 north, 127.0178 east. The pin is the public path on the water.

At night the fortress lights the arches and the stream turns the color of the lamps. By day it is a sluice with tourists on the wall. Either hour works. The confession was written for a place that already knew how to hold two people above moving water.

Photo: Hwahongmun, Suwon Hwaseong, September 2024, Mobius6, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.