Mr. Sunshine | Hapcheon Image Theme Park — The Train at Jemulpo

Episode three. Go Ae-sin boards a train at Jemulpo and levels a pistol at Japanese soldiers in the carriage. Both the train and the platform are at Hapcheon Image Theme Park, in the hills above Hapcheon Lake.

It opened in 2004 and it is bigger than people expect — around 75,000 square metres, four times the Nonsan set. What it reconstructs is later: Gyeongseong under Japanese rule, streets of Pyongyang, the Government-General building, and 1930s and 40s bathhouses, barbershops and tearooms. *Taegukgi* and *Modern Boy* were shot here too, so a lot of Korean twentieth-century screen memory comes from this one hillside.

It is a genuine film set rather than a theme park, and visitors who arrive expecting the latter say so. There is almost no shade, which makes a summer afternoon punishing. A monorail runs up the hill with the best views of the lake, and the queue for it can run twenty to thirty minutes. There is also a full-scale replica of the Blue House next door that you can walk into.

Nine to six, closed Mondays. Public transport out here is genuinely difficult — this is a drive. Haeinsa, one of Korea's great temples, is close enough to pair into the same day.

Stand on the platform beside the train. What the drama does with this set is put a Korean noblewoman with a rifle into a space built by the occupation, and the park is one of the few places you can stand in a reconstruction of that period at full scale.

Cover photo: Hapcheon, by Visviva, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. County view, not the park.