My Love from the Star | N Seoul Tower Love Locks — Four Hundred Years, One Padlock

Episode 16, 12 February 2014. The couple stand among the padlocks on the tower terrace and promise each other something that a man who has been alive for four centuries has no business promising anybody.

The terraces at 남산공원길 105 are outdoor and free. You do not need the observatory ticket — ₩29,000 for an adult at current rates — to stand where the scene was shot. The lock walls, the wire trees hung with them, the trellises: all of it is on the open plaza around the base.

The custom arrived here around 2007, imported from Europe and adopted at speed. It is also maintenance. The locks are cleared periodically because the weight and the rust are a structural problem, and then they fill again within months. Not one of the padlocks on that rail today was in the frame in 2014.

Getting up: the Namsan Oreumi inclined elevator from Hoehyeon, the cable car from Myeong-dong, or the trail from Namsan Botanical Garden. All three end in stairs.

That churn is the whole scene and nobody planned it. A tourist's padlock survives a few years before somebody cuts it off. Do Min-joon has four hundred. The rail gets emptied, refilled, emptied again, and the same promise gets made by different strangers every single week.