Reborn Rich | Chonnam National University — The Gwangju Campus That Played Seoul National

Jin Do-jun and Seo Min-young are supposed to be students at Seoul National University. They were filmed 270 kilometres south of it, at Chonnam National University in Gwangju.

The swap was deliberate. The drama runs from 1987 through the IMF crisis and beyond, and a campus that reads as period needs buildings that were already old then, standing next to newer ones, without the glass-and-steel refits that have swallowed most Korean universities. Chonnam has that layering, plus landscaping mature enough to carry a season change on screen.

Walk in from the main gate on Yongbong-ro and you get the metasequoia avenue — a straight run of tall, feathery-needled trees that turn rust-orange in November and go bare and architectural in winter. It is the single most photographed stretch of the campus and the one most likely to look familiar. Keep going to the back gate and there is a small lake with a walking path around it. Late July, it fills with lotus.

This is a working university, not a set. Term-time mornings the paths belong to students on scooters and the noise is considerable. Come on a weekend, or early, and it thins out into exactly the campus the drama needed: quiet, green, slightly out of its own time.

Go in the last week of October or the first of November for the metasequoia colour. That is the week the avenue does the thing the location scouts came for.

Cover photo: the front gate, by Gunarta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.