Sungkyunkwan Scandal|Jeonju Hyanggyo — The School They Used When Sungkyunkwan Said No

The production asked for the real Sungkyunkwan and was turned down. What you walk into instead is Jeonju Hyanggyo, a Joseon county school rebuilt here in 1603 after the Imjin War burned the first one, and the place where Kim Yoon-hee sat among the boys as Kim Yoon-shik.

The courtyard is level, not stacked up a hillside the way most hyanggyo are. Daeseongjeon faces the street. Myeongnyundang, the lecture hall, sits behind it. Ninety-nine rooms in all, Historic Site No. 379. The ginkgo inside the compound is the tree fans treated as a required stop after the drama aired. NamuWiki and local guides still mark the hyanggyo, and the hanok streets around it, as the Sungkyunkwan Scandal set.

KBS2 put the first episode on 30 August 2010. Park Min-young, Park Yoo-chun, Song Joong-ki and Yoo Ah-in used these tiles as a campus the royal guards were not supposed to enter. The school is public. The lecture hall still reads as a classroom. Stand in the yard and the disguise plot stops being abstract. A girl in a scholar's robe would have had nowhere to hide except the crowd of identical hats.

Photo: Steve46814, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons