True Beauty | Yonsei University Underwood Hall — The Campus That Stood In for Saebom High

The ivy on Underwood Hall does not care that the building is a university. It covers the stone the way it covered the school gate in the first episodes of True Beauty, when Im Ju-kyung walked onto a new campus with a face she had learned to put on that morning.

tvN used Yonsei University's Sinchon campus as Saebom High. Yeonhui Hall and the paths around Underwood Hall took the uniforms, the hallway stares, and the vote for the school's goddess. The drama needed a place that already looked like it had been choosing winners for a century. Yonsei has been doing that since Horace Underwood opened a college here. The hall itself went up in 1924. Seoul designated it a historic site in 1981.

You come in off Yonsei-ro. Students cut across the lawn with coffee. Tourists stop for the same angle the drama used, the dark stone and the vines and the clock of a morning that is trying to be ordinary. Ju-kyung's first day was not ordinary. Neither is standing in front of a building that has outlasted every uniform that passed it.

Walk the slope toward the main gate and look back once. The ivy is still working. The school in the drama was a costume. The stone is not.

Photo: Kimhs5400, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.