Winter Sonata | Choongang High School, Gye-dong — The First Pilgrimage Site

The story is set in Chuncheon. The school is in Seoul — Choongang High School in Gye-dong, Jongno-gu, a red-brick campus from the colonial period a few hundred metres from Samcheong-dong and Insa-dong. The exteriors, the gate, the broadcasting room where Yu-jin's voice comes over the speakers: all here.

What happened next made this the first true K-drama pilgrimage site. After the Japanese broadcast, tour buses started arriving daily. The stationery shops facing the gate — which had sold pencils and snacks to students for decades — converted almost entirely to selling Bae Yong-joon and Choi Ji-woo merchandise. Japanese visitors followed guides with raised flags through the lane. Two decades on the shops are still tourist shops; the faces in the window are just different idols now.

Choongang has since hosted Goblin, Our Beloved Summer, Lovely Runner and others, making it one of the most-filmed schools in Korea. If you hold memories on this Blox from those, it is the same gate.

And it is a working high school with hundreds of teenagers in it, in a residential neighbourhood where people have been openly fed up with the volume of visitors for twenty years. Stay outside the gate. Come at a weekend when the campus is empty. Do not photograph students.

Stand across from the entrance and look at the shopfronts rather than the school. Those shops are the oldest physical evidence anywhere of what a drama can do to a street, and they have been adapting to it continuously since 2002.

Cover photo: Choongang High School, by Lawinc82, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.