Winter Sonata | Junsang's House, Chuncheon — Saved on Paper, Status Uncertain

Read this before you travel for it. Junsang's House is the most at-risk location in this entire collection, and what you find may be a building site.

The house is a 1970s two-storey in Soyang-ro, Chuncheon, used as Kang Jun-sang's family home. It survived the drama, then survived being surrounded by an apartment redevelopment. In March 2021 Chuncheon City announced it had been saved: the redevelopment association would buy it for around 300 million won and preserve it, keeping the piano, the telephone and the bed that had sat in it since filming, with the surrounding land turned into a park.

That was the plan. Visitors since have reported something else — the door shut, the building unmaintained and deteriorating, the neighbourhood cleared around it, and at least one account that demolition of the area had begun. Others describe going in for coffee and finding it exactly as it was on screen. The reports conflict, and they conflict by year.

So the honest status is: uncertain, last confirmed contested. If you are going to Chuncheon anyway, walk past. Do not build a day around it, do not enter a construction site, and do not climb anything for a photograph.

One visitor put it well: the 1970s alleys around here are vanishing to redevelopment and this one probably will too, so photograph the lanes where the roofs meet while they exist. Banggae Market and the Bonguisan path are a few minutes away and will outlast the house.

The first Hallyu wave produced two kinds of location — the ones a village organised itself around, and the ones nobody quite decided about. This is the second kind.

Cover photo: Chuncheon, by YellowTurtle9, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. City view, not the house.