Andong

Andong took shape as a walled county town in the Goryeo period, and tradition holds that its people supported Wang Geon, the dynasty's founder, at a decisive battle nearby in 930, for which the town was granted its name and its privileges. The circle dance of Notdari Balpgi, in which women form a human bridge, is said to recall a royal crossing of the river here.

Its lasting importance came under Joseon. The Yeongnam region became the heartland of the Neo-Confucian school, and Andong its capital in intellectual terms: Yi Hwang, known as Toegye, one of the most influential Korean philosophers, was born nearby in 1501 and taught at the academy of Dosan, which his disciples founded after his death. Powerful clans — the Ryu of Hahoe, the Kim of Uiseong, the Yi of Jinseong — built head houses and academies across the surrounding valleys, and Ryu Seong-ryong of Hahoe served as chief state councillor during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s and wrote the best-known account of them.

The region kept its scholarly conservatism into the modern era and produced a disproportionate number of Confucian and independence activists under Japanese rule. Building the Andong Dam in the 1970s flooded riverside farmland and several villages, some of whose buildings were moved to higher ground. Hahoe village received Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, and nine Korean academies, Dosan and Byeongsan among them, were added in 2019. The North Gyeongsang provincial government moved to a new complex on the Andong–Yecheon border, returning an administrative role to the town.

Andong calls itself the capital of Korean spirit, meaning the Confucian tradition it has preserved more visibly than anywhere else. Clan head houses still hold ancestral rites, written genealogies and woodblock collections are kept as family property, and the etiquette of seniority, bowing and formal speech is taken seriously by older residents. Several head families run their houses as guesthouses, which is the closest a visitor gets to the tradition from the inside.

Against that formality sits the mask dance. Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori is a village ritual drama in which a depraved monk, a pompous scholar, a butcher and a shrewish old woman mock exactly the hierarchy the region is famous for; the carved wooden masks, with their hinged jaws, are among the oldest surviving in Korea and are designated national treasures. The dance grew into the Andong International Mask Dance Festival, which has brought masked performance traditions from around the world to the riverbank each autumn.

Other customs are craft-based: hemp cloth woven in the villages, paper made from mulberry, and the distilling of Andong soju, which was a household skill in gentry families before it became an industry. The town is also a centre of Korean studies, with a national institute collecting the documents of the region's clans, and its residents keep a reputation across Korea for stubbornness, formality and pride in old lineage.

About 160,000 people live in the Andong city area, which is geographically one of the largest local authorities in the country but mostly forest, farmland and reservoir. The population has been falling for decades and is markedly old; rural schools have closed and merged, and many valley hamlets have only a handful of elderly households left.

Agriculture and public administration carry the economy. Apples, hemp, mulberry paper, and the salted mackerel trade that gave the inland town a taste for sea fish all remain, alongside cattle and rice on the flatter land. The provincial government complex nearby brought civil service jobs and new housing, and the university, the hospital and the Korean Studies institute employ a further share of residents. Tourism is seasonal and concentrated on Hahoe and the autumn festival.

Daily life is provincial and early: the market trades in the morning, offices close on time, and by nine in the evening the centre is quiet apart from the chicken restaurants. Weekends bring coach parties to the villages and walkers to the reservoir roads and mountain parks. Local concerns are those of inland rural Korea — depopulation, the ageing of the farming workforce, keeping the clan houses maintained, and making the most of the heritage listings without turning the villages into museums.

Andong jjimdak is the dish that made the town's name nationally: chicken braised with soy sauce, sugar, glass noodles, potato, carrot and dried chilli, served in a wide bowl to be shared, sweet and salty rather than fiercely hot. It is associated with the alley of restaurants in the old market, and versions of it are now sold across Korea and beyond.

Heotjesabap is more local and stranger: a meal modelled on the food of an ancestral memorial rite, with rice, seasoned vegetables and grilled fish dressed with soy sauce rather than red-pepper paste, eaten from brass bowls. Gan godeungeo, salted mackerel, is the emblem of the inland town's old trade with the coast, cured on the road up from the sea and now grilled in restaurants everywhere in the city. Geonjin guksu, known locally as Andong guksi, is a dish of hand-rolled noodles in a clear broth, and Andong sikhye is a fermented rice punch, sharper than the sweet version drunk elsewhere.

Andong soju, distilled from rice to a strength far above ordinary soju, has been made here for centuries and is sold at a distillery museum on the edge of town. Steamed pork and mung-bean jelly appear at ritual meals, dried persimmons and apples come from the surrounding orchards, and the market's stalls sell hemp- wrapped sweets and barley cakes that follow the seasons.