Chuncheon

Chuncheon sits in a broad basin where two rivers meet, a place people have lived since prehistory — dolmens and Bronze Age remains have been found around the modern city, and one lakeside site was excavated before the reservoirs filled. Under Silla the area was a regional centre, and there is a long-standing tradition, recorded in Korean histories, that this basin was the seat of an early polity called Maekguk. Through the Goryeo and Joseon periods it was a district town on the road between the capital and the eastern mountains, with a Confucian school, a magistracy and a reputation for poverty and timber.

Modern Chuncheon was shaped by two decisions. In 1896 it was made the seat of the newly organised Gangwon province, giving it the administrative role it has kept ever since, and in 1939 the railway from Seoul reached the city. The Korean War brought heavy fighting to the basin in the first weeks of the conflict and again in 1951, and the American and later Korean military presence in the area lasted for decades afterwards.

The lakes came next. The Uiam and Chuncheon dams were built in the 1960s and the far larger Soyang dam was completed in 1973, controlling floods and supplying water and power to the capital region while submerging farmland and villages and turning the city into a place ringed by water. Tourism followed the reservoirs, the electrified Gyeongchun line arrived in 2010 with trains from Seoul in about an hour, and a theme park opened on Jungdo island in 2022, built over an archaeological site in a decision that drew criticism.

Chuncheon has cultivated a reputation as a city of performance and of romance. The international mime festival, held each May since 1993, is counted among the world's leading festivals of its kind and fills the streets and riverside with physical theatre, clowning and fire performances; a puppet festival, running since 1989, follows in the summer. Both give a provincial capital of modest size an unusually busy arts calendar, supported by the universities that supply a large student population.

The romantic image is partly borrowed. Nami Island in the river below the city became a fixture of Korean television drama, and the lakeside roads, the poplar avenues and the fog on the water are standard settings in Korean popular culture. Locals treat this with some irony, but the city leans into it with lakeside cafés, cycle routes and boat trips.

Older layers survive alongside. Cheongpyeongsa keeps a Buddhist monastic tradition going back to the Goryeo dynasty, ancestral rites and Confucian ceremonies continue at the city's old school, and the writer Kim Yu-jeong, born in a village here in 1908, is honoured with a station, a literary village and a following among Korean readers for his stories of rural life. Manners are those of provincial Gangwon — unhurried, deferential towards age, and generous with food.

About 290,000 people live in Chuncheon, which makes it the second-largest city in Gangwon after Wonju and the seat of provincial government. Most residents live in apartment districts spread around the old centre and along the lake shores, and the population includes a large student body from several universities and a long-standing military community based in the surrounding countryside.

Work is dominated by the public sector — the provincial administration, courts, hospitals, schools and universities — together with tourism, small manufacturing and agriculture in the outlying valleys. The city is close enough to Seoul that some people commute, and the improved rail link has brought both weekend visitors and new residents priced out of the capital. Soyang lake still supplies drinking water to much of the metropolitan area, which limits development around its shores.

The rhythm is quieter than the cities to the west. Weekdays belong to office workers and students, and the dakgalbi restaurants and lakeside paths fill from Friday evening. Local concerns are familiar for a provincial capital — an ageing population in the countryside, young people leaving for Seoul, the balance between development and the protected watershed, and how far the theme park and the rail link will change a city that has been used to a slower pace.

Dakgalbi is what most Koreans think of first. Chicken is cut into pieces, marinated in a sauce of red chilli paste, garlic and soy, and stir-fried at the table on a wide iron plate with cabbage, sweet potato, perilla leaves and tteok rice cakes; when the meat is gone, rice and seaweed are fried in the remaining sauce. It was devised in a Chuncheon pub in the 1960s, when chicken was used in place of pork, and spread nationwide under the city's name, and a lane in the centre is still given over to restaurants cooking it.

Makguksu is its traditional partner, and it belongs to the mountains rather than the city: buckwheat noodles served cold with shredded vegetables, sesame and a chilled broth or a spicy dressing, eaten after the chicken to cool the mouth. Buckwheat and potatoes are the staples of Gangwon cooking, so potato dumplings in soup, potato pancakes and corn appear on the same menus, alongside the wild mountain vegetables gathered in spring.

The lakes supply freshwater fish — catfish, carp and other river species simmered into a red maeuntang stew, or fried whole — and the surrounding valleys produce tofu, mushrooms, chestnuts and acorn jelly. Street food in the central market runs to rice cakes, doughnuts and fried snacks, and local makgeolli, the cloudy rice wine, is the usual drink with spicy chicken.