Gapyeong

Gapyeong sits where the Bukhan River cuts through the last mountains before the plain of Seoul, and that geography has shaped it throughout. The valley was Goguryeo territory before it passed to Silla, whose court gave it the name Gapyeong in the eighth century, and in 1413 it was transferred from Gangwon to Gyeonggi; this was a poor upland district of timber, chestnuts and pine nuts, administratively part of Gyeonggi but culturally closer to the Gangwon mountains next door. Rafts of logs were floated down the river to the capital, and the valley was a route between Seoul and the east.

The river was dammed at Cheongpyeong in the early 1940s, under Japanese rule, for hydroelectric power, drowning farmland and creating the lake that now defines the south of the county. During the Korean War the valley was a corridor towards Seoul, and in April 1951 a battle was fought here as Australian, Canadian and New Zealand troops of a Commonwealth brigade blocked a Chinese advance down the Gapyeong river; memorials to the units involved stand near the town, and veterans' families have visited them ever since.

For decades afterwards Gapyeong remained rural and lightly populated, and its riverbanks were known mainly to campers and to couples from Seoul. Two things changed it: the television drama Winter Sonata, filmed on Nami Island and broadcast in 2002, which brought visitors from across Asia, and the rebuilding of the Gyeongchun railway as an electrified commuter line, completed in 2010, which put the county within about an hour of central Seoul. Tourism has been the county's principal business ever since.

Gapyeong's culture is a countryside culture that has learned to host. Its older identity is agricultural — pine nuts, chestnuts, mountain vegetables, river fish, and village rites tied to the farming year — and much of that survives in the markets and in the way the hill villages organise themselves. The population is heavily weighted towards older residents, and the manners here are more formal and more rural than in Seoul: greetings with a slight bow, careful use of age-based forms of address, and a habit of feeding guests generously.

The county's public face is built around a handful of destinations that Koreans associate instantly with a weekend away. Nami Island, which markets itself with a whimsical independence as an imaginary republic, made Gapyeong familiar to viewers of Korean television in Japan, China and South-East Asia, and its avenues remain among the most photographed places in the country. The Garden of Morning Calm gives the county a horticultural reputation, and its winter lights are a fixture of the Seoul weekend calendar.

The Jarasum International Jazz Festival, held on the island beside the town each October, is the largest event of the year and has given a farming county an unexpected place in Korean music. War remembrance is the other public ritual: services held at the Commonwealth memorials bring Australian, Canadian and New Zealand visitors to a valley their countries' soldiers defended, and the link is taken seriously locally.

About 62,000 people live in Gapyeong county, spread across a town and a scatter of villages in an area of steep forest — one of the least densely populated parts of Gyeonggi province. The population is ageing, as young people leave for Seoul and the satellite cities, and several valley schools have closed or merged; at the same time the county has gained retirees and weekenders from the capital who have built houses and pensions along the river.

Work divides between farming, forestry and visitors. Pine nuts are the signature crop and a genuine part of the local economy, along with blueberries, chestnuts, peaches and mountain vegetables; the rest of the county lives on accommodation, restaurants, campsites, boat and zip-line operators and the shuttle buses. Many of these jobs are seasonal, busy from spring through autumn and slack in midwinter outside the lit gardens and the ice-fishing weekends.

The rhythm of the week is unusual: quiet from Monday to Thursday, when the town belongs to its residents, and crowded from Friday evening, when trains and cars arrive from Seoul. Local concerns are familiar ones for rural Korea — depopulation, the cost of maintaining roads and services across long valleys, pressure on the riverbank from development, and debate over how much more tourism the county can absorb without losing the quiet that people come for.

Pine nuts are the first thing anyone in Korea associates with Gapyeong. The county's hills produce a large share of the national crop, and the nuts appear everywhere: jatguksu, wheat noodles in a thick, pale broth of ground pine nuts, is the local dish, served cool in summer and hot in winter; jat-juk is a soft rice porridge made the same way; and shops around the station sell roasted nuts, pine-nut oil and a milky pine-nut makgeolli, the rice wine of the region.

The river and the reservoir supply the other local speciality. Restaurants along the lake at Cheongpyeong and on the banks near the town serve maeuntang, a red, peppery stew of freshwater fish with radish and vegetables, and grill river fish whole over charcoal. Freshwater eel and sweetfish appear on menus in season, and the shallows produce snails used in soup.

Otherwise Gapyeong eats what the mountains of the north-east eat. Dakgalbi, the spicy chicken stir-fry of neighbouring Chuncheon, is widespread, cooked on a hot plate at the table with cabbage, sweet potato and rice cakes and finished by frying rice in the leftover sauce. Makguksu, cold buckwheat noodles from the same tradition, is a summer staple. Mountain vegetables gathered in spring, called sannamul, are served as side dishes or mixed into rice, and chestnuts, blueberries and corn are sold from roadside stalls in late summer and autumn.