Gongju

The site was settled long before it had a name in the records: the Palaeolithic layers excavated at Seokjang-ri on the Geum River in the 1960s are among the earliest evidence of human occupation on the peninsula. Gongju's importance began in 475, when Goguryeo armies took the Baekje capital on the Han River and the court fled south. The kingdom re-established itself here as Ungjin, in a loop of the Geum protected by a hill that became the fortress of Gongsanseong, and stayed for sixty-three years. It was a period of recovery and of unusually wide contact: King Muryeong, who died in 523, was buried in a chamber of moulded brick built in a Chinese manner, with wooden coffins and gold and jade ornaments inside.

In 538 the capital moved downstream to Sabi, today's Buyeo, and Gongju became a provincial town. Under Joseon it was the seat of the governor of Chungcheong province, and the fortress's ramparts were rebuilt in stone; the court of King Injo fled south during Yi Kwal's rebellion in 1624. The provincial capital moved to Daejeon in the 1930s, once the railway had passed Gongju by, and the town settled into a long quiet period.

Muryeong's tomb was found by accident in 1971 during drainage work at the Songsan-ri mounds, and the flood of objects it produced transformed the study of Baekje. Gongju's fortress, tombs and temple sites were inscribed as part of the Baekje Historic Areas on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015.

Gongju understands itself through Baekje. The kingdom's reputation — for refined metalwork, elegant roof tiles, and the transmission of Buddhism, writing and craft skills to Japan — is the town's central story, and the Baekje Cultural Festival each autumn fills the riverbank with processions, memorial rites and lantern displays, alternating its main staging with Buyeo downstream. School groups come from across the country to the museum and the tombs.

Chungcheong province has a reputation elsewhere in Korea for an unhurried, indirect way of speaking, drawn out and full of understatement, and Gongju fits the description. It is also a strongly Confucian town: the provincial school, clan rites and a conservative sense of propriety shaped local life for centuries, and ancestral ceremonies are still observed carefully in the surrounding countryside.

Buddhism is the other thread. Magoksa, a head temple of the Jogye Order set between two arms of a mountain stream, runs temple stays that draw visitors into early-morning chanting and monastic meals, and Gapsa and Donghaksa on Gyeryongsan have long histories of their own. Gyeryongsan has attracted religious movements of many kinds, and small shrines and hermitages are scattered through its valleys. Education matters here as everywhere in Korea, and Kongju National University, which grew out of a teacher-training college, gives the town a student population and a long tradition of supplying schoolteachers.

About 100,000 people live in Gongju, spread between the old town, the newer district across the river and a wide rural hinterland of farming villages. Like most provincial cities in Korea it is ageing and slowly shrinking: young people leave for Daejeon, Sejong and Seoul, and rural schools have closed. The opening of Sejong, the administrative city built a short drive east, has cut both ways, drawing shoppers and workers away while making Gongju an affordable place to live for people who commute there.

Agriculture remains important. The hills around the city are planted with chestnut trees, a long-established local crop, along with pears, shiitake mushrooms, strawberries and rice from the Geum floodplain. Otherwise the economy rests on public administration, the university and its hospital, schools, and tourism built around the heritage sites.

The daily rhythm is provincial and early. The market beside the fortress is busiest in the morning, offices and schools empty in the late afternoon, and by mid-evening the old town is quiet while the student streets of Sinkwan-dong are just filling up. Weekends bring day-trippers from Daejeon and coach parties to the tombs and temples. Local concerns are those of much of inland Korea: an ageing population, the future of the rural districts, and flood management along the Geum.

Chestnuts run through everything. Gongju's hills produce them in quantity and the town sells them roasted in the market, boiled, candied, ground into cakes and biscuits, made into a sweet paste for pastries, and fermented into bam makgeolli, a cloudy chestnut rice wine sold in the market and in local restaurants. Chestnut rice, bam-bap, appears on set-meal tables with an array of vegetable side dishes.

The Geum River supplies the other local speciality. Restaurants along the riverside and below the fortress serve freshwater fish dishes — eoril-guksu and maeuntang, a fiery stew of river fish with red pepper paste, radish and crown daisy — and some serve steamed river snails. Gukbap, a rice and soup bowl usually made with pork bones, is the standard cheap lunch, and hand-cut kalguksu noodles are sold from counters in the covered market.

Temple food is a genuine local cuisine rather than a novelty: Magoksa's temple stays serve the vegetarian monastic meals that exclude garlic and onion, and a few restaurants near the mountain temples offer sanchae bibimbap, rice topped with wild mountain greens gathered in the valleys. Ginseng from the Chungcheong hills turns up in chicken soup, in sweets and in the market's medicinal stalls, and roadside stalls sell dried persimmons and jujubes in autumn.