Gwangju

Gwangju began as a walled county town of the Baekje kingdom and spent most of its history as a modest administrative and market centre on the rice plains below Mudeungsan. It grew after the railway arrived under Japanese rule, when it became the seat of South Jeolla province and a centre for cotton and rice shipped out through Mokpo. In October 1929 a confrontation between Korean and Japanese students at the railway station in nearby Naju set off protests in the city that November, spreading nationwide as the Gwangju Student Independence Movement, one of the largest acts of resistance to colonial rule.

The event that defines the modern city came in May 1980. After the coup that followed the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, the new military leadership extended martial law and sent paratroopers against student protests in Gwangju. The violence turned the city against the army; for several days residents held the centre, before troops retook it on 27 May. The official toll was 165 dead; later scholarship puts the number killed at between about 600 and 2,300. The killings were long officially denied, and the campaign to have them acknowledged shaped Korean opposition politics for a decade.

Democratisation in 1987 changed that. The uprising is now commemorated by the state, the dead were reburied in a national cemetery, and the former provincial office where the last defenders were surrounded stands inside the Asia Culture Center, opened in 2015. When South Jeolla moved its provincial government to Muan in 2005, Gwangju's identity shifted further towards culture: the biennale, founded in 1995, and a run of festivals now carry much of the city's public life.

Gwangju calls itself a city of art, and the claim has roots. The southern provinces produced a distinct school of ink painting and calligraphy, carried on into the 20th century by artists working on the slopes of Mudeungsan, and the city's museums and commercial galleries keep that line visible. The biennale, launched in 1995, made Gwangju one of the fixed points of the contemporary art calendar in Asia, and a design biennale alternates with it.

Music and literature are just as present. Pansori, the solo epic singing of the Jeolla region, has long been taught and performed here, and the novelist Han Kang, born in the city and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, wrote about the uprising in Human Acts. Food is treated as a cultural matter in its own right, discussed and compared with the seriousness other cities give to art.

Politics runs through all of it. Gwangju has voted overwhelmingly for liberal candidates since the 1980s, the May anniversary is the central date of the civic year, and the phrase used locally for the uprising — the May 18 Democratic Uprising — matters. Residents are known across Korea for warmth and directness, for feeding guests beyond reason, and for a long memory of having been treated as a province apart.

About 1.4 million people live in Gwangju, which makes it the largest city in the south-west. Long one of the country's metropolitan cities, it was merged in July 2026 with South Jeolla Province into a new provincial-level city, Jeonnam-Gwangju. It is a city of apartment blocks: the old low-rise districts around the centre are ringed by large estates in Buk-gu, Seo-gu and Gwangsan-gu, and the planned district of Sangmu, built on a former airbase, has become a second centre with the city hall and much of the nightlife.

The economy leans on vehicle manufacturing — a large car plant in Gwangsan-gu is the single biggest private employer — along with electrical goods, tyres, food processing, and a growing cluster in optical and photonics technology. Universities, led by Chonnam National, and a big hospital sector fill much of the rest. Wages and the cost of living are below the national average, and the city has spent years trying to keep graduates from moving to Seoul.

Daily life runs from the markets and the stream paths in the morning to the restaurants and pubs of Sangmu and the student districts at night. Weekends are spent on Mudeungsan, which fills with walkers in autumn, or in the bamboo groves and gardens of Damyang just to the north. The persistent local concerns are population decline, jobs for the young, and the pace of redevelopment in the older neighbourhoods.

Gwangju is the best place to eat the food of the Jeolla provinces, which Koreans regard as the country's richest. Ordering a plain baekban — rice, soup and whatever the kitchen has made — brings a table covered with small dishes: seasoned greens, braised fish, salted seafood, several kimchis, pickles and a stew, refilled without charge. The abundance comes from the plains and tidal flats around the city, which supply rice, vegetables and shellfish in quantity.

Two dishes are particularly the city's own. Tteokgalbi is short-rib meat taken off the bone, chopped, seasoned and pressed into patties grilled over charcoal, and the row of restaurants near the market at Songjeong is where most visitors try it. Oritang, a milky soup of duck simmered with herbs, is associated with a downtown street of specialist kitchens. Both are eaten with the usual spread of side dishes.

The region's most notorious speciality is hongeo, skate fermented until it gives off a powerful smell of ammonia; it is served in slices with boiled pork and aged kimchi in a combination called samhap and washed down with rice wine. Less demanding are boribap, barley rice mixed with vegetables, and the rice cakes, blood sausage and noodle stalls of Yangdong Market. Makgeolli is the usual drink with all of it, and the evening stalls at Daein Market have become a fixture for younger diners.