Paju

Paju's low hills and river flats were farmed from early times, and the area's position on the road between Kaesong and Hanyang made it strategically important throughout the Joseon period. Several royal and aristocratic burials lie here, including the tomb of King Injo, and the district produced or sheltered notable Confucian scholars: Yi I, known as Yulgok, is commemorated at a shrine and academy in the city, and the Paju countryside was dotted with the estates of officials serving in the capital a short ride away.

War shaped the modern city. The Imjin valley was a corridor for invading armies for centuries, and in the Korean War the front line settled here, with heavy fighting along the river in 1950 and 1951 and again near the end of the conflict. The armistice of 1953 drew the Military Demarcation Line and the Demilitarized Zone across the north of the district, and the site of the former truce village of Panmunjom lies on the district's northern edge. Thousands of families who had left the North found themselves stopped here, which is why Imjingak was built in 1972 as a place for them to hold rites facing their home towns.

For decades afterwards Paju was a garrison district of army camps, curfews and farmland, with South Korean and American units stationed along the river. From the 1990s it changed quickly: Paju Book City was planned as a home for the publishing industry, the Heyri arts village was laid out beside it, Dorasan station opened in 2002 in the hope of trains running north, and large new towns at Unjeong and Gyoha turned the south of the city into a commuter suburb of Seoul. A large high-technology manufacturing complex became one of the city's biggest employers.

Paju's public culture is shaped by the border. Imjingak is a memorial rather than a viewpoint: separated families come at Seollal and Chuseok to bow towards the North at the Mangbaedan altar, and the fences around the park are thick with ribbons and messages left by visitors. Discussion of reunification, of the families divided in 1953 and of what the closed railway line might one day carry is part of ordinary conversation here in a way it is not further south, and it is a subject to be approached with tact.

Alongside that, the city has become one of the country's centres for books and the arts. Paju Book City gathers publishers, printers, designers and bookshops in a planned town whose architecture is studied in its own right, with reading halls, festivals and a strong culture of design; the Heyri village nearby was built by artists, writers and film people under rules about height and materials that give it a uniform, low-rise calm. Together they draw a steady weekend traffic of readers, students and day visitors from Seoul.

The rest of the city keeps its rural and military character: markets on fixed days, soybean and rice farming on the Jangdan plain, and a long-standing relationship between villages and the units stationed near them. Manners are those of the capital area — shoes off indoors, two hands for giving and receiving, no tipping — with the extra rule, at the border, that visitors do exactly what their guides say.

About 500,000 people live in Paju, and the number has roughly doubled since the 1990s as the new towns filled. Most residents are in apartment complexes at Unjeong and Gyoha in the south, within commuting distance of Seoul by motorway or the Gyeongui line; the northern half of the city is still farmland, low hills, small towns such as Munsan and large areas of military land where building is restricted.

Manufacturing is the backbone of the local economy: a large high-technology manufacturing complex employs many thousands of people directly and through its suppliers, alongside printing and publishing at Book City, furniture and paper works, and farming on the Imjin plain, where Jangdan soybeans and rice have a national reputation. Outlet shopping centres and the arts villages bring weekend visitors and seasonal work.

The rhythm is a commuter one in the south and a country one in the north, where field work, market days and the daily movement of military vehicles set the pace. Living so close to the border is routine rather than dramatic: sirens are tested, some roads have checkpoints, and the wire along the riverbank is simply part of the landscape. The city's running concerns are the cost and pace of new building, the state of the Imjin's wetlands, flooding in the monsoon, and how much the northern districts can develop while land-use restrictions remain.

Paju's best-known produce comes from the Jangdan plain near the border, where the soil and the restricted land have kept farming small in scale. Jangdan soybeans are the basis of the local speciality, biji jjigae, a thick stew of crushed beans cooked with kimchi and pork, and of fresh tofu served warm in blocks with soy sauce and kimchi, and of doenjang bean paste sold in village shops. Jangdan also gives its name to a variety of hot pepper used in local chilli paste, and roadside restaurants north of Munsan make a point of the connection.

The Imjin River supplies the other local table. Freshwater fish are served as maeuntang, a peppery stew thickened with vegetables and crown daisy, and river eel and shrimp appear in season; in autumn the shrimp are salted for the year's kimchi. Duck, grilled or steamed with herbs, is a common country restaurant meal, as is bossam, boiled pork sliced and wrapped in leaves with radish salad.

Around the arts and publishing districts the food is more urban: cafés, bakeries and brunch restaurants in converted galleries and printing halls, along with pizza and pasta places aimed at weekend visitors. Geumchon's market supplies the everyday food — hand-cut kalguksu noodles, blood sausage, fried snacks and stalls of side dishes — and local makgeolli, the cloudy rice wine, is brewed from Paju rice and drunk with the bean and tofu dishes it suits best.