Kaesong & the South

Kaesong was the capital of Korea for almost five centuries. Wang Kon, who founded the Koryo dynasty in 918 — the source of the name "Korea" — made his home town Kaesong the capital the next year, and it remained so until 1392. It was a city of palaces, Buddhist monasteries and the Songgyungwan academy, and its merchants traded with China and beyond. In 1392 the general Yi Seong-gye seized power and founded the Joseon dynasty; the Koryo loyalist Chong Mong-ju was killed on the Sonjuk Bridge, and the new kings moved the capital to Seoul.

Kaesong remained a merchant city, famous for its ginseng trade and its traders' business methods, while the Hwanghae region to the west became a farming province with its capital at Haeju. Koguryo had ruled here in ancient times, and its painted tomb at Anak in South Hwanghae is one of its best known.

In 1945 Kaesong lay just south of the 38th parallel and belonged to the South; the Korean War began with fighting along this line in June 1950, including on the Ongjin peninsula. Armistice talks moved from Kaesong to Panmunjom, where the agreement was signed in July 1953, leaving Kaesong on the northern side of the new line. From 2004 the Kaesong Industrial Region employed North Korean workers in South Korean-run factories until it was shut in 2016. The waters off South Hwanghae, around the maritime line the North disputes, have seen deadly clashes, including the North's shelling of Yeonpyeong island in 2010.

Kaesong's identity comes from its Koryo past. Its citizens were long known in Korea as shrewd merchants, and the city's traders were credited with an early system of double-entry bookkeeping. Its surviving monuments — palace ruins, city walls, the Confucian academy, royal tombs — were listed together as the Historic Monuments and Sites in Kaesong, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 2013.

The Hwanghae region has its own dialect and folk traditions, among them the Pongsan mask dance, a satirical drama of masked dancers mocking monks and aristocrats. In the state's official culture the region is presented above all as the front line: school groups visit Panmunjom and the war memorials, and the Sinchon museum in South Hwanghae presents a 1950 massacre of civilians as an American atrocity, an account historians regard as contested.

As elsewhere, the region reflects the country's human-rights record, described by the UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014: restrictions on movement are especially tight in the border zone. Religious practice is suppressed, and old Buddhist temples such as Woljong-sa in the Kuwol mountains survive mainly as heritage sites.

Kaesong has around 200,000 people and is unusual in keeping a large district of traditional single-storey courtyard houses. Sariwon, the capital of North Hwanghae, and Haeju, the capital and Yellow Sea port of South Hwanghae, are somewhat larger, and Songnim is an industrial city on the Taedong.

Hwanghae is the country's main grain belt: the Chaeryong and Yonbaek plains grow rice, maize and vegetables, and farm work at planting and harvest draws in students, soldiers and city workers. Kaesong's economy rests on farming, ginseng growing, light industry and the tourist trade that once fed on DMZ tours. Military units are everywhere near the border.

Life follows the national pattern of work units, political meetings and markets. Despite the fertile land, floods and droughts have hit the plains repeatedly.

Kaesong has one of Korea's most admired kitchens, a legacy of its days as a royal and merchant capital. Bossam kimchi is its signature: cabbage leaves wrapped around a rich mixed kimchi filling. Pyonsu are square summer dumplings filled with meat and vegetables, served chilled, on their own or in cold broth. Kaesong's ginseng, or insam, is famous across Korea and goes into chicken soup, tea, sweets and ginseng liquor.

The Hwanghae plains supply rice, and Haeju bibimbap — fried rice with chopped pork, seasoned vegetables and sliced chicken — is the region's best-known dish. The Yellow Sea coast adds clams, crabs and fish.

Kaesong is also known for umegi, or Kaesong juak, sweet rice cakes coated in syrup. Meals for most households are simple, though — rice or maize, kimchi and soup — while tour groups have been served elaborate traditional meals.

Kaesong's old town, best seen from Mount Janam, is a grid of tiled courtyard houses unlike anything in Pyongyang. Around it lie the monuments of the Koryo capital: the terraced ruins of the Manwoldae palace below Mount Songak, the South Gate, the Songgyungwan academy, now the Koryo Museum, and the Sonjuk Bridge. West of the city are the Koryo tombs, above all the tomb of King Kongmin and his Mongol queen with its stone guardians, and the tomb of the founder Wang Kon. The Pakyon waterfall lies in the hills nearby.

South-east of Kaesong, Panmunjom and the DMZ are seen from the northern side: the hall where the armistice was signed, the blue huts of the Joint Security Area straddling the line, and South Korean soldiers facing the North a few metres away.

To the north-west, Sariwon has a reconstructed folk-customs street, with Mount Chongbang and the Songbul temple nearby. In South Hwanghae, Haeju looks onto the Yellow Sea, the Kuwol mountains rise to the north with the Woljong temple, and the painted Koguryo tomb of Anak lies on the mountain's slopes.