Letter from Bukchon
A morning walk through Seoul's most photographed neighborhood, and why the photographs don't capture it.
You should walk through Bukchon before seven in the morning. After seven, the neighborhood becomes its own documentation — a site primarily engaged in producing images of itself for distribution to people who are not there. The photography is excellent. The experience it documents does not survive the arrival of the photographers.
Before seven, something different is available. The tiled roofs of the hanok are visible in the particular light of early Seoul, which is softer than you expect from a city of this size. Residents move through the lanes on routes that long predate the tourism infrastructure — the old woman with the cart of vegetables, the office worker taking a shortcut, the man walking a small dog with the patience of someone who does not need to be anywhere until later. The neighborhood, in this hour, is a neighborhood rather than an attraction.
Bukchon's predicament is familiar to historic districts in major cities: the more accurately a place preserves what it was, the more intensely it is consumed by visitors seeking the experience of what it was, which produces conditions under which preserving what it was becomes increasingly difficult. There is no resolution to this problem. There is only the question of whether you walk through before or after seven.
We recommend before.
