Tongyeong
"Tongyeong sits at the edge of the peninsula like a place that decided long ago that beauty was enough reason."
I came to Tongyeong on a slow train from Busan, watching the Korean peninsula narrow to a point as if the land itself were being poured into the sea. By the time I reached the harbour, the light had gone the colour of pale honey, and the boats on Gangguan Port were rocking on water so still it looked laminated.
A Port That Smells Like Itself
Nobody tells you that Tongyeong has its own smell. It hits you on the steps down from the cable car terminal — salt, diesel, and something fermented and sharp that turns out to be gejang, raw crab marinated in soy sauce, the dish this city quietly considers its finest achievement. Lia found a haenyeo grandmother selling it by the styrofoam box near Sebyeonggwan Hall, the old naval command pavilion, and we ate standing up with our fingers, the brine cold and oceanic on our tongues. It tasted like the sea had been concentrated and handed to us directly.
Sebyeonggwan itself stopped me. It is one of the largest surviving wooden structures from the Joseon era — low, wide, its dark timber columns holding up a roof that sweeps like a held breath — and on a Tuesday morning there was almost no one there. Just us, a single monk crossing the courtyard, and the sound of harbour birds.
The Composer’s Staircase
What I had not expected was Yun Isang. The city’s most famous son — a composer who wrote modernist orchestral music that sounds like water moving over stone — has a museum and a childhood home tucked into the hillside neighbourhood of Dongpirang. The neighbourhood itself is covered in murals, the sort of thing that can feel self-conscious elsewhere but here felt genuinely inhabited, families drying laundry beneath paintings of herons. I climbed the 15-minute staircase path from Jungang Market to find Yun Isang’s birthplace and stood in the small room where he grew up listening to the strait. The connection between that view and his music — all those liquid, unresolved harmonies — suddenly made complete sense.
The Hundred-Island Harbour
The cable car from Mireuksan Mountain is the obvious panoramic move, and it delivers exactly what it promises: the city below, then the islands — all 150 of them, or some generous fraction — distributed across the strait like punctuation marks on a blue page. We took the gondola at dusk and said nothing for a long time.
The covered Jungang Market runs the length of the old downtown and sells everything from fresh oysters to pink rice cake shaped like the local topography. We ate oyster rice — gulbap, the city’s other great dish — at a stall with plastic stools and no menu, pointing at what the table next to us had ordered.
When to go: April to June brings mild temperatures and clear skies over the strait, ideal for island ferry trips. October is quieter, with cooler air and the hills above Dongpirang turning rust and gold.