Gwangjang Market

Where it sits. Gwangjang Market fills a block in Jongno District between the Cheonggyecheon stream to the south and Jong-ro to the north, roughly midway between Jongno 3-ga and Dongdaemun. It covers about 42,000 square metres under a patchwork of steel and translucent roofing, with more than five thousand shops, something in the order of twenty thousand people working in it, and a footfall commonly given as sixty-five thousand a day. Four numbered gates open off the surrounding streets; the north gate on Jong-ro and the south gate by the stream are the two most people use.

The story behind it. The market opened in 1905 as Dongdaemun Market, the first permanent daily market in Korea to trade from fixed buildings rather than on periodic market days. Its founding was a commercial and quietly political act by Korean merchants at a moment when Japanese trading houses were taking control of the capital's commerce; the company created to run it was incorporated in 1911 and is among the oldest continuously operating firms in the country, still the market's landlord and manager. That continuity is why the place is organised the way it is, with a merchants' association that allocates pitches, sets rules and, when necessary, disciplines its own members. The market has survived the colonial period, the flattening of central Seoul during the Korean War, the arrival of department stores in the 1970s and the wholesale shift of clothing manufacture to the towers of Dongdaemun a few hundred metres east, and it has done so by never being only one thing.

Two markets stacked. The ground floor is food and the upper floor is cloth, and most visitors never see the second one. Upstairs are hundreds of units selling hanbok silk, bedding, curtain fabric, tailoring supplies and, in the eastern section, Korea's largest secondhand clothing market, where imported vintage is sorted, priced and resold to shops across the country. Trading up there follows office hours and closes on Sundays. Downstairs the alleys run on a different clock, opening in the morning and going until eleven at night or later, with stools set around the cooking counters and a level of noise that makes conversation a shouting matter after seven. The two systems share a building but barely acknowledge each other, and the stairwells between them are among the few places in central Seoul where you can pass from a tourist attraction into a working wholesale district in ten steps.

What to eat. The market's reputation rests on a handful of dishes it does better and cheaper than almost anywhere:

• Bindaetteok, thick mung-bean pancakes ground on stone mills in full view and fried in a shallow pool of oil, eaten with raw onion in soy vinegar
• Mayak gimbap, thumb-sized seaweed rolls served with a mustard-soy dip, the nickname a piece of dark local humour about how many you eat
• Yukhoe, hand-cut raw beef with pear and egg yolk, sold along a dedicated alley toward the north-east corner
• Knife-cut kalguksu noodles and sundae, boiled blood sausage, from counters that have run for three generations

On screen and the friction that followed. The kalguksu counters here reached a global audience through the Korean episode of Netflix's Street Food: Asia in 2019, which built its story around one long-serving Gwangjang stallholder, and the market has since become one of the most filmed food locations in Asia. The consequences have not all been comfortable. In 2024 a widely shared video of a small side-dish plate sold to a visitor at an inflated price forced the merchants' association to suspend the stall involved, publish price boards and impose portion standards — a public admission that the market's tourist trade and its neighbourhood trade had drifted apart. Ordering in the quieter side aisles rather than the two photographed central alleys still gets both a fairer price and a better plate, and the stalls where older Korean customers are sitting are a reliable guide.

Getting there and timing. Jongno 5-ga Station on Line 1, exit 8, opens almost onto the north gate; Euljiro 4-ga on Lines 2 and 5 is a similar distance from the south side. Late morning is the calm window, mid-afternoon is manageable, and from about six the food alleys are shoulder to shoulder. Cash is still easier than cards at many counters, seats are shared with strangers as a matter of course, and portions are sized for sharing. The floors are level but wet, narrow and permanently crowded, which makes wheeled access hard in practice even though there are no steps at the main gates. From the south gate it is a two-minute walk down to the Cheonggyecheon walkway, and fifteen minutes east along Jong-ro to Heunginjimun and the Dongdaemun fashion district, which trades through the night.