Cheongsando

Where it sits. Cheongsando lies off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula, the main island of Cheongsan-myeon in Wando County, South Jeolla Province, with about nineteen square kilometres of hill and terrace and a population that has fallen to roughly two thousand. Four smaller inhabited islands and a scatter of uninhabited rocks belong to the same township. The name means green mountain island, a reference to how little the slopes fade over winter, and older records call it Seonsan, the mountain of the immortals. The ferry from Wando takes about fifty minutes across water that is usually calm and often hazy, and the island rises out of it in ridges of dark pine with stone-walled fields cut into every workable slope.

Fields built out of stone. Cheongsando's agricultural landscape is the reason the island matters beyond its film credits. Because the slopes are steep and the soil thin, generations of farmers built terraced paddies called gudeuljangnon, laying flat stones as an underfloor drainage flue in the same way a traditional Korean heated floor is laid, then packing soil on top so that water could be held on ground that should not hold any. The system was recognised nationally as agricultural heritage and then listed by the Food and Agriculture Organization among Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems in 2014. Walking between the fields, the drystone walls are chest-high, the lanes are barely cart-width, and in April the barley is bright green against yellow rapeseed.

On screen. In 1993 Im Kwon-taek released Seopyeonje, adapted from stories by Yi Chong-jun, about an itinerant pansori singer who blinds his adopted daughter so that she will carry the grief her singing requires. Its most celebrated sequence was shot here: a single unbroken take, running more than five minutes, in which the three travellers come down a curving stone-walled road between the fields singing Jindo Arirang, the camera holding steady as they dwindle into the distance. The film was the first Korean feature to sell more than a million tickets in Seoul, and it is credited with reviving public interest in pansori. The road is signposted as the Seopyeonje path, the walls are as they were, and the view down toward the sea is unchanged. Later, KBS filmed its 2006 drama Spring Waltz on the island, building a house set above the shore that has been kept as an exhibit.

Korea's slow island. In December 2007 Cheongsan-myeon was designated among the first Cittaslow towns in Asia, part of a small group of Korean places that took the Italian slow-city charter as a development strategy. In practice that meant refusing large resorts, keeping the field walls, and building a network of walking courses instead. Eleven marked routes now total something over forty kilometres, following the coastline, the terraces and the village lanes, and an annual slow-walking festival in April times itself to the barley and rapeseed. The island also preserves distinctive funeral customs, including a communal bier song and a hillside of grave mounds set among the fields, and the local economy still turns on abalone, sea squirt and the seaweed rafts that grid the water offshore. Population decline is the countervailing fact: the school rolls are tiny, most working farmers are past sixty, and the slow-city designation is as much a survival strategy as a philosophy.

What is actually there. Docheong-ri is the ferry village and the only real service centre, with a handful of guesthouses, minbak rooms in family houses, and small restaurants serving abalone porridge and grilled fish. Dangri and the neighbouring hamlets hold the film locations and the best of the terraced landscape. Beaches at Jisan and Sinheung are quiet and largely undeveloped, backed by pine and rarely holding more than a handful of people even in August. The coastal cliffs on the southern side, where the ferries pass, are the island at its most dramatic: dark rock, low scrub, and a horizon of scattered islets fading in the haze. There is a bus that meets the ferries, but the island rewards walking, and most visitors cover the Seopyeonje road, the terraces above it and the coastal cliffs in a single long day.

Getting there and timing. Wando is reached by intercity bus from Gwangju in about two and a half hours or from Seoul in five, and ferries run from Wando ferry terminal several times daily, more often in summer, with a car ferry service for those bringing a vehicle. Sailings are cancelled in strong wind and during typhoon warnings between July and September, so a return trip should carry slack. April is the peak of both landscape and visitor numbers; October offers the same walking without the festival crowd. The terrain is unrelentingly steep, the lanes are cobbled and stepped, and the island is not realistic for wheelchair users or for anyone unsteady on rough ground.