Jeongdongjin

Where it sits. Jeongdongjin is a small coastal settlement about eighteen kilometres southeast of central Gangneung, strung along a narrow shelf between low hills and the East Sea. Its name is administrative rather than poetic: it marks the garrison that lay due east of the royal palace in Seoul, and the village still trades on that alignment, because facing due east on this coast means facing the sunrise squarely. The sand is coarse and pale, the sea drops off quickly, and the coastal railway of the Yeongdong Line runs between the beach and the buildings — close enough that the platform is a matter of a few metres from the water.

The station that made it famous. Jeongdongjin Station opened in 1962 as a minor halt serving coal and local traffic. Its distinction is proximity: it is recognised as the railway station closest to the sea anywhere in the country, and the record has been repeated so often that the claim is now part of the local branding. Trains stop long enough for passengers to walk out and photograph the water. On the seaward side of the platform stands a solitary pine on a small mound, and that tree, more than the station building, is the object of most pilgrimages here.

On screen. In January and February 1995 SBS broadcast Sandglass, a twenty-four-episode drama directed by Kim Jong-hak and written by Song Ji-na, tracing three friends through the political violence of 1980s South Korea. It drew audience shares in the sixties, emptied restaurants during broadcast, and remains a reference point for the entire genre. Its most quoted image is the character Yun Hye-rin, played by Go Hyun-jung, waiting at the little station beside that lone pine on the shore. The tree has been called the Sandglass pine ever since. The drama turned an obscure halt into a destination almost overnight, and Jeongdongjin was among the first Korean places to experience what screen tourism could do to a village: within a couple of years the fields behind the beach were being sold for hotels.

Time made literal. The town leaned into the drama's title. For the millennium turnover, an enormous sand clock was installed in a park above the beach, a disc more than eight metres across holding tonnes of sand that runs for a full year and is turned every 1 January in a public ceremony. Nearby, a museum built inside a line of retired passenger railway carriages runs an exhibition on clocks and timekeeping. On the cliff to the north sits the Sun Cruise Resort, a hotel built in the shape of a full-sized cruise liner, opened in 2002, marooned some sixty metres above the sea. Kitsch is not an accident here; it is the local architecture. The disused and reworked sections of the coastal railway have been turned to leisure use as well: a tourist service with seats swung round to face the water ran this shore between Gangneung and Samcheok for years, and rail bikes now roll along a stretch of old track just north of the village, with the sea a few metres to the left the whole way.

A harder history at the same beach. In September 1996 a North Korean submarine ran aground a short distance down this coast near Anin, and the infiltration that followed triggered a manhunt through the Gangwon mountains lasting more than seven weeks. The vessel is now displayed, together with a captured South Korean-built warship, at the Unification Park a couple of kilometres from Jeongdongjin. The barbed wire and guard posts that once ran the length of this shoreline have mostly come down, but enough remains along the coastal path to make the point that the sunrise coast was a front line within living memory.

• The lone pine and the platform at Jeongdongjin Station, from Sandglass
• The annual turning of the giant sand clock on 1 January
• The ship-shaped Sun Cruise Resort on the cliff above the beach
• The submarine and warship exhibits at nearby Unification Park

Getting there and timing. Trains on the Yeongdong Line stop at Jeongdongjin from Gangneung in about fifteen minutes, and the overnight sunrise trains from Seoul are a long-standing New Year tradition, timed to arrive in the dark before dawn. By road it is a half-hour drive from Gangneung along Route 7. Autumn gives the cleanest horizon and the sharpest sunrises; midwinter mornings are bitter but the light is extraordinary. The first day of January is the single busiest date, with tens of thousands crowding the sand, and both trains and rooms are taken months in advance. The beach and the station approach are level, the sand clock park involves steps, and the cliff-top hotel is reached by road rather than on foot.