Ahyeon-dong

Where it sits. Ahyeon-dong is a long ridge in the eastern corner of Mapo District, pinched between the student quarter around Sinchon to the west and the insurance towers of Chungjeongno to the east. Its older Korean name, Aeogae, still labels a station on Subway Line 5, while Ahyeon — the Sino-Korean reading of the same idea — labels a station on Line 2 at the foot of the northern slope. Both names point at a hill and a pass, and local tradition ties them to the route by which the coffins of children were carried out of the walled capital, burial inside the gates being forbidden. The gradient explains everything else about the place. Side streets gain thirty or forty metres in a couple of hundred, and where a delivery van cannot climb, the city poured concrete steps instead.

On screen. In the first act of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019), Ki-woo walks up to a corner shop, drinks beer at a plastic table with his friend Min, and is handed the scholar's rock that drives the rest of the film. The shop and the flight of steps beside it are both here, roughly ten minutes uphill from Ahyeon Station. The grocer was an ordinary rice-and-sundries store trading under its own sign; the production hung a new one reading Woori Supermarket over it for the shoot and took it down afterwards. After the film won the best-picture Academy Award in February 2020, the steps filled with visitors photographing each other, and Seoul's tourism office published a walking route stringing the film's locations together. The reaction on the hill was mixed at best. Shopkeepers and residents noted that people were queueing to be photographed in a neighbourhood chosen precisely because it read as poor, and the attention arrived without anyone asking them first.

The semi-basement question. The Kim family's flat is a banjiha, a half-sunk apartment with its windows at pavement height. This is a real Seoul housing type rather than a screenwriter's device. A 1970 building code obliged new blocks to include basements usable as shelters; letting those spaces as homes was tolerated, then legalised in 1984, and the 2020 census still counted roughly two hundred thousand such households across the city. What the film does not show is that its street was never real: the flooded alley was constructed inside a water tank at a studio in Goyang, north-west of Seoul. Actual semi-basements around Mapo do flood, and in August 2022 record rainfall drowned a family in one in Gwanak District, after which the city announced a long phase-out of basement dwellings.

What redevelopment left. Much of the hill has already gone. Ahyeon-dong was among the earliest and largest of Seoul's New Town clearances, and the low-rise lanes of the eastern slope were replaced by an apartment complex of close to four thousand flats completed in 2014. The stepped alleys that survive sit in the seams between those towers, which makes the contrast unusually legible: a two-storey brick house under a corrugated roof, then a thirty-storey slab, then another flight of steps with a handrail worn smooth. Later phases of clearance are still working through the district, so a staircase photographed one spring can be behind site hoarding the next.

Wedding street. What Ahyeon-dong is known for at home has nothing to do with cinema. The main road below the ridge carries Seoul's bridal district, a run of shops selling and hiring wedding dresses that has traded since the 1960s and once held well over a hundred storefronts. Plate-glass windows full of white satin, alteration workshops on the upper floors, veil and shoe specialists, photographic studios in the side streets: online competition and rising rents have thinned it, but it remains the densest concentration of bridal retail in the country and an oddly hushed thing to walk past on a weekday afternoon.

Getting there and timing. Ahyeon Station on Line 2 and Aeogae Station on Line 5 both drop you at the bottom of the climb, and Chungjeongno and Sinchon are each within walking distance. Nothing here has a ticket or an opening hour, which is exactly why the timing matters: before about nine in the morning the alleys belong to the people who live in them, and after dark the steps are unevenly lit and steep enough to punish inattention. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons, while July and August bring the monsoon rain the film made famous. Treat the whole neighbourhood as somebody's front garden — keep your voice down, stay out of doorways, photograph the architecture and not the residents. One block north, the Gyeongui Line Forest Park, a linear green strip laid over a buried railway and opened in stages through 2015 and 2016, offers a flat shaded walk back toward Hongdae.