Dongmyo

Where it sits. Dongmyo stands a few hundred metres beyond the line of the old city wall east of Heunginjimun, the great eastern gate, in Jongno District. The Cheonggyecheon stream runs a block to the south, the wholesale fashion towers of Dongdaemun rise to the south-west, and Sinseol-dong and the old textile workshops lie to the east. Dongmyo Station, where Subway Lines 1 and 6 cross, sits directly outside the compound wall, and the shrine's grey-tiled roof is visible from the platform exits. The site occupies about 9,300 square metres behind a wall of stone and packed earth, an island of pine trees and silence in one of the loudest stretches of central Seoul.

The story behind it. The shrine is a Korean temple to a Chinese god of war. Construction began in 1599 and finished in 1601, paid for in part by the Wanli Emperor of Ming, who also sent a plaque in his own calligraphy. The dedication is to Guan Yu, the third-century general deified in China as a guarantor of loyalty and martial virtue, whose cult Ming officers brought with them during the campaigns against the Japanese invasions of the 1590s. Three such shrines were raised in the capital; only this eastern one survives. Korean scholar-officials, schooled in a strict Neo-Confucian reading of ritual, found the whole business awkward and maintained it chiefly out of diplomatic obligation. It was only under King Yeongjo, who reigned from 1724 to 1776, that Dongmyo was folded into state ceremony, by then as a pointed gesture of loyalty to the fallen Ming and disdain for the Qing.

The building itself. The main hall reads as visibly foreign to anyone used to Korean palace architecture. Two rectangular halls are joined front to back under a continuous roofline, producing a deep, dim interior rather than the shallow, open bays of a Joseon shrine. The walls are brick rather than the usual timber frame with plaster infill, the eave brackets are heavier and closer set, and the whole composition sits low to the ground. Inside, a gilt-bronze seated figure of Guan Yu occupies the altar, flanked by painted attendant generals, with stone stelae and a pair of carved guardians in the forecourt. It is protected as a national treasure-class monument and entry is free.

The market that grew around it. Since the 1980s the streets ringing the shrine wall have carried Seoul's largest informal secondhand market. Clothing is sold by the armful from tarpaulins spread on the pavement, and around it trade the sellers of vinyl records, mechanical watches, transistor radios, army surplus, single shoes, old spectacles, cassette decks and hanbok. Two waves of displaced traders fed it: the clearing of the stallholders along Cheonggyecheon during the stream's restoration between 2003 and 2005, and the demolition of Dongdaemun Stadium in 2008. A formal replacement market opened at Sinseol-dong in 2008 to absorb them, but the unofficial trade at Dongmyo never stopped, and in the last decade it has been rediscovered by young Seoulites hunting vintage denim and knitwear at a fraction of Hongdae prices. The sorting is the spectacle: sellers upend sacks onto a sheet, shout a flat price for anything in the pile, and let the crowd dig, so a good find is entirely a matter of patience and elbows.

On screen. A small pizza takeaway a short walk from the shrine supplied the exterior of the box-folding shop in Parasite, where the Kim family assemble cartons for piece rates before Ki-woo's tutoring job changes their fortunes. The shop is an unremarkable neighbourhood pizzeria on a corner of an unremarkable street, which is exactly why it was cast: this quarter has resisted renovation, so its shopfronts, hand-painted signage and tangled overhead cabling still read as several decades old on camera. Seoul's tourism office added it to the walking route it published after the film's Academy Awards, and the owners eventually acknowledged the connection with a sign of their own. Anyone arriving expecting a film set will find a working takeaway with a queue of locals at lunchtime.

Getting there and timing. Dongmyo Station, exits 3 and 6, opens straight onto the market streets; Dongdaemun Station is a ten-minute walk west along Jong-ro. The shrine grounds keep daytime hours and are usually closed one day a week, while the market runs daily and peaks on Saturday and Sunday mornings, when the pavements narrow to a single shuffling file. Bring cash in small notes, since most sellers take nothing else, and expect prices to be spoken rather than marked. The ground is flat but heavily obstructed by goods, which makes wheeled movement difficult at busy times. Spring and autumn are the pleasant months; the market trades through winter, when the sellers light kerosene heaters and the clothing piles double in size.