Woljeongsa

Where it sits. Woljeongsa stands at around 700 metres on the flank of Odaesan, in Pyeongchang County, at the point where the mountain valley narrows and the Odaecheon stream runs clear over pale stone. It is the head temple of the fourth parish of the Jogye Order, the main Buddhist body in South Korea, and it anchors a valley that holds several other monasteries higher up. Odaesan means the mountain of five plateaux, a deliberate echo of Mount Wutai in China, and Korean Buddhism treats it as the dwelling of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. The approach is the part visitors remember: a track of roughly a kilometre running from the entrance gate to the temple courtyard beneath around seventeen hundred fir trees, some of them three centuries old, the light arriving green and vertical even at midday.

Founded on a relic. Tradition dates the temple to 643 and credits the Silla monk Jajang, who is said to have returned from Tang China carrying relics of the Buddha and to have enshrined them in these mountains. That claim underpins the whole valley: higher up, above the temple of Sangwonsa, sits one of the Korean peninsula's five relic halls, a shrine with no Buddha image inside because the relic behind it is the object of veneration. Woljeongsa itself grew as the valley's gateway monastery and was rebuilt many times over thirteen centuries, always in wood, always after fire.

Burned and rebuilt within living memory. In January 1951, during the Korean War, the temple was destroyed by fire as forces withdrew through the valley, on the reasoning that the buildings would otherwise give cover. Almost nothing wooden survived. What stands today is the product of a reconstruction that began in the 1960s with the main hall and continued for decades, which is why the paintwork looks fresher than the site's age suggests. The stone survived: an octagonal nine-storey pagoda of about fifteen metres, carved in the Goryeo period and designated a National Treasure, still stands on the axis in front of the hall, its stacked eaves slightly flared, with a stone bodhisattva kneeling before it in offering. The original of that kneeling figure has been moved indoors to the temple museum and a copy set outside, a compromise now common at exposed Korean stone sites. The museum alongside the courtyard also holds sutras, paintings and metalwork recovered from the valley's temples, and it is worth the twenty minutes for the pagoda figure alone.

Up the valley. Ten kilometres further into the mountain, reached by a rough road or by the forest trail that follows the stream, Sangwonsa holds the oldest dated bronze bell in Korea, cast in 725 and famous for the flying musicians carved on its surface, and a seated wooden Manjushri associated with a legend about King Sejo being healed in the stream nearby. The walking route between the two temples, which follows the water most of the way, is the best day's walk in the valley and is manageable by anyone comfortable with a gentle nine-kilometre forest track. Above Sangwonsa the path climbs to Birobong at 1,563 metres, the summit of Odaesan, with the ridge open to the wind.

Screen, silence and the Olympic decade. Woljeongsa runs one of the country's best-known templestay programmes, a system created nationally in 2002 that opened monastic routine — pre-dawn chanting, tea with a monk, walking meditation on the fir path — to lay visitors and foreign travellers. The fir avenue has become a standard location for Korean broadcasters shooting nature and meditation programming, and it is used constantly for tourism campaigns; those long green corridors of trunks are among the most reproduced landscape images in the country. The valley's wider profile changed again with the 2018 Winter Olympics, whose alpine venues at Daegwallyeong lie roughly twenty kilometres away and which brought a KTX line to Jinbu, on the valley's doorstep.

Getting there and timing. The Gyeonggang KTX from Seoul reaches Jinbu Station in about ninety minutes, and a local bus or taxi covers the last fifteen minutes to the temple gate. Intercity buses run to Jinbu from Seoul's Dong Seoul terminal. Since May 2023, when the national government took over the cost, most Jogye Order temples inside national parks no longer charge a cultural-heritage admission fee, so entry here is now free. Autumn colour peaks in mid-October and fills the car park; the fir path is at its best in early morning mist or after rain, when the resin smell is strongest. Snow lies deep in the valley from December to March and the temple keeps the fir track cleared. The forest track is broad, level gravel and manageable with assistance, though the courtyard steps and the higher trails are not.