Seosan-dong Sihwa Alley & Bori Madang

Character

Im Jeong-sun’s poem on a Seosan-dong wall records 33 years working at a terminal, then remembers the part she liked best: singing and dancing with coworkers after the shift. Her life had been hard, but she still described those years as fun

That voice changes the alley. Mokpo writers contributed poems about the old mood of Bori Madang; older residents wrote about labor, difficult marriages, poverty, children and the small pleasures that survived alongside them. By 2019, the project included 28 resident life-history poems in murals as well as 67 poem-and-image works by 43 local writers

The neighborhood becomes more specific as those two kinds of memory sit on the same walls

The experience

Three short alleys climb the Seosan-dong slope toward Bori Madang. Each is only about 100 metres, but the route is vertical: narrow stairs run between closely packed homes, divide at a small neighborhood resting point and repeatedly reopen toward the sea as the elevation rises

The lower end includes Yeonhee’s Supermarket, restored after the film *1987* made the location nationally recognizable. Farther uphill, the attraction is less a single set piece than the accumulation of resident poems, murals, low walls, steps and ordinary houses still used as homes

Bori Madang is the release at the top. The open ground takes its name from the place where barley or rice was once dried and threshed. From it, the roofs of Seosan-dong fall toward Mokpo’s harbor, with Goha Island and the water beyond

The route is short enough to walk all three alleys rather than choosing one. The distance understates the climb

History

The hillside was already a working-class settlement before the poetry project. During the colonial period, workers lived on the slope behind Mokpo’s port; Korean War refugees later settled there as well

By the 1980s, Seosan-dong was still tied directly to fishing and port work. Residents owned fishing boats or worked loading cargo. One Korea Tourism Organization account uses an unusually concrete measure of that economy: in the cold season, as many as three trucks of coal briquettes entered the village in a day

The current poetry-alley project began in 2015 as part of Mokpo’s three-year Humanities City program, backed by about 420 million won. The initial plan called for 30 permanent poem-and-art woodblocks by Mokpo poets and artists; residents’ own life histories later became a major part of the walls

The project also had a maintenance failure. In June 2019, Yonhap reported that 13 woodblock works had disappeared and that some fallen pieces had remained on stairs for more than a month. A local culture group publicly demanded repairs. The episode matters because the alley’s value depends on material care, not only on having collected residents’ memories once

Bori Madang Alley was designated Mokpo local heritage in 2016, while the surrounding slope continued to function as a residential neighborhood

Before you go

Bori Madang works well as the turning point, with one alley used for the climb and another for the return. This remains a lived residential neighborhood, and the lower film location is best understood as the beginning of the route, with the resident poems and harbor view still ahead