Tongyeong Dongpirang & Gangguan Port

Character

A staircase turns between painted house walls and Gangguan Port suddenly opens below. Dongpirang is built on that contrast: a dense residential hillside pressed directly above Tongyeong’s working harbor. The murals arrived in 2007, when redevelopment threatened to erase much of the neighborhood

Paintings occupy the surfaces that already belonged to daily life — retaining walls, stairs, house fronts, corners and utility structures. They appear in pieces as the lanes bend. Between them are doors, small shops, roofs and repeated glimpses of boats below. The art is inseparable from an inhabited slope

The experience

Dongpirang is small enough to explore without a plan, but steep enough that the hill shapes every few minutes. From Gangguan or the central market, stairs and narrow lanes rise quickly above the waterfront. Some murals fill whole walls; others appear almost incidentally at a turn or on a flight of steps

The harbor keeps returning between buildings. From the upper lanes, fishing boats and the waterfront sit almost directly beneath the houses. Back at Gangguan, the painted hillside becomes part of the view across the port. That change of level is the simplest way to grasp how tightly the neighborhood and harbor sit together

History

Dongpirang was an aging hillside neighborhood when Tongyeong planned redevelopment around the historic Dongporu lookout. In 2007, Green Tongyeong 21 organized a national mural project across walls, stairs, chimneys and water tanks as residents faced the prospect of demolition

The response changed what happened next. Visitors came, the neighborhood gained national attention, and plans moved away from wholesale clearance. Dongpirang became an early and widely cited Korean example of mural-led urban regeneration, with later painting rounds replacing weathered works and adding new ones

The important part of that history is still visible in ordinary details. Homes remain mixed among murals and visitor-facing businesses, and the slope is still a neighborhood before it is a sightseeing route. The project helped keep a residential piece of central Tongyeong in place

Before you go

Start from Gangguan or the central market and allow time for the climb; the lanes are short but genuinely steep. Treat doorways and residential passages as lived space. After the hill, return to the waterfront for the reverse view. From below, the compactness of Dongpirang and Gangguan is immediately obvious