Nuwemaru Street

The street has had three names

Before Nuwemaru, this 440-metre strip in Yeon-dong was Rodeo Street. Jeju turned it into a pedestrian-focused commercial street in 2010, then renamed it Baozen Street after roughly 10,000 employees of China’s Baojian Group arrived on an incentive trip in 2011. One corporate tour changed the street’s identity

Chinese group tourism then became part of the physical landscape. Menus and signs multiplied in Chinese, investment followed the visitors, and Baozen became one of Jeju City’s most visible package-tour shopping stops. When the THAAD dispute sharply reduced Chinese group arrivals in 2017, the street lost the market its name had come to represent

Later that year, Jeju replaced Baozen with Nuwemaru, combining Jeju-language words for “silkworm” and “ridge.” The new name did more than localize the signboard: it closed a chapter in which a commercial street had been branded around one foreign company and one style of tourism

Chinese visitors returned, but the travel pattern changed

Chinese travelers are visible on Nuwemaru again. In 2023, a local select-shop manager said eight in ten customers were Chinese, mostly younger independent travelers, and the shop had added WeChat Pay and Alipay. A 2025 street report again found Chinese visitors shopping in the Yeon-dong area during the day

That is a different economy from the old Baozen years. The earlier boom was built around organized groups and incentive tours; current visitors are more likely to choose their own shops, restaurants and cafés. The Chinese-tourism layer is still visible at eye level. Recent reporting found shop signs and menus pairing Korean with Chinese for black pork, stone-pot bibimbap and foot-care services, while younger Chinese visitors stopped at cosmetics stores. The movement through the street is less choreographed than in the old group-tour years, but the language of that market never fully disappeared

Yeon-dong keeps the street useful after the branding fades

Nuwemaru sits inside one of Jeju City’s densest commercial districts. The pedestrian strip is lined with stacked vertical signs, cosmetic storefronts and bilingual restaurant boards, while the same commercial frontage continues into the narrower Yeon-dong side streets rather than ending at the official street boundary

The street also continues to be used as local city space. Jeju’s 2026 Samda Concert tied receipt events to spending in the Yeon-dong commercial district and Nuwemaru, using the street as part of a broader attempt to pull people back into the neighborhood after dark. The branding has changed repeatedly; the commercial function has not disappeared with any one name

Before you go

Nuwemaru works best as part of an evening in Yeon-dong rather than as a single attraction with a start and finish. The most useful way to read it is to notice the layers at once: Jeju-language street branding, Chinese-facing retail, local restaurants and bars, and the dense hotel-and-shopping blocks around the pedestrian strip