Dong Yi|Yongin Daejanggeum Park Marketplace — The Eighty-Metre Street That Taught a Court Lady the City

The first thing you hear is wood. Shop signs knock in the wind. A butcher’s hook ticks against a beam. The traditional marketplace inside Yongin Daejanggeum Park runs about eighty metres — dry-goods stalls, inns, and the kind of open kitchens that fed extras between takes.

MBC built this street as part of the old Dramia lot in Cheoin-gu. Dong Yi shot here in 2010. Han Hyo-joo’s water maid is supposed to be a girl from the city’s lowest lanes, and this is the lane they gave her: packed earth, tiled eaves, a mountain rising behind the last shop so the frame never quite looks like downtown Hanyang.

Walk it slowly. The Korea Herald still calls this stretch the park’s most visited set because it is the one place where sageuk commoners were allowed to have faces. Dong Yi learns the city here before she learns the court. A visitor standing under the same eaves hears the same small commerce the cameras needed — a bowl set down, a coin counted, someone calling from the far end of the eighty metres.

The park opens most days from nine. Last entry is an hour before close. The street is short. The work of climbing out of it took the character sixty episodes.