Empress Ki|Yongin Daejanggeum Park — The Goryeo Streets Built for a Yuan Empress

Ha Ji-won's first shooting day for Empress Ki was not in a Yuan capital. It was here, on 18 August 2013, at what was still called MBC Dramia.

The lot sits at 25 Yongcheon-dramagil in Baegam-myeon, Yongin. MBC bought the hillside decades earlier and opened the rebuilt streets to visitors in 2011. VisitKorea still names the park among the dramas shot on these tiles: Jumong, Dong Yi, Moon Embracing the Sun, Empress Ki.

You walk a market that never sold anything and a palace gate that never held a real king. The eaves are too clean. The gravel is too even. That is the point. The series needed a Goryeo that could double as Dadu without flying the whole company to Zhejiang every week.

Stand in the market lane at mid-morning. The same boards that carried Ki Seung-nyang in men's clothes still take school groups and hanbok rentals. The park renamed itself Daejanggeum Park in 2015. The drama that used it to invent an empress did not change.