Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha | Cheongha Gongjin Market — The Squid That Kept the Village

The market is smaller than the name Gongjin makes it sound. Twenty-odd shops sit on Cheongha-ro 200beon-gil in Cheongha-myeon, north Pohang. On dates ending in 1 and 6 the five-day market still opens: dried fish, peppers, jujubes, someone frying something that smells like breakfast. The rest of the week the square is quieter. A bronze squid stands in the middle of it anyway.

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha invented Gongjin. The cameras used this real market. The statue was a prop. When the series ended, the production left the squid and the painted signs for Pohang City, and VisitKorea still prints the address — 6 Cheongha-ro 200beon-gil — on the official Hallyu map. Children in the drama sat under those tentacles with a hedgehog. Visitors stand in the same patch of asphalt now and line up for the same bronze.

Walk the loop once. Bora Super, Cheongho Hardware, and the mint-green cafe front are a few doors apart. Do not treat the market as a set that emptied. People still buy wire and soju here. The boards the city put up will tell you which doorway was which. The squid does not need a caption. It is already writing Gongjin in raised letters on the plaque.

Photo: Korea Tourism Organization / VisitKorea, Cheongha Market, 2021.