Winter Sonata | Nami Island Metasequoia Lane — The Trees That Taught a Continent to Come

The trunks go up first. Then the light drops. Metasequoia Lane on Namiseom is a straight cut through dawn redwoods planted in the late 1960s, long before a KBS camera needed them. The bark is fluted. The path is packed grit. In winter the needles bronze and the lane becomes a corridor you can hear your own steps in.

Winter Sonata used this walk for the bicycle and the first long look. Kang Joon-sang and Jeong Yoo-jin leave a Chuncheon classroom on screen and arrive here, thirty kilometres down the Bukhangang, as if the island were next door. Filming started in mid-December 2001. After the 14 January 2002 premiere, Japanese charter buses followed the same ferry the extras had used. VisitKorea still treats the lane as the original Hallyu pilgrimage line. The island company marks the kiss bench and the Yeonga statues so nobody has to guess.

Walk it without a bicycle. The trees have outgrown the frame they were shot in. Peacocks cut across the grit. The ferry from Gapyeong still takes five minutes. What the drama needed was a path narrow enough that two people could not pretend they were not walking together. The lane is still that width.

Photo: 강여사, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Tree-lined path on Namiseom.