Bohemian Gyeongju

Gyeongju was for a millennium the capital city of the kingdom of Silla, which ruled all of the Korean peninsula from the 7th through 10th centuries. While the legacy of its regal past is everywhere in evidence in the form of the many massive burial mounds scattered in and around the city, and is on display at the fantastic Gyeongju National Museum, nowadays it is a small, unassuming city. It has no skyline to speak of, and thrives mainly on tourism. There is here none of the modern-day urban bustle of Seoul, the megalopolis capital of South Korea.

But there is a kind of romantic luster limning Gyeongju that seems to attract a certain type of outsider. Artists, calligraphers, history buffs, counter-culturalists, drop-outs, and iconoclasts have come here to settle. All over town there are signs in Chinese characters, propped up against dilapidated buildings in out-of-the-way narrow alleys, announcing the presence of a "Three Kingdoms History Research Study Group" or an "Ancient Calligraphy Studio".

Many of these folks seem to end up opening restaurants, which function as expressions of their artistic sensibilities or as gathering places for their like-minded friends.

So it's not unusual to find restaurants whose walls are decorated with classical poetry and whose bookshelves are lined with volumes on history and archeology. In the evenings there are little salons where conversation, lubricated by soju, lingers long into the night.

The poems below were on the wall of a loach-soup place we went to months ago. The presentation isn't anything special, just computer printouts, but this is the sort of thing that can appeal only to a small subset of the population. (Bear in mind that most Koreans can no longer read Chinese characters, let alone poems written in Classical Chinese.)

We recently ate lunch on the site of the former school of the Chinese-Korean community of Gyeongju. It was purchased by a middle-aged man who opened a small artsy printing studio and grilled kalbi restaurant on the grounds.

The printing studio, Wol In Jae 月印齋

The plaque for the Chinese-Korean school still stands outside the gate.

Inside the walls were decorated with all sorts of artistic photographs, ranging from landscape scenes to candid portraits.

But the pictures that struck our eyes were the 9 in the frame on the right of the above picture, shown again below:

These are all 20th-century scenes related to the Chinese-Korean school when it was in operation. On the lower right you can see a map of China on the classroom wall, and in the lower center photo are portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek.

We didn't know anything about the place, but a young man—who turned out to be the owner—a little drunk from some lunchtime revelry with friends, wandered over to talk to us. "You are the first customers to ever notice these photos," he said. He sat down to tell us about them. He and Erma's mother chatted for a while about local history and his own history.

If you are a big-city person, Gyeongju isn't the place for you. But if you think you weren't meant for the modern era, consider opening a restaurant here and discovering a small circle of like-minded Bohemians.