Gwangjang Market is a sprawling, covered labyrinth in central Seoul where the city's textile trade has largely given way to street food. Under a canopy of neon signs, hundreds of vendors operate from tightly squeezed stalls, cooking working-class dishes over open flames and vats of popping oil. The air is heavy with the smell of deep-frying and the clamor of crowds—a mix of locals and foreign tourists drawn by the market's appearance on Netflix’s Street Food: Asia.

Gwangjang was founded in 1905 as a direct act of economic resistance. When Japanese merchants seized control of Seoul’s main Namdaemun commercial district following the 1904 Japan-Korea Treaty, a group of Korean merchants retaliated with their wallets. They pooled their funds to establish Korea’s first permanent, daily market run exclusively by and for Koreans. Through the Japanese colonial period, its labyrinthine alleys did double duty: selling dry goods by day, and providing cover for independence meetings and covert fundraising by night.

The Korean War burned the market to ash. Its revival was willed into existence by war widows and mothers who set up in the ruins, surviving by selling smuggled US military goods and fabric scraps. As South Korea industrialized in the 1960s and 70s, those scraps built the country's premier textile hub. Wholesale fabric sellers downstairs and tailors upstairs supplied everything from custom hanbok (traditional clothing) to imported silks, feeding an ecosystem of laborers who toiled 14-hour days.

When ready-to-wear fashion gutted the custom tailoring business in the 1990s, the looms quieted. But the ground-floor food stalls—originally built to serve cheap, high-calorie meals to manual laborers—outlasted the workforce they were meant to feed. As the tailors left, the food took over. Today, a massive influx of global tourism brings new friction: rising rents threaten the surviving fabric vendors upstairs, while the merchants' association polices price-gouging and shrinking portion sizes at the food stalls below.