If you stand in the middle of Tongin Market, you’ll hear a sound that doesn’t quite belong in the twenty-first century: the clink of heavy brass coins.
Here’s how it works. Near the center of the arcade there’s a desk. You hand over cash, and you’re given a black plastic tray with empty compartments—and a string of Joseon-style brass tokens, each with a square hole.
And just like that, the market changes shape in your head. You’re not spending money anymore. You’re spending coins. The friction drops. It feels like a game.
You take the empty tray back into the alley and look for stalls with a little sign showing they’re part of the lunchbox network. The weathered grandmother behind mountains of side dishes becomes, for a moment, the keeper of a simple trade. You point. You hand over two coins. She drops a single portion into one square of your tray.
That tiny transaction solves a lot at once. You don’t need a kilo of anything—you can taste. You don’t need much language—pointing and a coin do the work. And to fill the tray, you have to walk, stopping again and again, engaging with the whole length of the market instead of cutting through it.
One item pulls people in especially hard: Tongin’s oil tteokbokki. In most of Korea, tteokbokki comes in a thick red sauce. Here, the rice cakes hit a broad iron pan with hot oil and chili flakes. They come out dry, intensely savory, crisped at the edges.
Behind the scenes, the system stays simple. Vendors take in tokens all day, and the market association converts them back into real payments. The washing, the trays, the staffing—much of that is covered upstairs, where people sit down to eat and buy rice and soup with regular money.
The tradeoff is real. A stall that once made a living selling raw spinach might now keep a portable burner going all day, frying pancakes for people with lunch trays. The market feeds fewer kitchens the old way.
But in the arcade itself—the sesame oil in the air, the sharp bite of chili on hot iron, the coins ticking in a teenager’s hand as they argue over one last choice—you can feel what the system saved. Not a museum. A working rhythm, kept alive by a small sound of metal on metal.
