To really understand the city of Jeonju, you have to stand right in the middle of the Omokgyo pedestrian bridge. Beneath your feet is a massive, noisy, multi-lane road. But the bridge itself isn't just a way to cross traffic. It is a time machine between two fiercely opposing stories of Korean survival.
If you look back to the west, you see the famous Jeonju Hanok Village. Thousands of tourists flock there every day. It looks ancient, with its elegant, curving black roof tiles. Much of what you see was actually shaped and expanded in the early twentieth century, as Korean families built a dense concentration of hanok on the flat land during the colonial period. Down there, gravity is your friend. Water is easy to draw from deep courtyards, and the flat streets signal permanence and wealth.
But turn around. Face east, toward the slopes of Seungam Mountain, and that order shatters. The land pitches sharply upward into a stair-choked scramble. You are looking at Jaman, a daldongne.
You already know why they called it a moon village. Here's what that nickname leaves out: water, heat, and winter had to be carried up these stairs by hand.
In the early 1950s, millions of displaced people fled south during the Korean War. Jeonju swelled with refugees. But the flat, arable, livable valley floor was already claimed, and guarded. The refugees had literally nowhere to go but up. They were pushed onto the sheer, unpaved inclines of the mountain.
There was nothing romantic about it. Up in Jaman, there was no running water. No sewage infrastructure. No paved roads. Houses were built from whatever could be dragged up the hill—cinder blocks, scrap wood, corrugated tin. Every drop of water had to be carried up lung-burning stairs in buckets suspended from wooden yokes.
And then there was winter. To survive the freezing temperatures, South Koreans relied on yeontan, cylindrical coal briquettes. Each block weighed several kilograms. Because delivery trucks couldn't navigate the narrow, winding alleys, residents strapped traditional wooden A-frame carriers to their backs and hauled the heavy blocks up the icy stairs. In the worst winters, homes went unheated and people risked hypothermia. If a briquette dropped and shattered, the black ash was left there to provide traction on the ice. The physical toll of just keeping a family warm wrecked the knees and spines of an entire generation.
The bitter irony of all this struggle is the dirt beneath those stairs. Right next to the village is a pavilion called Omokdae. In 1380, long before he founded the Joseon Dynasty, General Yi Seong-gye is said to have stopped here to celebrate a victory at Hwangsan over raiders from across the sea. His great-grandfather lived just steps away. This hillside is tied to the ancestral ground of the Jeonju Yi clan, the origin story of the dynasty itself. Six centuries later, the descendants of that elite were comfortably living in the flat valley below, while the most desperate, war-torn citizens of modern Korea were forced to squat on the dynasty's ancestral ground just to survive.
For decades, Jaman remained a marginalized slum. When the younger generation finally left for modern apartments with elevators, the village began to rot. The city considered bulldozing the whole thing. But in 2012, artists were brought in to paint murals on the decaying cinderblock walls.
Today, art covers cinderblock, and cafes sit inside what used to be freezing, coal-heated shacks. The exact steep labyrinth that made Jaman a living hell for refugees in 1953 is what makes it quirky and charming to visitors today. Tourists pour over the bridge to photograph the walls.
Sitting quietly in the shade are a few remaining elderly residents. Many are in their eighties, walking with heavily bowed backs. They are the original refugees. They remember the smell of the open gutters. They remember the sheer weight of the coal. The murals are loud; the people living behind them often aren't. They sit there and watch the valley-dwellers climb their mountain, taking pictures of bright pastel paint applied directly over the back-breaking history they survived.
