Myeongdong

At the top of the subway exit, the first thing to do is stand still for a few seconds and let your eyes adjust.

There is far more light here than anywhere else. Signs are stacked on signs, from the first floor up to the fifth, and every one of them is lit. Music pours out of dozens of shops at once. People move in a stream, and that stream has its own speed. Anyone who walks too slowly gets nudged to the side.

This place is called Myeongdong. The name means bright neighborhood.

The word "bright" in that name goes back long before there were light bulbs. In the time of the Joseon kings, one of this area's old names already carried that same word. So "bright" belonged to this place back when its evenings were as dark as anywhere else. Then, a few hundred years later, the name suddenly came true in the most literal sense, so true that it is a little funny.

Every day, an estimated 2 million people pass along this street. Two million. That is more than the population of most cities in Vietnam. And in 2023, Myeongdong was ranked the ninth most expensive shopping street in the world, measured by the rent on shop space.

The ninth most expensive in the world. That figure says something very concrete about every square meter here. A shop that wants a place on this street must sell a great deal each month just to pay for the ground it stands on. That is why everything here is so bright, so loud, and so eager to call people in. Nobody in Myeongdong can afford to stand still and wait for customers.

After about ten minutes in that stream of people, the street shows its first layer, which is food.

Small pushcarts line both sides of the road. Each cart makes one dish, cooked on the spot and eaten on the spot, standing up. Some things fry in shallow pans of oil. Some grill over charcoal. Some are sweet and eaten hot, and they need care, because the filling that runs out is very hot. Smoke rises from dozens of carts at once, and the smells blend into one that only a night food street has.

This is the place to go slowly, look closely, point, and order whatever looks like fun.

But walking the main street to the end and turning back shows only half of it.

Now try something different: leave the stream of people and take one of the small slopes that lead uphill.

It is only a few hundred steps.

The music fades. The lights thin out. The road climbs. Then the slope ends, and a wide courtyard opens up ahead, with a red brick building standing in the middle.

That is Myeongdong Cathedral, completed in 1898. When it was finished, it was the largest building in Seoul.

What stands out is not the architecture but the distance. The loudest spot in this area and the quietest are only a few minutes apart on foot. The cathedral has stood there for more than 100 years, and the busy shopping streets below grew up around it. On one side is the market, on the other the bell tower, and neither will agree to move away.

The street also has its own story about its name.

In the time of the Joseon kings, this area went by other names: Myeongnyebang, or Chonghyeon. In 1914, under colonial rule, it was renamed Meiji-cho, after Emperor Meiji of Japan. That name lasted more than 30 years.

Then in 1946, after the country gained its independence, the neighborhood officially took the name Myeongdong.

A street losing its name and then taking a Korean name again sounds like a small thing, but it reached into ordinary lives. For more than 30 years, the people living here had to write an unfamiliar name on the envelopes they sent to family. Children grew up knowing only that name. When the neighborhood took a Korean name again, a whole generation had to learn a new name for home.

The brightly lit street of tonight has been through all of that.

After the war, as the 1960s began, the economy grew and banks gradually moved into the area. By the 1970s, Myeongdong had become the place where young people and the most fashionable dressers in Seoul came to gather. It has kept that role ever since, changing what it sells but never its character.

So the street has two layers, and only someone who walks through both sees it whole. The lower layer is the main street, with its smoke and its smells, its dishes made right on the pushcarts, and a stream of people that never thins. The upper layer waits at the end of a small slope, a few hundred steps away.

Up in the cathedral courtyard, the music is gone. Stand there for a few minutes, then turn and look back down. Below lies the whole blazing, noisy district just left behind, still there, waiting for the walk back down.