Choryang Ibagu-gil Alley

This guide to Choryang Ibagu-gil Alley in Busan starts with a refugee woman climbing a stone stairway before dawn in the autumn of 1950, after war turned Busan into South Korea's crowded, temporary capital. It follows how families with nowhere else to go built up the hillside itself, and why a stairway of one hundred and sixty-eight steps became the daily route to the neighborhood well. Locals still call the route Ibagu-gil, story road, for what each wall along the climb is said to hold.