Geumjeongsan

This guide to Geumjeongsan in Busan starts with the legend behind its name, a summit well locals still swear runs gold, and a golden fish said to have ridden down from heaven and given its name to the mountain's great temple, Beomeosa. It moves down to Sanseong Maeul, a fortress village walled inside eighteen kilometers of stone raised in the early 1700s after a century of invasions, where families have brewed makgeolli rice wine for more than five hundred years. Along the way it covers the hand-kneaded starter that turns steamed rice into alcohol, and the decades Korea banned the drink outright before lifting the ban nationwide.