Gukje Market

This guide to Gukje Market in Busan follows its path from a scrappy postwar trading ground, renamed twice before becoming Gukje, into Korea's most famous flea market, built by refugees who arrived after liberation and during the Korean War selling smuggled goods and salvaged wares. It also traces an ordinary January night in 1953, when three cosmetics merchants and a knocked-over oil lamp set the crowded alleys ablaze. Stand among today's reopened stalls and street food, on ground its refugees have rebuilt more than once.