Yongdusan Park

This guide to Yongdusan Park in Busan starts below the hill, where a warehouse once held Joseon dynasty royal portraits stored for safekeeping. It's December 1954, and refugees who fled the Korean War have built a hillside slum of shacks on what was then called Dragon Head Mountain. You'll hear how officials had already warned that a fire risk sat near those portraits, and how one clothing vendor's mishandled briquette set off a blaze days before an even larger fire followed. Around you now are the pine paths, flower clock and bronze admiral that replaced the burned slum entirely.