Buam-dong

This guide to Buam-dong in Seoul returns to ten o'clock on the night of January 21, 1968, when men in South Korean army uniforms came down these hills toward a checkpoint near the presidential residence, and a police chief named Choi Gyu-sik stepped out to question them. It traces who they really were, the mission they had trained two years for, and the gunfight that followed through these quiet slopes. Today the neighborhood is a pocket of art studios and rice-cake shops beneath Jaha Gate, worth wandering slowly rather than rushing to the summit.