Chungcheongnam-do Culture & Language

The province’s culture is defined by an ancient kingdom and by rural tradition.

Baekje art

The style is restrained where Silla’s is opulent: soft modelling, a slight smile on the stone Buddhas that is known in Korean art history as the Baekje smile, and a preference for proportion over display. The Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner, found in 1993 in a temple site at Buyeo, is the supreme example — sixty centimetres of cast bronze with a phoenix on the lid, mountains populated by musicians and animals, and a dragon rearing at the base, all in a single casting.

Architecture and transmission

Baekje builders and sculptors worked in Japan, and the oldest wooden buildings in the world at Horyuji owe their form to them. The five-storey stone pagoda at Jeongnimsa translates a wooden structure into stone and is a key monument of Korean architecture.

Temples

Sudeoksa, Magoksa and Gapsa are working monasteries with Goryeo and Joseon buildings, and several run templestay programmes.

Folk tradition

Five-day markets, nongak farmers’ percussion bands with their spinning hat ribbons, and village guardian rituals at the stone posts at the entrance to old settlements all survive in the country districts, kept going by local preservation associations rather than by tourism.

Hanok villages

Oeam and Waryong preserve clusters of tile-and-thatch houses with stone walls, kitchen gardens and underfloor ondol heating, lived in rather than reconstructed. They show how a Joseon country village was actually laid out, down to the drainage channels between the houses.

Ginseng

Geumsan has been the centre of the Korean ginseng trade for centuries and holds the national market.

Korean is the language, written in hangul, an alphabet designed in the fifteenth century and genuinely learnable in an afternoon — which is worth doing, as it makes signs, menus and place names accessible.

English is taught in schools and understood by younger people and at major sites, but this is not Seoul, and outside the museums and the larger hotels you should expect to manage with gestures and a translation app.

The Chungcheong dialect is noticeably slower and softer than standard Korean, with distinctive sentence endings, and is the subject of gentle national teasing.

Useful Korean: annyeonghaseyo for hello, gamsahamnida for thank you, eolmayeyo for how much, igeo juseyo for this one please, and hwajangsil for toilet.