Abai Village

Before the Korean War, Sokcho was a small fishing port that few Koreans could place. After the war, it was a city of refugees. The village on the sandbar beside the cruise terminal is where that began.

A town that was in the North

When Korea was divided along the 38th parallel in 1945, Sokcho fell on the northern side. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records that it stayed under North Korean rule until 1951, when ROK forces took it back. A military government ran it until civilian rule returned in 1954. A law of 21 October that year covered seven counties recovered north of the old line. On 1 January 1963 the town became Sokcho City.

That history makes Sokcho unusual among the Korean ports on a cruise itinerary. Busan and Incheon received refugees; Sokcho was itself retaken. Most of its old families were living in North Korea six years before the city existed.

The sandbar

The Korea Tourism Organization dates the village to 1951, when displaced people from Hamgyeong province came south with the Korean army. Their home coast lay just over the line. A 2004 column by the historian Ju Gang-hyeon reckons about 50,000 people reached Sokcho by sea and land, most from South Hamgyeong. He names their towns: Dancheon, Sinpo, Jeongpyeong, Iwon, Yeongheung.

They moored their boats on the spit between Cheongcho Lake and the sea, a strip about a kilometre long and eighty metres wide. It was state-owned shore, so nobody could evict them. They built from ration boxes, broken boats and flattened oil drums. The men fished, the only trade they had; the women picked fish from the nets. They expected to go home when the fighting stopped.

They built from ration boxes, broken boats and flattened oil drums, and expected to go home when the fighting stopped.

The armistice of 1953 fixed the line, and the village became permanent. Abai is Hamgyeong dialect for an older man, a grandfather. Its first generation has almost all died without returning. The column notes that descendants scatter ashes at sea, hoping the current carries them north.

The Gaetbae

The channel that cuts the village off from the town centre was dug for port works late in the Japanese colonial period. For years the refugees crossed it by rowing boat. The tourism organization's history says Sokcho township built the first Gaetbae around 1955. A second boat and a formal ferry licence followed in 1961, with a veterans' association as operator. In 1988 the city handed it to the Cheongho-dong Development Committee, which still runs it. The present boat is a 1998 refit.

There is no engine and no captain. Two steel cables cross the channel, one boat on each. Passengers pick up an iron hook, catch the cable and pull. The crossing is one or two minutes; by road around the lake it is half an hour. Residents have always ridden free. The city lists the fare at ₩500, and the ferry carries 150,000 to 200,000 paying passengers a year.

Autumn in My Heart

The village was known for its ferry and its food, and then it was known everywhere. Autumn in My Heart aired on KBS2 from 18 September to 7 November 2000, sixteen episodes on Monday and Tuesday nights. It averaged 38.6 per cent of the national audience and peaked at 46.1. The heroine, Eun-seo, lives in Abai Village and crosses by the Gaetbae; the beach beside the terminal is where Tae-seok prays for her recovery.

The series is counted among the first exports of the Korean Wave, and tours of its locations followed. The shop that stood in for Eun-seo's house still hangs a banner. A replica of the house is in the city museum, where it serves as the kiosk.

Sundae, two ways

The village's dish is Abai sundae, a large pork intestine stuffed with glutinous rice, blood, cabbage and bean sprouts, then steamed. The city's food page says the Hamgyeong version is bigger and fuller than the southern sausages, which skip the rice. When intestine ran short, the refugees stuffed a whole squid instead: rice, radish leaves, carrot, onion and perilla, steamed and sliced. Ojingeo sundae is a Sokcho invention born of shortage. The alleys also sell Hamheung cold noodles and gajami sikhae, fermented flounder with rice.

A city of divided families

In 1983 KBS ran a live programme to reunite families separated by the war. It was meant to last a night and ran from 30 June to 14 November, 453 hours over 138 days. More than 100,000 people applied and 10,189 families were reunited. UNESCO added the tapes to its Memory of the World register in 2015. Sokcho's families were the kind it was made for: separated not by the front line but by a single harbour crossing that never reopened.

The city keeps the memory formally. The Displaced Civilians Folk Village beside the City Museum reconstructs houses from Gaeseong, Pyongyang, Pyeongan, Hamgyeong and Hwanghae. It adds a Cheongho-dong alley of shacks and the old Sokcho railway station. The Displaced Civilians Culture Festival is held each June at the Expo lawn and in Abai Village. The eleventh, on 12 and 13 June 2026, drew about 58,000 people. It includes a joint memorial rite for parents left behind.

The city's own page on the village is frank about what is left. New waterworks have removed most of the old shacks and lanes. A few houses survive, each with pots of chilli and flowers in tins and fish boxes by the door. The murals on Cheongho-ro paint the journey south. Walk it quietly; it is still somebody's street.