Korean Filming Locations: One Site Rose 640%

Here is what happened in one year at two Joseon-era historic sites in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province, Korea.

Visitors to Cheongnyeongpo rose 640%. Visitors to King Danjong's royal tomb rose 752%. These were quiet places for history enthusiasts. Now people queue one to three hours for the boat into Cheongnyeongpo, and the surrounding roads jam.

The cause is a single film: The King's Warden, released on 4 February 2026, which had drawn 16.91 million admissions by July — second on the all-time Korean admissions list and first by gross revenue.

At a glance

Percentages that size usually mean the base was tiny. Here it was not: in five months the two sites together passed their entire previous year. What the table cannot show is that neither place was built to hold a crowd — one of them is still reachable only by boat.

What The King's Warden is

Since the film is the cause, it deserves a proper introduction.

It is director Jang Hang-jun's first period film, starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Ji-hoon, Yoo Ji-tae and Jeon Mi-do. Released 4 February 2026, it passed 10 million admissions on 6 March, making it Korea's 34th ten-million film. By July it had reached 16.91 million admissions: second all time by attendance, first by revenue.

The story is set in early Joseon Korea. After King Sejo seized the throne from his nephew King Danjong, Danjong was exiled; the film follows that exile and the failed restoration plot led by Grand Prince Geumseong. Korean audiences learn this in school. For everyone else, a short primer helps:

• Danjong became king as a child in 1452 and was forced to abdicate two years later by his uncle.
• Sejo, that uncle, took the throne and later had Danjong exiled and killed at age 16.
• The exile site is Cheongnyeongpo, and the burial site is the tomb — the two places in the table above.

Why ten million admissions is such a loaded number in Korea is explained in our piece on reading Korean box office figures. In a country of 51 million people, 16.91 million admissions means roughly one in three Koreans bought a cinema ticket for this film.

What these two places actually are

Neither site is a set. Both are the real locations of the events the film depicts.

Cheongnyeongpo is where Danjong was exiled. It is enclosed by river on three sides and a cliff on the fourth, so it can still only be reached by boat. That geography is precisely the isolation the film portrays — and it is why a surge in visitors turned immediately into a queue. The road does not set the capacity; the boat does.

Jangneung, the royal tomb, is the only Joseon royal tomb located outside the Seoul and Gyeonggi region, and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing covering the 40 Joseon royal tombs.

So visitors are not looking at a recreation. They are standing where it happened — which is a meaningfully different experience from a purpose-built film set, and worth knowing before you choose.

Month by month, the release curve is simply visible

But tourism statistics rarely resolve this cleanly to one cause. Normally weather, holidays, local festivals and transport improvements are tangled together. Here the curve begins exactly at the release date and rises as the box office rises.

Screen tourism pulls visitors out of Seoul

Korea has a term for travelling to places seen on screen. This case is unusually large, but the phenomenon is old.

Look at the time span. Winter Sonata is more than twenty years old and Nami Island still draws crowds on that name. Once a place becomes a location, the effect lasts a long time.

There is a survey figure behind all of it: in Korea Culture and Tourism Institute research, 38.3% of respondents cited Hallyu content as a factor in their decision to visit Korea. Close to four in ten.

And the flow runs away from Seoul. Every place in that table is regional — Yeongwol, Mungyeong, Chuncheon, Gangneung, Changwon. Mungyeong's total tourism spending is up 13.8% year on year, which local governments watch more closely than headcount because it means visitors are spending there, not just passing through. It is the same direction as foreign card spending spreading to Busan and Jeju.

What this means where you are

One addition for readers travelling from Southeast Asia. The second row causes the most regret. Long-haul airfare pushes people toward short itineraries, and a single filming location consumes a full day. If you have three locations you want to see, that is a second trip — treating it that way reliably produces a better first one.

Also worth remembering: these are quarterly figures. When a film's cultural moment passes, numbers come down. Chasing whatever is surging right now tends to age badly; choosing the place from the story you personally loved does not.

Read next

• How to read Korean box office admissions — why ten million is the unit that matters
• Nambeol and the return of the period action film — the next film riding the same wave
• Foreign card spending hit 10 trillion won, and left Seoul — the same dispersal in payment data
• There are rules for the products in Korean dramas — the other way screen time converts into spending

Sources

• Digital Daily — Shall we visit that place from the drama? Screen tourism rides K-content
• Supple — Yeongwol's Jangneung and Cheongnyeongpo pass 520,000 visitors on the back of The King's Warden
• Wikipedia (Korean) — The King's Warden
• Star News — 16.9 million wept: what the King's Warden phenomenon left behind