Jo Jeong-rae's epic novel The Taebaek Mountains unfolds around Beolgyo township, spanning the period from the outbreak of the Yeosu-Suncheon Incident in 1948 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. The novel depicts the lives of people who had to survive amid the intense ideological conflict that swept the Korean peninsula in the years following liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Locations that appear in the novel — Sohwa's house, the Hyeon family's house, Jungdo embankment, and the Namdo Inn — all correspond to real places in the Beolgyo area, and can still be visited today along what is known as "The Taebaek Mountains Literary Trail."
The ideological conflict that swept the Korean peninsula, and South Jeolla Province in particular, during this period, along with the civilian harm it caused, is an extremely complex and weighty matter of historical record. As with content from other regions set against the backdrop of the Yeosu-Suncheon Incident and the Korean War, this period's history should be presented with restraint, grounded in official investigative findings and confirmed facts, without simplifying the attribution of harm to either side. These five years, first conveyed through the form of fiction, now remain as a trail that readers can walk in person, weighing the full historical weight of that period for themselves.