Seosan-dong was originally nothing more than a barley field. That changed the moment Mokpo's port opened to foreign trade in 1897. As newly arrived Japanese residents claimed the best flat land near the harbor, poor Korean boatmen who'd been pushed out settled on the surrounding hillside, building a dense cluster of small, closely packed houses. The narrow, winding alleys and low rooflines you still see in Seosan-dong today are direct traces of that era — this wasn't a planned neighborhood, but one that formed naturally as displaced people found whatever ground was left to claim.
The neighborhood took on its current look much later. Starting in 2015 and continuing for about three years, local poets, painters, and residents worked together to fill the alley walls with handwritten poems and woodblock prints, turning it into what's now called the "Poem-and-Painting Alley" (Sihwa-golmok). A hillside settlement built by people pushed out of the city by the port's opening became, nearly a century later, an alley covered in poetry. Most travelers who walk through today remember it simply as a picturesque photo-op alley — but knowing that its origins trace back to the economic displacement the port's opening caused changes how the same alley reads.