At the Yudal intersection in front of the Mokpo Modern History Museum stands an easy-to-miss monument marking the starting point of South Korea's National Route 1 and National Route 2. National Route 1, built by the Japanese colonial government between 1906 and 1911, originally ran 939 kilometers from Mokpo — through Jeolla, Chungcheong, and Gyeonggi provinces — all the way to Sinuiju, on Korea's northern border. It's no accident that Mokpo was chosen as the starting point: as a rapidly growing grain-export port after the 1897 opening, Mokpo was exactly the kind of hub the colonial government needed to move extracted resources deep into the interior and up to the Manchurian border.
Standing in front of this monument today, there's a real gap between what the sign says and what's actually true. National Route 1 is still officially mapped as running all the way to Sinuiju, but in reality the road simply stops at the Demilitarized Zone. Of the original 939 kilometers that once began in Mokpo, roughly half has been completely inaccessible since the Korean peninsula was divided — not a single stretch of it has been fully passable since. It's a rare case where a single piece of modern infrastructure carries two entirely different historical wounds at once: colonial extraction and national division. There's nothing dramatic to look at here, but few places in Mokpo compress the arc of modern Korean history into such a small, easy-to-walk-past monument.