Two different origin stories are told to explain how Naju gomtang (a milky beef bone soup) became so well known. One traces it to a soup enjoyed by merchants and ordinary people at the region's traditional five-day markets. The other locates its origin during the Japanese colonial period, when Japan built the Takenaka canning factory in Naju to mass-produce canned beef for military supply purposes — a development widely credited with establishing a local food culture built around beef-based soups.
Behind the emergence of this food culture lies Naju's long-standing prosperity as a region in its own right. Najumok, established in 983 under King Seongjong of Goryeo, remained a stable administrative center for an extraordinary 913 years, and the vast Naju plain surrounding it fostered highly developed farming and livestock industries — at various points, the region's population ranked among the highest in the entire country. Add to this the flow of seafood and other goods arriving via Yeongsanpo, Korea's only inland port, and it's no surprise that the area was so prosperous that in 1470, prompted by a famine, Naju and several other counties across Jeolla province hosted what are regarded as Korea's very first regular markets (jangmun). It was on top of this long-standing material foundation that, through the specific historical accident of a colonial-era canning factory, today's Naju gomtang emerged. Today, the old Naju fortress town area is home to a cluster of gomtang restaurants — known collectively as Gomtang Street — some of them now run by the fourth generation of the same family, letting visitors trace roughly a century of this soup's history firsthand.