Beyond the stigma: How Daerim-dong built a thriving Chinese community in the heart of Seoul

[About Town Global]: Daerim-dong

Korea is no longer the homogeneous nation it once was. The country saw a record high 2.16 million foreign residents as of 2025, accounting for more than four percent of the population. Many of them have found comfort in settling near one another, creating various ethnic enclaves in Korea that preserve culture and language from afar while settling in. In this "Global" edition, a spinoff of Korea JoongAng Daily's long-running "About Town" series, we talk to residents, business owners and passersby to explore the beginnings of these communities, their evolution and the ways they navigate life in modern Korea.

Walk out of Exit 12 of Daerim Station and within a block, Korean-language signs become a rarity. Travel agencies advertise Beijing and Yanji routes in Mandarin only, while supermarkets stack five-liter jugs of baijiu (Chinese liquor) next to vats of pickled mustard root.

This is Daerim-dong, Seoul’s representative Chinatown — the place you come to when you want to eat Chinese food that isn’t tailored to the Korean palate and where threads of Mandarin and Yanbian-accented Korean can be heard weaving together in conversations.

Of Daerim-dong’s roughly 45,000 residents, more than 60 percent are Korean Chinese or Chinese nationals — the highest density of any ethnic enclave in Korea, according to population data from the Seoul Metropolitan Government. The share of Chinese-language signage scattered around the area surrounding commercial streets is at 60 to 70 percent, according to sociolinguistic studies.

Unlike Incheon’s formally designated Chinatown, the Daerim neighborhood is not quite tailored to tourists nor did it start out that way. Rather, it organically formed out of an amalgamation of cheap rooms, day-labor markets, family migration and the everyday needs of Korean Chinese residents who decades ago began flowing into the area from neighboring industrial areas and China.

Most of Daerim's residents are Korean Chinese, known in Korean as Joseonjok and in Chinese as Chaoxianzu. Their ancestors crossed the Yalu and Tumen rivers into Manchuria beginning in the 1860s — first to escape famine, then by forced relocation from Gyeongsang and Jeolla under Japan's colonial rule in the 1930s. After Korea and China normalized relations in 1992, their descendants began returning to Korea for work.

Daerim-dong’s transformation into an informal "Chinatown" began not in the area itself but traces back to nearby Garibong-dong. In the mid-1960s, Garibong-dong filled up with workers from the southern provinces who came north to staff the new Guro Industrial Complex — Korea’s first export manufacturing district. They lived in beoljipchon (beehive houses), multi-family buildings whose rooms were partitioned, sometimes 30 to a floor, into single-occupancy cells. By the late 1980s, factories were relocating overseas and workers were thinning out.

“By the time the Korean Chinese started arriving in the mid-1990s, Garibong had been hollowed out for almost a decade,” said Kim Yong-pil, editor of a neighborhood news service centered on the Korean Chinese community in Seoul. “There was cheap housing, and right next door at Namguro Station there was a pre-dawn day-labor market — 5,000 construction workers a morning at its peak. That was the draw.”

The shift to Daerim came about in two policy-driven waves. The first was in 2003, when Seoul designated Garibong a redevelopment district, forcing its settled community to move next door. The second wave — in 2007, when Korea introduced the H-2 visit-and-employment visa — legalized low-skill work for ethnic Koreans abroad, thus allowing hundreds of thousands more to arrive safely and lawfully.

The years that followed were Daerim’s boom. Chinese capital flowed in and businesses targeting both the resident community and Chinese export trade proliferated. Now, though never officially designated as such, Daerim serves as Seoul’s distinctive Chinatown.

Rooted and growing

While the Chinatowns found in tourist destinations often flaunt flashy signboards, red-and-gold dragon gates and souvenir stalls, Daerim-dong remains a neighborhood deeply rooted in everyday life. On weekends, residents flock to a decades-old building carrying everything from secondhand clothes to antiques for an auction, while elderly men fill local parks, engrossed in games of janggi (Korean chess) and conversation.

"Older Korean Chinese expatriates often come to the park when they have nothing else to do during the day," said Shin Joong-woo, a longtime resident of Daerim.

Just blocks apart, the parks of Daerim 1-dong and Daerim 2-dong become the area's outdoor living room on weekday evenings, filling up almost entirely with locals who venture out to pass the time or in search of someone to spark up conversation with. The benches near the entrance are claimed first; the janggi and card tables sit further back, in the shade; older men in pressed shirts line the perimeter, watching the games.

"Playing cards, janggi and jegichagi (shuttlecock kicking) are part of their everyday culture, similar to what you see on the streets in Chinese cities."

That occasionally produces friction: "To some Koreans, our activities can seem unfamiliar or may resemble gambling, which leads to misunderstandings," Shin said. "But for the Chinese community here, it's an essential part of daily life."

In summer, the trees cast enough shade that the regulars stay until evening. Vendors sometimes set up at the edge with carts of sliced watermelon and skewered fruit. By the time the streetlights come on, the jegichagi players have packed up and the benches are mostly empty, but a few card games run on past dark.

Another neighborhood landmark, where the residents gather for auctions, is Sun Plaza, a 15-minute walk from Daerim Station. The building is a three-story commercial building that was completed in 1982, originally called "The House of the Sun," and designed by renowned architect Kim Chung-up — the only commercial building Kim ever designed. Kim studied for three years at Le Corbusier's atelier in Paris in the 1950s before returning to design Korea's tallest building of the 1970s, the 31 Building in Jongno District, central Seoul.

Kim gave Sun Plaza his signature vocabulary, with curved surfaces, ramps, circular motifs and rough-textured red brick, chosen, in his own words, "to create organic texture" rather than smooth walls. The building is now registered in Yeongdeungpo District's architectural heritage records, but it operates less as a monument than as a place residents actually use. Inside, shops, arcades and a sauna take up the three floors; on the rooftop, the rusted remnants of a mini-amusement park — battered toy trains that once ran on 500 won (33 cent) coins — sit scattered across the concrete.

"It was well known in my parents' generation, and I know it was built by a famous architect," said Lee Jin-hee, a resident of Daerim. "To me it's still a meaningful building. It's part of what makes Daerim not just any neighborhood."

The most local, the most authentic

Facilities that cater to residents' everyday needs help create some of the neighborhood's most authentic scenes.

Its market was originally established to serve the influx of workers who settled nearby when the Guro Industrial Complex was at its peak in the 1970s. Its character gradually changed with the arrival of Korean Chinese immigrants, and today its stalls remain lined with Chinese goods, from Sichuan peppercorns served by the kilogram to dried lily buds and goji berries bound in clear plastic bags.

“The market offers a truly diverse arrays of foods and stepping inside it feels a bit like being in China,” said Yu Min-hee, a Korean Chinese resident. “If you’re craving food from your hometown or miss the dishes you used to eat in China, you can fully indulge in Daerim. I think this is a place that can help ease that longing to some extent when you’re feeling homesick.”

Bokmanlu, one of Daerim's best-known Chinese restaurants whose second branch is located inside Daerim Central Market, draws a steady stream of visitors seeking an authentic taste of Chinese cuisine. Yet the restaurant remains, above all, a community hub, with its banquet halls regularly hosting weddings, birthday celebrations and other family gatherings for local Chinese residents.

“When I started, there were almost no Chinese restaurants here,” the owner, Lee Ryeo, said. “We started out as an eatery to cater to the Chinese-descent population in Daerim, then we started seeing more business as the years passed.”

A stretch of road running from Exit 12 of Daerim Station to Daerim Central Market is commonly known as "Chinese signage street" due to a dense concentration of storefronts bearing Chinese characters for PC rooms, labeled as wangba (internet cafes). Remittance shops let people send money to relatives still in Heilongjiang or Jilin. Herbal medicine shops sell the kinds of remedies expatriates would buy in any northeastern Chinese town.

Lee Jin-hee, who is third-generation Korean Chinese — her grandfather migrated to Korea, her parents lived in Garibong, and she now lives in Daerim and commutes to work in Guro — said the layered sounds of the street is what keeps her here.

“When I come out of Exit 12 and hear Korean and Chinese and Yanbian dialect mixed together, I feel relaxed,” she said. “It feels like home in a way the rest of Seoul doesn’t. I work in Guro, so I could live anywhere along that line. But I live here because it feels closest to who I identify myself as: both Korean and Chinese.”

Finding a sense of belonging

Behind Myongji St. Mary’s Hospital in Daerim sits the Dadeurim Cultural Center, opened on March 2018 and operated directly by the Yeongdeungpo District Office. The programs offered here are bilingual where necessary, spanning five levels of Korean language instruction, after-school math, and Mandarin. The facility also hosts cooking classes, traditional crafts, and music programs like samulnori (percussion) and Nanta, alongside biweekly legal counseling sessions.

“There are a lot of programs for Korean Chinese kids at the center,” Lee said. “It’s part of why I think of Daerim as home — not just because my parents lived in Garibong and we eventually moved here, but because the neighborhood is set up for kids like me to feel like we belong.”

“The Dadeurim Cultural Center is effectively an after-school program run by the district office,” Kim Yong-pil, said. “Music education, language classes for kids who don’t speak Korean well. It serves as one of the core community centers in Daerim.”

With the concentration of Korean Chinese populations in Daerim, centers such as the Dadeurim Cultural Center and community organizations provide much of the services needed for newly settled foreigners or older-generation Korean Chinese to navigate bureaucratic difficulties or emergencies.

In January this year, seven Korean Chinese organizations formally united under a single umbrella council at the National Assembly building in Yeouido — the first time the community has had a unified institutional voice.

“We’ve tried to expand our activities from volunteering for the local community to fundraising for supporting the programs at the center and helping community elders in need,” said Kim Ho-rim, a longtime resident of the neighborhood and chairman of the Nationwide Association of Chinese Koreans, based in Daerim.

For a better future

The community didn't always have such a voice. Through much of the 2010s, Daerim's reputation in the wider Korean public was shaped largely by films and headlines. "The Yellow Sea" (2010) had set the template of prejudice with its Yanji-based criminal underworld. In 2017, two months apart, "Midnight Runners" and "The Outlaws" both placed Korean Chinese gangs at the center of their plots; "Midnight Runners" in particular cast Daerim as a knife-attack zone.

"Whenever films like those came out, the community felt cornered," Kim Yong-pil, the editor of a community newspaper based in Daerim, said. "Korean Chinese had no voice in the public conversation. The films just kept making Korean Chinese into the villains."

The community's response to "Midnight Runners" was the moment that brought on change. After a pastor flagged the film, Kim himself wrote the early articles that organized a response committee. Various federations followed up with statements, protests at Daerim Station and a 62-plaintiff suit against the production company. In June 2020, the Seoul High Court issued a mediation order requiring the production company to apologize — the first such ruling in Korean judicial history concerning the prejudicial portrayal of a migrant community.

The community had also been working on the more mundane sources of the neighborhood's bad reputation. The federations and a women's committee organized regular cleanups of the streets and the market.

"The biggest misunderstanding people have about Daerim is that it's dirty and scary," Lee Ryeo, the Bokmanlu owner, said, "that you can't walk here at night, that kind of thing. It just isn't true."

What the community now wants is recognition. In 2009, an attempt by the city to formally designate Daerim a Chinatown was defeated by Korean property owners who feared falling values. Seventeen years later, with federations now united under one umbrella council, the push for designation is back on the agenda.

"The neighborhood surrounding Konkuk University's officially recognized Lamb Skewer Street gets the attention because the city named it," Yu said. "Daerim is bigger and we've been here longer, and we still don't get that."

An official designation as a Chinatown and fighting the prejudice that comes from media are both longstanding tasks; in the meanwhile, the Korean Chinese populations in Daerim continue gathering to the area.

"Even if I ever leave Daerim, I think I'll come back every week like so many people I know do," said Lee Jin-hee. "We've got to stick to a feeling of home wherever we are. That's what Daerim does for us."

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]