When Life Gives You Tangerines — Filming Locations & Real Places

After watching When Life Gives You Tangerines, there's this thing that happens.

You want to go to Jeju.

You want to see the sea Ae-sun and Gwan-sik walked along, that canola field.

Going in, I expected a quiet romance set in Jeju. What actually hooked me from episode one wasn't the romance — it was Ae-sun herself. The show doesn't soften how hard it was to be a sharp, defiant sixteen-year-old who'd rather write poems than study, in 1950s Jeju; it just shows you.

Ae-sun grows up poor with her mother Jeon Gwang-rye, a haenyeo diver, and loses her father to the Korean War — the era's wounds run deep through the family history. In the middle of all that, she builds a bond from childhood with the gruff but tender boy next door, Gwan-sik.

관덕정, 제주목 관아 - 드라마 속 옛 제주 풍경의 실제 촬영지 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

What stayed with me most was how the show handles time. The moment the actress playing young Ae-sun is replaced by an older actress mid-scene — that recasting itself becomes a piece of direction. Showing what years do to a person, and what they don't, through a changing face is genuinely striking.

Ae-sun and Gwan-sik marry and simply endure, leaning on each other through poverty and hard labor, day after day. Their story carries into the next generation through their three children — eldest daughter Geum-myeong, Eun-myeong, and Dong-myeong.

Grown up, Geum-myeong leaves Jeju in 1987 to study English literature at Seoul National University. Working a box-office job at the Gwangju Theater — nicknamed the 'Cannes Theater' — she crosses paths with Park Yeong-beom, the son of a government official, and starts a new relationship with Park Chung-seop, a sign painter at the same theater. Their very different backgrounds become one thread of the story.

And then the show returns to Ae-sun and Gwan-sik, now middle-aged and elderly, still living side by side. Raising and letting go of their children, growing old together through all of life's turns — I realized late that this, not the early romance, is the show's real center.

So I looked up the filming locations. Turns out it's more interesting than I expected.

월정리 해변, 제주 구좌읍 · Wikimedia Commons

That yellow canola field where the two of them stood — I just assumed it was Jeju. It was actually Gochang, in North Jeolla.

The village where they grew up isn't a real Jeju village either — the crew built the entire thing from scratch in Andong. Stone walls, houses, even a harbor, and they gradually changed the wallpaper and roofs as the story moved through the decades.

Here's the part that genuinely surprised me. The village Ae-sun and Gwan-sik lived in, 'Dodong-ri' — if you pull up a map in Jeju looking for it, it's not there. It never existed. It's a fictional place name the production made up on purpose, specifically so it wouldn't resemble any one real Jeju village too closely — like they wanted it to feel like anyone's hometown, not a specific place.

Some spots are the real deal, though. Gimnyeong Beach is still there, looking exactly like it does on screen.

At release, the show reportedly earned some of the highest ratings ever recorded for a Korean drama on sites like IMDb and Watcha Pedia. IU's own vocals on the OST track 'Midnight Walk' also drew significant attention after it aired.

So if you do make it to Jeju, maybe don't just hit the famous spots — try tracking down one or two of these and asking yourself, 'wait, was this the scene?' Though maybe the biggest twist of all is that most of the scenes that hit you hardest weren't shot in Jeju at all — they were shot in Andong and Gochang.