This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we finish our four-part King Jeongjo series in the place where his personal history became a physical landscape: Suwon Hwaseong. It began with the memory of his father Crown Prince Sado, grew into a new city built with scholars, soldiers, craftsmen and new technology, and became the stage for Jeongjo’s extraordinary 1795 journey with his mother Lady Hyegyeong. And the timing is perfect — because this weekend, that journey comes back to life at the 2026 Suwon Hwaseong Cultural Festival.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we leave King Jeongjo’s private life and look at how he actually governed. Jeongjo had ambitious ideas, but being king did not automatically give him loyal officials, trusted soldiers, or the power to change old economic privileges, so he built institutions to do it. From 규장각 and 초계문신 to 장용영 and 신해통공, today we look at the machinery behind the reform king.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we leave King Jeongjo’s private life and look at how he actually governed. Jeongjo had ambitious ideas, but being king did not automatically give him loyal officials, trusted soldiers, or the power to change old economic privileges, so he built institutions to do it. From 규장각 and 초계문신 to 장용영 and 신해통공, today we look at the machinery behind the reform king.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we begin our new history and folklore chapter with King Jeongjo — not as a distant textbook figure, but as a prince shaped by family trauma, palace pressure, and survival. Through Lee Joon-ik’s film The Throne / 사도, we’ll look at Yeongjo as the ultimate “tiger parent king,” Sado as the son who broke under impossible expectations, and Jeongjo as the child who survived by becoming almost painfully disciplined. Before Jeongjo became the reforming king of Joseon, he first had to survive being Yi San.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we close one chapter and prepare for the next with our final classic travel segment before next week’s renewal into Korean history, folk history, and lore. Our listener survey answers traveled a little farther than expected – from Canada to Uganda to Japan, and even back to our Sky Castle episode – reminding us that travel is really about memory, mood, and story. So today, we bring that idea home to Korea with three destinations: Jongno for Memory, Yangpyeong’s Dumulmeori for Mood, and Seochon for Story.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we’re going back to school: new semester, new notebooks, same old anxiety. We’ll look at Korea’s latest school debates, from phone bans and AI textbooks to hagwon pressure and “friendflation,” then visit two very different school stories: the teacher drama Black Dog and the wonderfully strange indie film 막걸리가 알려줄 거야. Finally, we’ll head to Sinchon, Seoul’s classic student neighborhood, for campus nostalgia, cheap eats, and the legendary Doksuri Dabang.

This week on Arirang Travel Diaries, we return to the KOSPI chart — because apparently the market heard our July episode and chose violence. On July 16, we talked about KOSPI fever: AI, semiconductors, retail investors, leverage, FOMO, and the emotional life of Korean “ants.” But just two weeks later, the market gave us a historic roller coaster: a brutal late-July selloff, a shocking rebound on July 31, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix surging nearly 30%, and investors asking whether this was 시황–market analysis or 신앙–market faith.

On this week’s Arirang Travel Diaries, we honor Liberation Day in Korea—Gwangbokjeol—the day light was restored after the period of Japanese colonial rule. But today, our core theme is resistance. We remember not only the moment of liberation in 1945, but the decades-long resistance of Koreans who refused to fade away: those who organized, fought, wrote, taught, and marched. Afterwards, we’ll dive into two films that capture the essence of resistance, and finish with a guide to key sites and events you can visit yourself this week.