The 31st Plum Festival was held for ten days in March this year in Plum Village on the Seomjin River in Gwangyang County, South Jeolla Province. The festival was held on the side of a mountain among blossoming plum flowers and traditional tile-roofed houses.
Travelers visited the festival to observe the beautiful flowers that are messengers of spring, as well as the wide, open views of the Seomjin River. The number of tourists who came exceeded one million during a single month.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, for its first three years, the festival was hosted by the owner of the 40-acre plum field, Hong Ssang-ri. Her father-in-law, who had earned his fortune in Japan, bought the field and planted chestnut trees and plum trees there.
In the late 1960s, Hong persuaded her father-in-law to dig up the chestnut trees and plant more plum trees. He accepted her suggestion. In the early 1970s when she was in her late twenties, she developed a life-threatening condition that requires surgery. As a result her husband and elder brother-in-law fell into debt and entered the mining industry.
To repay her husband’s debt, Hong ran the plum field with her children and sold goods as a peddler. In the 1990s, she started her own kimchi business, which was so successful that she fell in love with the work.
Her second son, who was attending high school, ran away one day and did not come home for a week. Realizing that it was more important for her to rear her child, she gave up all the peddling and just hung on to the plum farm.
She never forgot the instructions of the doctor who was in charge of her surgery. He advised her to eat plum-based foods and soybean paste consistently to live a long life. From then until now, she has developed more than 50 kinds of plum-based foods.
Thanks to her skill with food and her confidence, her fame has spread around the county. In 1991, parts of the popular television drama Heo Jun were filmed there, adding to the popularity of the village and Hong's farm.
In the courtyard of the house, Hong has hundreds of large jars containing soybean paste and plum extract. These are used as the main ingredients in the foods she makes., which are sold not only at the store on the farm but also at department stores around the country and online.
Hong is now 83-years-old, but during the festival, she led her workers to make and sell various dishes that used her soy bean paste and plum extract. As a result, her dishes were the food most preferred by tourists during the festival.
Source: Korea Times News
