Jinju Namgang Yudeung Festival

Looking for cool events or cultural festivals to visit, I had stumbled across pictures from the Jinju Lantern Festival, and was immediately intrigued. It wasn’t too far away, and I started looking up information. Originally, the festival takes place in October, but due to Covid-19 it was delayed until December 2021. Information that was very hard to figure out if you can’t read Korean because there wasn’t a lot of news posted about it until later, so I may or may not have almost gone in October….

I went with a friend, and we decided to make an overnight trip since we wanted to stay later, as it is a lantern festival. So I booked an airbnb nearby and we bought our bus tickets the day of for an afternoon bus since there was a bit of a mix up and apparently there were fewer busses than we expected. Someone had told us there were busses every hour, and I had accidentally typed in the wrong city on the bus app so it wasn’t until we showed up at the bus station and saw only one morning bus that we realized that wasn’t the case. There was only one seat left for the only morning bus and since we weren’t in a rush we took the afternoon bus, and double checked the times for busses coming home.

Gwangju to Jinju is about a two hour bus ride, so it’s great if you want to take a nap or watch a movie or look at the countryside. The bus stops at one intercity bus stop in Jinju a few minutes before getting to the main bus terminal, which is a short taxi ride from the Jinjuseong Fortress where the festival takes place. 

Because of Covid, you need a vaccine pass (Korean or foreign) or a PCR test, and call in and do a temperature check before entering the fortress. Entrance is free, and they give you wristbands so you can exit and enter the premises without having to go through check in again. 

The sun sets early now (just after 5pm) so we got there early to see everything before it got dark, which I highly recommend. The golden hour was beautiful and seeing everything during daytime and watching the sun set over the city was one of my favorite parts. We walked over most of the fortress area before leaving to grab a bite to eat to wait for it to get dark and come back. 

If you go down to the river you can cross two bridges to see more light displays along the river and floating lantern displays on the river (2,000 KRW one-way) and you can look up at the fortress lit up. It was super pretty and we walked back to where we had been earlier that day and it was such a different experience once all the lights were on. The history behind it, from what I read, was during the 16th century the Korean military would communicate via floating lanterns to prevent Japanese from crossing the river, as well as contacting families during occupation. On the river, one bridge display is set up with military guards protecting the river and fortress and that was a really cool set up to see.

Night time was so pretty and they had a few events going on in the evening, but we ended up missing those because we didn’t see a time and it was over by the time we walked across (and walking around the whole area took a while.) Afterwards we went to a cafe and bakery across the street to warm up a bit, and called it a night. Overall it was a really fun experience and I’m really glad I got to go. They put in a lot of work, and I’m glad it didn’t get canceled like last year so we could still enjoy all the lanterns.

Info: 진주 남강유등축제

Dates: 12-04-2021 to 12-31-2021

Lighting Time:  17:00-23:00

Address: 626, Namgang-ro, Jinju-si, Gyeongsangnam-do

경상남도 진주시 남강로 626

Website: https://yudeung.com/