Incheon

Incheon (인천) is the port city west of Seoul and the country's front door, since almost every international arrival lands at its airport on Yeongjong Island. Its own history is compressed into the old open-port quarter, where Japanese and Chinese banks and warehouses from the 1880s stand a few streets apart, and into the Chinatown next to them, the oldest in Korea and the birthplace of jajangmyeon. General MacArthur's amphibious landing here in September 1950 turned the Korean War, and the memorial hall above the harbour tells that story. Songdo, built from reclaimed mudflat, is a planned city of towers around a saltwater central park. Offshore the islands of Muui and Silmi have wide tidal beaches, and Ganghwa to the north holds Bronze Age dolmens.