Today, five more tourists from Kazakhstan came to Insadong. Most of them are visiting South Korea from Almaty. As I greeted them and shared my experience of visiting Almaty—the birthplace of apples—they were thrilled. I can still vividly remember how amazed and fascinated I was when I first learned about the history of apples there.

The history of apples—which humans have eaten for nearly 10,000 years, and which spread from Central Asia to the rest of the world along the Silk Road—was fascinating in itself. There was once a special kind of apple that existed until the early 20th century, weighing a whopping 5 kg, but it is now said to be extinct. Until the 1970s, apples were considered rare in South Korea. Even now, apple-cultivation regions are gradually moving further north. To Koreans, apples used to be a precious fruit traditionally reserved for ancestral ritual tables.

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