Seoul for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

The apothecary's cabinets and scales of the Joseon dispensary Bojewon, and a pharmacopoeia of dried snakes, deer antler and cordyceps, before the museum closes.

Seventy percent of the country's traditional medicine passes through these streets; the air is liquorice and angelica, and clinics still write prescriptions by hand.

A whole chicken boiled in a dented cauldron at the table, in an unlit alley of rival grandmothers behind the fabric market.

Tongmungwan, the oldest bookshop in Korea since 1934, then the calligraphy suppliers of the side lanes where brushes are still tied from weasel and goat hair.

Buy brass coins at the stall, fill a lunch tray from the ajummas' counters, with tteokbokki fried in soy oil and sesame leaves, and eat upstairs with the market workers.

The Korea Craft and Design Foundation's studio: beat mulberry fibre, pull a sheet of hanji and dye it with persimmon under a craftsman who makes paper for the palaces.

The national shaman shrine, moved here from Namsan in 1925, and the eroded Zen rocks above it where women still leave rice and candles at dawn.

Steam rice, break nuruk starter and set your own jar of makgeolli to ferment while tasting the small-batch brews reviving the unfiltered rice wine.

Pork skirt steak and ribs over charcoal at the counter of the galmaegisal house the market porters and taxi drivers use, with eggs cooking in the grill's rim.

The oldest market in Seoul: kitchenware alleys, camera dealers, ginseng sellers and the wholesalers who load the Jongno shops before dawn.

A hanok devoted to maedeup, the decorative knots that hung from scholars' belts and court tassels, with the maker's workbench and silk thread still in use.

Gomtang only, a clear ox-bone soup served since 1939 and sold out by mid-afternoon, with cubes of radish kimchi to crack across it.