Kaesong was the capital of Korea for nearly five centuries, long before Seoul, and the Koryo Songgyungwan is the best reminder of that age. The compound began in 992 as the Gukjagam, the national academy, in the Goryeo dynasty, which gave Korea its Western name, and it was turned into the Songgyungwan in the late fourteenth century. The present buildings, with their curved tile roofs, wooden pillars and ancient ginkgo and zelkova trees, mostly date from the seventeenth century, after the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, and the site is now a museum of the Koryo period, with celadon, metalwork and printing blocks on display. Kaesong's historic monuments and sites were inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2013.
The city lies on the southern edge of North Korea, only a few kilometres from the demilitarised zone, and its old centre has a quiet, provincial feel. The town has long been famous for ginseng, and its cooking is considered among the finest in Korea, with elaborate dishes of many small bowls. A few kilometres away, the Sonjuk Bridge records one of the most famous stories in Korean history, the murder of the loyalist scholar Jeong Mong-ju in 1392, shortly before the dynasty fell.
This is not a place you can simply ride to. From the south, the route passes Munsan, about twenty-four kilometres away in South Korea, but the border there is closed to ordinary traffic, and foreign visitors to North Korea can only travel on an organised tour, with official guides, fixed itineraries and no independent movement. Private motorcycles, rental bikes and independent riding are not possible, so treat this as a place to read about, or to visit only through an arranged and approved tour, if that ever becomes possible and appropriate for you.
For the landscape, Kaesong lies among low hills at the foot of the Songak mountain, with rice fields, orchards and small villages around the town. The seasons are sharply marked, with a hot, humid summer, a cold, dry winter and a golden autumn. If you want to see something of the Goryeo world from the south, the museums in Seoul, Gyeongju and Ganghwa Island tell much of the same story, and Ganghwa, reachable by an easy ride from Seoul, was the refuge of the court during the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century.