I'll admit something about this one upfront: Mr. Sunshine intimidated me a little as a topic, because it's widely considered the most ambitious production in this entire location series I've been writing. A nearly 40 billion won budget. A production crew that reportedly logged 40,000 kilometers of total travel between filming locations. A drama so cinematically shot that it was made in a 21:9 aspect ratio, the same ratio used for theatrical films, not the usual 16:9 of Korean television.
I haven't made the trip to Nonsan myself yet, and I want to be upfront about that rather than pretend otherwise. But the sheer scale of what this production built, and the fact that you can walk through most of it today, makes this one of the most rewarding location stories in Korean drama history to research properly.
Table of Contents
- The Premise — A Joseon-Born American Soldier Returns Home
- Why SBS Walked Away From This Project
- Filming Location: Sunshine Land in Nonsan
- Filming Location: Hagindang in Jeonju Hanok Village
- Filming Location: Gunsan's Sinheung-dong Japanese-Style Houses
- Scattered Across the Country — The Other Major Sites
- The Bakery PPL That Became a National Conversation
- Insider's Insight — Why This Became Kim Eun-sook's Best-Reviewed Work
- Real Talk — The Ratings Record It Quietly Set
- Planning Your Own Visit
- FAQ
- Final Thoughts
The Premise — A Joseon-Born American Soldier Returns Home
Mr. Sunshine follows Eugene Choi, a man born into slavery in late Joseon Korea who flees to America as a child, eventually becomes a U.S. Marine officer, and returns to his birth country during the turbulent final years of the Korean Empire. There, he falls for Go Ae-sin, a noblewoman secretly working as an independence fighter, while Korea's sovereignty crumbles around both of them under encroaching Japanese influence.
It's a sweeping historical romance, but it's also genuinely one of the more serious-minded treatments of this specific, painful period of Korean history that mainstream television has attempted, balancing personal melodrama against real political weight.
Why SBS Walked Away From This Project
Here's a production detail that doesn't get mentioned often enough. This show was originally slated for SBS, but the network reportedly walked away from the project after the projected cost per episode approached 1.5 billion won — though screenwriter Kim Eun-sook has stated in interviews that the per-episode budget figure wasn't actually fixed yet at that point and that no final cost had been calculated. Some industry speculation also pointed to friction between lead actor Lee Byung-hun and SBS's drama division as a contributing factor.
Worth Noting: Whatever the exact reason, tvN ultimately picked it up, and the gamble paid off in a way that reshaped how the network was perceived. The production had been in development since as far back as 2008, with Wentworth Miller — best known for Prison Break — originally considered for a role before the project eventually came together with its final cast.
Filming Location: Sunshine Land in Nonsan
This is the centerpiece of the entire production, and the one location I'd genuinely prioritize if you only visit one. The main filming set, officially called Sunshine Land, sits in Yeonmu-eup, Nonsan, in South Chungcheong Province, right next to the Republic of Korea Army Training Center.
The scale here is genuinely difficult to overstate. The set spans roughly 6,000 pyeong and includes five modern-style buildings, 19 traditional tile-roofed houses, four thatched-roof houses, and nine Japanese-colonial-style residences, all built to recreate the streetscape of early-1900s Hanseong (old Seoul) during Korea's opening to the West. It was developed as Korea's first public-private partnership drama theme park, co-funded by Nonsan City, which provided the land and infrastructure, alongside the drama's production companies.
Insider's Insight: What I find genuinely clever about this location is its proximity to the actual military training center next door — there are accounts of soldiers going through basic training nearby who could see the set from their marching routes between training stations, which is a strange, almost poetic coincidence given the drama's own military and wartime themes.
The site originally closed to visitors during filming for spoiler-protection reasons, then partially reopened starting in late October 2018 before fully opening to the public in November that year. Today it operates as Sunshine Studio, with an exhibition hall showing highlight footage and props, a café in a restored early electric company building, and a costume exhibition and rental space inside a recreated government building from the period.
Filming Location: Hagindang in Jeonju Hanok Village
Moving to Jeonju, the production used Hagindang, located inside Jeonju's famous Hanok Village, as the home of Kim Hee-seong, one of the drama's key supporting characters. Hagindang itself has a layered history worth knowing even outside its drama connection — it was originally built for Baek Nak-jung, a man honored by Emperor Gojong with a court title for his filial devotion, and the house's name derives from a character in his pen name meant to commemorate that same virtue after his death.
Honestly? What makes Hagindang such a fitting filming location is that it's architecturally significant in its own right, independent of the drama — it represents a transitional style where former royal court architectural elements got adopted into upper-class residential construction after the Joseon dynasty's collapse, which lines up almost too perfectly with the show's own themes about Korea's old order crumbling.
Filming Location: Gunsan's Sinheung-dong Japanese-Style Houses
Gunsan's Sinheung-dong neighborhood, known for its preserved Japanese-colonial-era residential architecture, served as a major filming location for the drama's Japanese consulate scenes. This neighborhood has become something of a go-to filming destination for any Korean production dealing with the Japanese colonial period, precisely because so much of the original architecture survives intact rather than needing to be recreated from scratch.
Scattered Across the Country — The Other Major Sites
This is where the production's full geographic scope becomes clear, and honestly a little exhausting to even list. Beyond the major sets already covered, filming took place at Unbo's House in Naesu-eup, Cheongju (serving as the American legation), Munhwa-gonggam Sujeong in Busan's Dong-gu (a tavern setting where a key assassination scene takes place), the Hanhakchon Korean studies village at Keimyung University's Seongseo Campus in Daegu (the school where Go Ae-sin learns English), Changheojeong pavilion at Haemi Eupseong fortress (where Go Ae-sin's aunt is shown practicing archery), and Cheoneunsa Temple in Gurye, which appears as the temple Go Ae-sin attends and where her parents' remains are enshrined.
Beyond these, the production also used sets and locations across Cheongju, Gokseong, Andong, and Hadong, plus large indoor studios including Studio Cube. Gosan-jeong pavilion in Andong specifically appears in a flashback during episode 2, where Eugene recalls hiding on a boat as a child while fleeing, and again in episode 9 during a scene of Eugene and Go Ae-sin standing at the same river crossing trying to cross a frozen river.
The Part Nobody Talks About: I think this almost absurd geographic spread is actually part of why the show reads as cinematic rather than televisual. Most Korean dramas concentrate filming in a handful of regions to manage logistics. This production deliberately refused to do that, and the visual variety shows in every episode.
The Bakery PPL That Became a National Conversation
I have to dedicate real space to this, because it's one of the most discussed product placement strategies in Korean television history, and it's genuinely clever in a way that's worth understanding even if you don't care about advertising.
Historical dramas were traditionally considered nearly impossible territory for product placement, since modern brand names obviously can't appear in a Joseon-era setting. Mr. Sunshine's solution was to disguise Paris Baguette, a real Korean bakery chain, as "Bullanshe Jebbangso" — a period-appropriate phonetic rendering using the old Korean term for France ("Bullanseo") rather than the modern brand name. The bakery's in-show logo even subtly echoed the Eiffel Tower for anyone paying close enough attention.
The show used this fictional bakery to introduce a "rainbow castella" cake and a shaved-ice dessert, explicitly timed to promote Paris Baguette's real seasonal products despite filming taking place in winter for what was meant to represent a summer scene. Following the show's airing, sales of the rainbow castella and honey castella roughly doubled compared to before, while the shaved-ice product saw about a 40% increase — modest by the standards of fashion and beauty PPL elsewhere in Korean drama, but enough that SPC Group, Paris Baguette's parent company, considered the campaign successful for raising product visibility even if it didn't dramatically move overall sales.
Real Talk: Industry estimates suggested securing main PPL placement in a Kim Eun-sook drama at that point in her career would have cost anywhere from several hundred million to several billion won, given her track record as a near-guaranteed ratings hit. Compare that to her earlier work Descendants of the Sun, where a lipstick shade worn by the female lead reportedly sold out within three days of airing and moved 160,000 units over the following month — a much more dramatic PPL outcome than what Mr. Sunshine's bakery campaign achieved, which says something about how fashion and beauty placements still outperform food placements even in a hit show.
Insider's Insight — Why This Became Kim Eun-sook's Best-Reviewed Work
Kim Eun-sook has a genuinely complicated reputation among Korean drama critics — her dialogue and plot devices are often described as cheesy or overly familiar across her body of work, including hits like Descendants of the Sun and Goblin. What sets Mr. Sunshine apart in critical conversations is that it's widely considered to directly address and improve upon criticisms leveled at her earlier work, rather than repeating the same patterns.
It earned the highest first-episode rating in tvN drama history at the time, a record that held until Hospital Playlist Season 2 eventually surpassed it, and remains the network's fifth highest-rated drama overall. What's even more telling is its long-tail performance — years after its original broadcast, the show experienced a notable resurgence and spent extended time in Netflix Korea's top 10, alongside Hospital Playlist, demonstrating staying power well beyond its initial broadcast window.
Real Talk — The Ratings Record It Quietly Set
The numbers here are worth sitting with for a moment. The series finale crossed a 20% rating in the greater Seoul metropolitan area specifically, an unusually strong number for a cable production competing against the entrenched dominance of terrestrial network dramas in Korea.
Been There: I think what's most striking, even just researching this from a distance, is how the show's reputation has only grown since 2018. A drama that performs well on original broadcast and then fades is common. A drama that quietly climbs back into a major streaming platform's top 10 years later, competing against an entirely new generation of content, is a much rarer thing.
Planning Your Own Visit
If you want to chase this one across the country, here's how I'd realistically sequence it. Sunshine Studio in Nonsan is the clear anchor point — it's about two and a half hours from Seoul by car, and it's the only location built specifically as a public attraction, so it's the most visitor-friendly stop by a wide margin.
Jeonju's Hagindang sits inside the Hanok Village, which means you can easily fold it into a broader Jeonju trip alongside the city's well-known street food and traditional architecture scene. Gunsan's Sinheung-dong is roughly 40 minutes from Jeonju by car, making the two an easy combined day or overnight trip.
The remaining locations — Andong, Gurye, Haemi, Daegu, Busan — are genuinely scattered and not realistic to chase in a single trip unless you're building an extended, dedicated tour specifically around this drama.
FAQ
Q: Can I actually visit the main Mr. Sunshine filming set?
A: Yes. It operates today as Sunshine Studio in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, open to the public since November 2018 with exhibition halls, a café, and costume displays.
Q: Why did Paris Baguette appear under a different name in the show?
A: Since the drama is set in early-1900s Korea, the real "Paris Baguette" brand name couldn't appear without breaking the period setting, so the show used a phonetically period-appropriate fictional name instead, while keeping recognizable branding cues.
Q: How big was the budget for Mr. Sunshine?
A: Reports cited a budget of roughly 40 billion won, an unusually high figure that contributed to SBS originally passing on the project before tvN picked it up.
Q: Was Mr. Sunshine a ratings success?
A: Yes. It set tvN's highest first-episode rating at the time and remains the network's fifth highest-rated drama, while also seeing a major resurgence on Netflix Korea years after its original broadcast.
Q: What time period does Mr. Sunshine depict?
A: It's set during the final years of the Korean Empire in the early 1900s, as Japanese colonial influence was expanding and Korea's sovereignty was collapsing.
Q: Is Hagindang in Jeonju open to visitors outside the drama connection?
A: Yes. It's a recognized traditional architectural site within Jeonju Hanok Village with its own historical significance tied to Korean filial-piety honors from the late Joseon period.
Final Thoughts
What stays with me most about this production, even without having walked the actual set yet myself, is the sheer commitment to scale. A 40,000-kilometer filming radius for a single television drama is the kind of number that sounds almost made up until you start tracing the actual location list and realize it checks out.
Have you made the trip out to Sunshine Studio, or is it on your list? I'd love to hear what the experience is actually like in person — let me know in the comments.
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