Hantan River
— — a river that cuts its own canyon through old lava.
Not only on a wall.
“A tributary of the Imjin that rises on the Pyonggang plateau in southern Kangwon and runs south across the demarcation line into the South. Most of its length lies along a sheet of Quaternary basalt left by eruptions from the Orisan and Geomulsan vents, and the river has spent the time since carving a slow gorge through the lava, leaving columnar walls and small inner falls. On the North side the river is largely unseen, threading the forested uplands. On the South side it has become the spine of a UNESCO Global Geopark.
Hantan River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Hantan rises in the highlands around Pyonggang County in southern Kangwon Province of North Korea, on a basalt plateau formed by Quaternary eruptions roughly half a million years ago. It flows about 130 kilometres south, crossing the Military Demarcation Line near Cheorwon and joining the Imjin River in Yeoncheon County, in Gyeonggi Province of South Korea. The Imjin then meets the Han at the Korean estuary above Ganghwa. The northern headwaters are inaccessible to outside visitors; almost everything published about the river's gorge concerns its South Korean reach.
The defining feature of the Hantan is its bed of columnar basalt. Lava from vents on the Orisan-Geomulsan line ponded along the ancestral river valley in the late Pleistocene, and the present-day Hantan has since cut a steep-walled gorge through it. The South Korean reach, including Jiktang Falls and the Sungeumdong basalt cliffs, was inscribed as the Hantangang UNESCO Global Geopark in 2020, the first river-based geopark on the Korean peninsula. The columns can reach more than twenty metres in height where the gorge is deepest.
Above the demarcation line the river runs through forested uplands with no public access, no roads on most maps, and no published flow gauges. The peninsula's division in 1953 cut the watershed in half, and the headwaters have been militarily restricted ever since. South of the line the river crosses the Civilian Control Zone in Cheorwon County, where access is permitted only with notice through ROK authorities. The result is one of the quieter rivers in East Asia, by accident rather than by design.