Korea has looked after body and mind in its own way for centuries. Monks once ran sweat kilns as clinics for the sick, the court physician Heo Jun wrote the Donguibogam, the great medical classic of the Joseon dynasty, and families still end a hard week together in the bathhouse.
This journey gathers those traditions at an unhurried pace: mornings in the mountains and forests, afternoons in heat and silence, evenings at a table where every dish has a purpose, and one day in Seoul given to a thorough look at your own health.
It suits every season. Winter is the most rewarding of all, when the kilns are at their warmest and the temples are quiet under snow.
The geomungo, a deep six string zither struck with a bamboo stick, and the gayageum, plucked and brighter, have been played in Korea for more than a thousand years. Korean court music is slow by design, its tempo tied to the breath of the listener, which makes it one of the most restful sounds there is.
Through Templestay, a national programme, Korea's working mountain temples open their gates to overnight guests. Arrive in the afternoon, walk the grounds as the light goes, and wake before dawn to the drum and the chanting of the morning service, followed by 108 bows, one for each of the 108 worldly troubles Buddhism names.
Breakfast is baru gongyang, the formal monastic meal, eaten in silence from four wooden bowls with nothing left behind. Later there is meditation, tea with a monk and the plant based food of Korean temple cuisine.
At Golgulsa in Gyeongju, beneath a cliff of Buddhas carved into the rock, the temple teaches seonmudo, a Korean Buddhist practice that joins breath, meditation and slow, deliberate movement. We arrange stays with a private interpreter throughout.
Long before the modern spa, Korea had the hanjeungmak: a stone dome heated by a pine wood fire, first recorded in the fifteenth century, when Buddhist monks ran them as clinics for the sick. A few traditional kilns are still fired by hand, and an afternoon inside one is unlike any sauna you have known.
Hanbang, Korean medicine, is practised alongside modern medicine in Korea by licensed doctors trained for six years. It reads the body as a whole and treats it with herbs, acupuncture and diet, following ideas set down in the Donguibogam in 1613, a work now on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
Korea treats its forests as medicine. The country runs national healing forests and trains certified forest healing instructors, who lead slow walks, breathing and rest among the trees, a practice Koreans call sanlim chiyu.
We take you to the quietest of them: the bamboo groves of Damyang, where the stalks rise above you and the air is cool even in summer, the planted cypress forest of Jangseong, and the mist forests on the slopes of Hallasan in Jeju.
Darye, the Korean way of tea, is quieter than its neighbours: no strict choreography, only care, warmth and attention to the guest. It grew up in the temples, and it still feels like a meditation.
We pour it where Korean tea began. In Hwagae, Hadong, tea has been grown on the slopes of Jirisan for about 1,200 years, in wild gardens the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization lists as a world agricultural heritage system. We pair it with a visit to the kilns of Gangjin, home of Goryeo celadon, and the green tea fields of Jeju.
Korea is known worldwide for the speed and depth of its preventive health screening, and many guests now plan a day in Seoul around a full executive checkup. The leading university hospitals run international health centres for exactly this, and we arrange the whole day around you.
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