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Shin Ye-eun in a still from The Secret Romantic Guesthouse.

K-drama The Secret Romantic Guesthouse: Shin Ye-eun leads breezy and undemanding period youth romance

  • Shin Ye-eun’s character runs a guest house where scholars sitting an exam for government jobs stay. One of them will almost certainly win her heart
  • In the meantime she must deal with thugs chasing a debt her late father owed, while a royal regent suspects one of her boarders is rightful heir to his throne

This article contains mild spoilers.

Fans of Sungkyungkwan Scandal may want to book themselves a stay at The Secret Romantic Guesthouse, a new Korean period romance series about attractive young scholars and their febrile emotions.

Leading the series is Shin Ye-eun, who recently headlined the Disney+ show Revenge of Others but is more well known to viewers as the teenage version of the vicious school bully Park Yeon-jin in the Netflix smash hit The Glory.
Shin’s co-stars, who all play young scholarly boarders, include Ryeo Un (Through the Darkness), Jung Gun-joo (Oh My Baby) and Kang Hoon (Little Women).

Shin is Yoon Dan-o, the vivacious young woman who runs the Garden of Flowers, the titular guest house which is open exclusively to young men seeking room and board while they prepare to take the demanding exams needed to land governmental posts.

Dan-o aggressively courts prospective boarders as they arrive in town, claiming that her inn has a distinguished record of guests going on to pass the difficult government exams. Rival innkeepers try to dissuade the young men with talk that her inn is haunted.

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In truth, neither of those claims is quite true, but Dan-o’s circumstances are nonetheless unique. She was born a noblewoman, which makes her current business pursuit highly unusual.

The establishment belonged to her father, who recently died, and it’s all she has to remember him by. She later admits that the only scholar to succeed in the exams who stayed in the house was her father.

There may or may not be a ghost on the premises, but the looming spectre of her father returns to haunt her when creditors barge into her inn, demanding payment of his 100 nyang debt; her boarders are charged only 3 nyang per month.

Ryeo Un as Kang San in a still from “The Secret Romantic Guesthouse”.

The thugs have been hired by Buyounggak, an influential local house of gisaeng (Korean courtesans) who hope to take over the inn for their own purposes.

Buyounggak bought a debt originally owed to Jang Tae-hwa (Oh Man-seok), a high-ranking officer of the royal court who had a deal with Dan-o’s father for his son to marry Dan-o’s elder sister.

The marriage never happened, as Dan-o’s sister fell ill; she remained in the annex of the Garden of Flowers, where she died, the only part of the inn that is off limits to guests. There is some kind of presence in the annex, which has led to rumours of it being haunted, but only time will tell whether these are well founded.

Jung Gun-joo asnJung Yoo-ha in a still from The Secret Romantic Guesthouse.

Being that it is a Korean period drama, The Secret Romantic Guesthouse must include some kind of palace intrigue. While it doesn’t feature prominently in the early episodes, the seeds are all there and the lives of Dan-o and the royal family will surely become enmeshed as this 18-episode series progresses.

The reigning regent in the story is Lee Chang (Hyun Woo), who is more interested in his private pleasures and carrying on his line than in matters of state.

The queen is pregnant but, based on the prophecies of various monks, all the signs point to a girl being born. Chang strikes down a blind soothsayer when he foretells that he will never father a male child.

Despite all these negative premonitions, the regent does wind up with a male heir. But given that a separate thread involves Dan-o and her boarders saving a kidnapped male child from Buyounggak, this birth appears highly suspicious.

Kang Hoon as Kim Shi-yeolin a still from The Secret Romantic Guesthouse.

Even more pressing is the matter of the Deposed Grand Heir Lee Seol, nicknamed Snowflake, who is rumoured to have returned to the capital disguised as a young scholar. Tae-hwa is charged with ferreting out this young man, who could pose a threat to the legitimacy of Lee Chang’s reign.

While we haven’t been made aware of who the real Lee Seol is, it is most likely one of Dan-o’s three young boarders; we can safely discount the eldest of the boarders, Yook Yook-ho (In Gyo-jin), who has been failing the exams for years and is too old to be the Grand Heir.

That leaves Kang San (Ryeo), Jung Yoo-ha (Jung) and Kim Shi-yeol (Kang). San is a stoic youth from out of town who carries a wooden sword which he is more than capable of handling. Yoo-ha is a true scholar, buried in his books and always at hand with a literary quote.

Finally there is Shi-yeol, the joker among the group who we first meet when he tries to duck out of paying his bill after a night with one of Buyounggak’s giseang.

Shin Ye-eun (front) as Yoon Dan-o in a still from The Secret Romantic Guesthouse.

Yoo-ha is already one of Dan-o’s boarders, while Shi-yeol winds up there as he escapes his creditors and San is tricked into staying there.

All three young men could be Lee Seol, and one of them will almost certainly be the man who claim Dan-o’s heart. Of the three, matinee idol San, who has already locked eyes with Dan-o in slow motion while catching her falling off a roof, seems the most likely to be both of those men.

Dan-o is particularly interested in finding Lee Seol, as doing so would give her a way to dig herself out of her debt.

Breezy and familiar, The Secret Romantic Guesthouse is comfort food that plays strictly to its core youth audience. It unabashedly recycles common tropes – but then again, a chunk of its audience was probably too young for Sungkyungkwan Scandal.

The Secret Romantic Guesthouse is streaming on Viu.

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