Samsugapsan (三水甲山) refers jointly to Samsu County and Gapsan County in Hamgyeong Province. It's often mistaken for somewhere scenic and misspelled as "sansu-gapsan" (sansu meaning "landscape"), but the true meaning is the opposite. Samsu, set along a tributary of the Yalu River, was the coldest place in Korea, with winter averages of minus 16 to 18 degrees Celsius. Gapsan sat in the heart of the Kaema Plateau, far from the sea and rife with endemic disease — rugged backcountry. Both were so cold, harsh, and hard to farm that almost no one lived there, which made them among the most notorious places of exile throughout the Joseon Dynasty. Once dragged off there, you could scarcely expect to return alive. And so the phrase "even if it means going to Samsugapsan" came to express a desperate resolve: to go through with something even at the cost of being cast into the harshest place imaginable.