After taking a bow and making an offering of fruit and a dried fish, Ryh Jae-hong tosses a cup of alcohol towards the thick barbed-wire fence that protects South Korea's Gyodong Island from North Korea.

South Koreans perform this funeral ritual during the autumn harvest festival Chuseok at altars erected along the border to honour ancestors who remained in the North.

Just two kilometres (1.2 miles) from the Manghyangdae altar, on the northern tip of Gyodong, farmers work the land beneath red flags and a slogan in giant letters on a nearby hilltop reads: "Long live socialism!"

"They are there, I just hope they are doing well," said Ryh, whose father fled south at the end of the Korean War in the 1950s, but whose grandmother and other relatives stayed behind and have not been heard from since.

Gyodong Island, which sits at the mouth of the Han river, welcomed thousands of displaced people during the war.

Many crossed the water in small boats to Gyodong or swam across when Chinese forces -- allied........

© International Business Times