Korean history begins with a myth and an archaeological reality that run side by side. The myth is that of Dangun, son of a god and of a bear turned into a woman, who according to tradition founded Gojoseon —'Old Joseon'— in 2333 BC. The reality is that in the Taedong River basin, in the north of the peninsula and southern Manchuria, the first Korean state took shape around the first millennium BC, a Bronze Age and later Iron Age society that traded and fought with the neighbouring Chinese kingdoms. In 108 BC, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty conquered Gojoseon and set up Chinese commanderies on its territory, among them Lelang, which lasted for centuries.
From the ruins of that world, around the turn of the era, three kingdoms emerged that would share the peninsula for almost seven hundred years. Goguryeo, the largest and most warlike, stretched across the north and Manchuria and held back Chinese armies time and again. Baekje, in the southwest, was a refined maritime kingdom that carried Buddhism and Chinese writing to Japan. Silla, in the southeast, cornered at first, developed a solid monarchy and a rigid aristocratic order, the 'sacred bone' and 'true bone' system that reserved the throne and high office for the nobility of blood.
The three kingdoms shared certain traits: centralised monarchies, powerful aristocracies, the adoption of Buddhism as state religion from the 4th century onwards, and the use of Chinese characters. But they fought one another relentlessly. That unstable balance would break in the 7th century, when Silla chose to ally itself with the superpower of the day —Tang China— to finish off its rivals.
In 660, the combined forces of Silla and the Tang dynasty crushed Baekje; in 668 Goguryeo fell. For the first time, most of the peninsula was under a single power: Silla. But victory brought an immediate problem, because the Tang meant to keep the conquered territory for themselves. Silla went to war against its own allies and, by around 676, managed to push them back north of the Taedong River. That standoff against the largest empire in Asia is one of the founding moments of Korean consciousness.
So was born what is known as Unified Silla (668-935), which ushered in nearly two and a half centuries of cultural splendour. Its capital, Gyeongju, became one of the largest cities in the world, with streets laid out on a grid, Buddhist temples and palaces. From this period come Bulguksa Temple and the Seokguram Grotto, high points of Korean Buddhist art and now World Heritage Sites. To the north, in the old lands of Goguryeo, another kingdom arose, Balhae, which many Korean historians consider part of their heritage: that is why the period is sometimes called the era of the 'Northern and Southern States'.
Over time, the rigidity of the aristocratic system and the struggles over the throne weakened Silla. In the 9th century central power collapsed, regional warlords rose up and kingdoms evoking the old Baekje and Goguryeo were briefly re-established. Out of that chaos, known as the Later Three Kingdoms period, a new unifier would emerge.
In 918, a general named Wang Geon founded a new kingdom, and in 935 he completed the reunification of the peninsula when the last king of Silla surrendered to him. His dynasty, Goryeo (918-1392), gave Korea the name the West knows it by: 'Korea' comes from 'Goryeo'. It set up its capital in Kaesong and built a centralised state with a Chinese-style examination system to recruit officials, although the hereditary aristocracy still carried a lot of weight.
Goryeo was a brilliant civilisation. Buddhism reached its peak as state religion and funded temples, pagodas and a monumental work: the Tripitaka Koreana, the complete Buddhist canon carved into more than 80.000 wooden blocks, kept at Haeinsa Temple and considered the most accurate version in existence. Goryeo potters created jade-green glazed celadon, one of the most admired ceramics in Asia. And it was here, in the 13th century, that printing with movable metal type took place —the 'Jikji', from 1377, is the oldest surviving book printed with that technique, predating Gutenberg.
But Goryeo also suffered. In the 12th century power fell into the hands of military dictatorships. And from 1231 onwards, the Mongols invaded the peninsula again and again for almost thirty years, causing enormous devastation; the court took refuge on Ganghwa Island while the countryside was laid waste. Goryeo ended up subjugated as a vassal state of the Mongol Yuan empire for almost a century. When Mongol power collapsed in the 14th century, the dynasty was left exhausted and divided, and an ambitious general saw his chance.
In 1392, General Yi Seong-gye staged a coup, overthrew Goryeo and founded a new dynasty he called Joseon, in tribute to the ancient founding kingdom. He moved the capital to Hanyang —present-day Seoul— and adopted Neo-Confucianism as the official ideology, a doctrine that ordered all of society into strict hierarchies: king over subject, father over son, man over woman. The Joseon dynasty would reign for more than five centuries, from 1392 to 1897 (and until 1910 as the Korean Empire), one of the longest-lived monarchies in history.
Its most luminous figure was King Sejong the Great (reigned 1418 to 1450), under whose rule science, astronomy and the arts flourished. His most enduring work was hangul, the Korean alphabet, promulgated in 1443. Until then only the elite could read and write, because the extremely complex Chinese characters were used. Sejong commissioned a group of scholars to create a simple phonetic system of just twenty-eight letters designed to represent the actual sounds of the language; its consonants imitate the shape the mouth takes when pronouncing them. It is one of the few alphabets in the world for which we know exactly who created it, when and why, and today it is studied as a masterpiece of linguistics.
The literate elite, the 'yangban', distrusted hangul and kept writing in Chinese for centuries; the new alphabet was relegated to women, ordinary people and popular literature, and did not fully take hold until the 20th century. Even so, Joseon consolidated a strong, Confucian and centralised Korean identity that would define the country until the modern era.
Joseon's golden age ended abruptly in 1592, when the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who dreamed of conquering Ming China, launched a colossal invasion of Korea as a first step. An initial force of more than 24.000 men landed at Busan in the spring of 1592, and within a few weeks the Japanese army swept aside the Korean defences and took Seoul and Pyongyang. That war —known as the Imjin War— was brutal: massacres, the deportation of craftsmen and potters to Japan, and a destruction of heritage from which Korea took generations to recover.
The resistance had a naval hero who became a legend: Admiral Yi Sun-sin. With a fleet that was smaller but better organised, and with the famous 'turtle ships' (geobukseon), armoured and bristling with cannons, Yi cut the Japanese supply lines and won battle after battle. Tradition credits him with never losing a naval engagement in more than twenty encounters; his most cited victory, at Myeongnyang in 1597, was won with just thirteen ships against a far larger Japanese fleet. With help from Ming Chinese troops and volunteer peasant militias, and after Hideyoshi's death, the Japanese withdrew in 1598. Yi died in the last battle, at Noryang.
Barely recovered from that war, Korea suffered two more invasions, this time from the north: those of the Manchus, who were founding the Qing dynasty in China. In 1627 and above all in 1636, their armies devastated the peninsula; King Injo ended up humiliated, forced to kneel before the Manchu emperor and accept submission to the Qing. Traumatised, Joseon turned inward, closed its borders to foreigners and earned the nickname 'the hermit kingdom', a policy of isolation that would last more than two centuries.
During the 19th century, as the Western powers forced East Asia open, Joseon clung to its isolation. The regent Heungseon Daewongun persecuted Christianity and drove off with cannon fire the French and American fleets that tried to open the country. But the pressure was irresistible. In 1876, an already modernised Japan imposed the Treaty of Ganghwa on Korea, the first of a series of unequal agreements that opened its ports and eroded its sovereignty.
The countryside, squeezed by abusive taxes and corrupt officials, exploded. In 1894 the Donghak Peasant Revolution broke out, an uprising born in Jeolla that mixed social demands with a new home-grown religion. The peasants even took Jeonju, and the government, unable to contain them, asked China for help; Japan used that pretext to send in its own troops. The result was the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), which Japan won, and the crushing of the revolt, which left more than ten thousand peasants dead.
In the years that followed, Korea fell further into Japan's orbit. In 1895 Queen Myeongseong (Queen Min) was murdered by Japanese agents in her own palace. In 1897 King Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire in a belated attempt to assert independence. It was no use: after also defeating Russia in 1905, Japan made Korea its protectorate and, on 22 August 1910, formally annexed it. Five centuries of the Joseon dynasty ended under a foreign flag.
The thirty-five years of Japanese colonial rule left a scar that still marks relations between Korea and Japan. The colonial regime set out, especially in its final phase, to erase Korean identity: it banned the teaching of the Korean language and history, forced millions of people to adopt Japanese names, imposed Shinto worship and treated Koreans as second-class subjects. Economically it modernised infrastructure —railways, factories, ports—, but in the service of the metropole: Korean land and rice fed Japan while many farmers lost their property.
Resistance was constant. On 1 March 1919, shortly after the death of the former emperor Gojong, a Declaration of Independence was read out in Seoul and a peaceful protest movement broke out and spread across the whole country: the March First Movement, in which nearly two million people took part. The Japanese crackdown was ferocious. According to Korean estimates, it left around 7.500 dead, 16.000 wounded and some 47.000 arrested; the exact figures are disputed, but the brutality is not. From that movement a Korean government in exile was born, based in Shanghai.
The darkest chapter came with the war. During Japan's military expansion and the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were sent to forced labour in mines and factories, and tens of thousands of women —Korean and from other Asian countries— were forced into sexual slavery in the Japanese army's military brothels, the women euphemistically called 'comfort women'. The exact number and the nature of the coercion remain the subject of tense historiographical and diplomatic debate, but the consensus among historians is that it was a system organised by the Japanese state. Liberation came on 15 August 1945, with Japan's surrender. Koreans celebrated; they did not know that liberation would bring, almost immediately, division.
The division of Korea was not decided by Koreans. In August 1945, with Japan defeated, two American officers drew a line on a map, almost in a hurry, along the 38th parallel to split the occupation with the Soviet Union: the Soviets would administer the north; the Americans, the south. What was meant to be a temporary measure froze into place with the Cold War. In 1948 two rival states were proclaimed: the Republic of Korea in the south, under Syngman Rhee, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, under Kim Il-sung.
On 25 June 1950, the North Korean army, armed and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the south. Within a few weeks it occupied almost the entire peninsula; only a pocket around Busan held out, the 'Pusan Perimeter'. A UN force led by the United States turned the tide with the Incheon landing in September and advanced north, until the massive entry of Chinese troops in the winter of 1950 pushed the front back south again. The war then stalled for two years around the 38th parallel, in a slaughter of trenches and bombing.
On 27 July 1953 an armistice was signed —not a peace treaty— which established a Demilitarised Zone along the front line, more or less where it had all begun. The toll was devastating: around a million military casualties and at least as many civilian deaths, families separated on both sides of the border, and a country in ruins. Korea remained split in two, and technically it still is today: peace was never signed.
Post-war South Korea was a dictatorship for decades. In 1961, General Park Chung-hee seized power in a military coup and ruled with an iron fist until 1979, when he was assassinated by his own intelligence chief. Park drove the country's economic take-off, but harshly repressed the opposition, the unions and the press. His death opened a brief window of democratic hope that another general, Chun Doo-hwan, set about crushing with a new coup between December 1979 and May 1980.
Resistance to that coup was centred on Gwangju, in the southwest. On 18 May 1980, students protesting against martial law were attacked with extreme violence by elite troops. Far from being intimidated, the whole city rose up: for a few days, armed citizens managed to drive out the army and run Gwangju themselves, until on 27 May the troops retook it by force. The official count of 1995 acknowledged 193 dead (166 civilians, 23 soldiers and 4 police officers), but many researchers maintain that the real figure was considerably higher, because the regime hid records; much of the historiography puts it above a thousand. The debate over the figures remains open, but the fact is clear: it was a massacre of civilians at the hands of their own state.
For years, the dictatorship portrayed Gwangju as a communist revolt. The truth gradually prevailed and the uprising became the symbol of Korea's democratic struggle. Popular pressure culminated in June 1987 in huge protests that forced the regime to accept direct presidential elections. In 1997, Kim Dae-jung —an opposition figure from Jeolla who had been sentenced to death after Gwangju— won the presidency: the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition. UNESCO inscribed the archives of the Gwangju Uprising on its Memory of the World register.
When the war ended in 1953, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, its industry destroyed and its economy dependent on foreign aid. Three decades later it had become an industrial power. That dizzying transformation is known as 'the miracle on the Han River', after the river that runs through Seoul, the heart of that take-off. The expression became popular in the early sixties and describes the leap from a devastated agrarian country to an industrialised, export-driven economy.
The engine was the five-year plans of Park Chung-hee's regime, which channelled credit and national effort into heavy industry, shipbuilding, steel, chemicals and later electronics. The state allied itself with large family-run conglomerates, the 'chaebol' —Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Daewoo—, which grew under the protection of those in power and are now global giants. Millions of farmers moved to the cities and worked extremely long hours for low wages; the growth was real and spectacular, but it rested on enormous sacrifices and on political repression that stifled labour demands.
In 1988, Seoul hosted the Olympic Games, the country's coming-out party before the world. In 1996, South Korea joined the OECD, the club of developed economies. The 1997 Asian financial crisis hit hard and forced an IMF bailout and deep reforms, but the country recovered quickly. Today South Korea has one of the largest economies on the planet, leads sectors such as semiconductors, mobile phones and shipbuilding, and boasts one of the most connected and best-educated populations in the world.
From the 1990s onwards, South Korea also became a cultural superpower. The phenomenon has a name: 'hallyu', the 'Korean wave', the global boom in interest in its popular culture. It began with the K-dramas and pop music that first swept across Asia and, with the arrival of the internet and streaming platforms, went on to conquer the whole world. The country's opening to cultural imports in 1998 and heavy public and private investment in the creative industries paved the way for that expansion.
The milestones piled up in just a few years: K-pop, with groups such as BTS and Blackpink filling stadiums on every continent; cinema, crowned in 2019 with the Oscar for best picture for Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite', the first non-English-language film to win it; and streaming series such as 'Squid Game' (2021), one of the biggest hits in Netflix history. Add to that the food, cosmetics —'K-beauty'— and video games. Culture also became an instrument of soft power and a first-rate export industry.
Contemporary Korea, however, is no fairy tale. It is a vigorous democracy —as it showed in 2016-2017, when massive, peaceful protests led to the removal of President Park Geun-hye for corruption— but also a society under strain: the pressure at school and at work is enormous, inequality and housing prices are a worry, and the country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, a deep-rooted demographic problem. And above all it is still split in two: to the north, just a few kilometres from Seoul, the most militarised border on the planet is a reminder that the war never fully ended. That is Korea today: rich, creative, democratic and still divided.
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Jeju, Korea's largest island, had a history apart from the peninsula for centuries. According to the founding legend, three demigods emerged from holes in the ground (the Samseonghyeol site in Jeju City is still revered) and the island's people descended from them. What is certain is that Jeju was for a long time an independent kingdom called Tamna, with its own language, customs and kings.
Tamna traded by sea with the peninsula, China and Japan, and stayed autonomous until 938, when it became a tributary state of the Goryeo dynasty, which over time absorbed it completely. In the 13th century, after the Mongol invasion, Jeju spent almost a century as a huge horse-breeding ground for the Yuan empire. The famous Jeju horses and the island's riding culture date from that time. Its isolation and mild climate, so different from the rest of Korea, shaped a strong island identity, with its own dialect that is now in danger of disappearing.
Under the Joseon dynasty, Jeju's remoteness made it the place of exile above all others. Surrounded by sea and hard to reach, it was where the court sent those who had fallen from favour: purged officials, rival princes, scholars who had lost out in factional struggles. For a Seoul scholar, exile to Jeju was like being sent to the end of the world.
The most famous of these exiles was Kim Jeong-hui (Chusa), one of the great calligraphers and scholars of 19th-century Korea, who spent almost nine years banished on the island. There, in solitude, he perfected his calligraphic style, the 'chusache', and painted one of the masterpieces of Korean painting, the 'Sehando'. The memory of those exiles left Jeju with a scholarly layer that lived alongside the hard lives of local fishermen and farmers, for whom the island was not a punishment but their home and their living.
One of Jeju's most powerful symbols is the haenyeo, divers who go down without oxygen tanks to gather abalone, sea urchins, octopus and seaweed from the seabed. They dive to about ten or twenty metres and hold their breath for one or two minutes per dive, using a whistling exhalation technique called 'sumbisori', and they work for hours even in cold water. It is one of the most unusual traditions in Asia.
There is a concrete historical reason behind it. At first both men and women dived, but under the Joseon dynasty the abalone tribute the court demanded from male divers became so heavy that men gradually gave up the trade, leaving it to the women, whose work was taxed less. Over time the haenyeo became the breadwinners of many families and a figure of strong female independence, organised in communities that managed the sea's resources sustainably. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed their culture on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Few remain today, most of them elderly, and their craft risks disappearing with them.
The most painful episode in Jeju's history took place in 1948 and 1949, against the backdrop of Korea's division and the start of the Cold War. On 3 April 1948 (hence the name '4·3'), a group of left-wing insurgents took up arms to protest against elections that would cement the country's division, and against police brutality. The response from the government and the security forces, backed by the US command, was extremely violent repression that went on for months.
The figures are chilling and are still debated. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented 14.373 victims, but estimates that the total may have reached around 30.000 people killed, roughly ten per cent of the island's population. According to its data, about 86 per cent died at the hands of the security forces. Close to 70 per cent of the island's villages were burned and tens of thousands of people fled, many of them to Japan. For almost fifty years, talking about 4·3 was taboo and could land you in prison under the authoritarian regimes. Only in 2003 did the government officially acknowledge what happened and apologise, and today a peace park honours the victims. It is one of the deepest wounds in modern Korean history, kept under an enforced silence for decades.
Jeju is, above all, a volcanic island. At its heart is Hallasan, the highest peak in South Korea, a volcano that created the island and is now a national park. Around it the landscape is dotted with smaller volcanic cones (the 'oreum'), underground lava tubes such as Manjanggul cave, craters such as Seongsan Ilchulbong (a striking natural fortress rising from the sea) and black basalt coastlines. In 2007 UNESCO inscribed these volcanic landscapes as a World Natural Heritage site.
That heritage, together with a warmer climate than the rest of the country, made Jeju Korea's top tourist destination. For decades it was the favourite honeymoon spot for Korean couples, and today it welcomes millions of visitors a year, from Korea and abroad. Much of the island lives off that tourism, with the inevitable debates about overtourism and environmental impact. Jeju's three faces sit side by side: the volcanic nature that amazes travellers, the ancestral culture of the haenyeo and the island's gods, and the painful memory of 4·3, which the island has chosen not to forget.
Seoul has been Korea's capital, almost without interruption, since 1394, when the founder of the Joseon dynasty, King Taejo, moved the court there and named it Hanyang. The choice was no accident: the city was protected by mountains and by the Han River, in line with the geomantic principles of pungsu (Korean 'feng shui'), and it sat in a central position on the peninsula. Around it rose a wall with great gates, some of which still survive, such as Namdaemun and Heunginjimun.
From that royal capital come the great palaces that are today the city's historic emblem. Gyeongbokgung, the main palace, was built in 1395; it was razed during the Japanese invasion of 1592 and rebuilt centuries later. Around it other palaces survive, such as Changdeokgung, with its secret garden, a World Heritage Site, and the royal shrine of Jongmyo, where the kings of the dynasty were venerated. Between the palaces lie traditional neighbourhoods of hanok houses, such as Bukchon, which give an idea of what the Confucian city of the yangban was like.
No city embodies Korea's leap better than Seoul. During the Korean War it changed hands four times between 1950 and 1951 and was left devastated, with its bridges blown up and whole neighbourhoods in ruins. From that starting point, in barely half a century it became one of the largest and most modern metropolitan areas in the world: today the capital region, which includes Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province, is home to around half the country's population.
The Han River, which runs through it, is the symbol of that transformation —the 'Miracle on the Han River' is named after it. South of the river grew Gangnam, a byword for prosperous, consumer Korea, made famous around the planet by the 2012 song 'Gangnam Style'. To the north beat the historic and student neighbourhoods, such as Hongdae, with its nightlife, or Insadong, with its galleries and teahouses. Seoul hosted the 1988 Olympic Games and the 2002 Football World Cup, two showcases through which Korea presented itself to the world.
Just over an hour from Seoul, on the Yellow Sea, Incheon has been Korea's maritime gateway for a century and a half. In 1883 its port was opened to international trade under foreign pressure, and Chinese, Japanese and Western merchants settled there; from that period dates the country's oldest Chinatown, still very much alive. It was also one of the first places modernity arrived: the railway, the telegraph, the first Christian churches.
But Incheon earned its place in military history through one decisive episode. On 15 September 1950, in the middle of the Korean War, UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur carried out a daring amphibious landing here amid extremely difficult tides. The operation took the North Korean army by surprise, cut its supply lines and made it possible to retake Seoul a few days later, reversing the course of the war. Today Incheon is something else entirely: home to the country's main international airport —one of the highest-rated in the world— and to the ultra-modern Songdo district, a 'smart city' built on land reclaimed from the sea.
South of Seoul, Suwon holds one of the masterpieces of Korean military architecture: Hwaseong Fortress, a wall of almost six kilometres with monumental gates, watchtowers and bastions, now a World Heritage Site. It was commissioned in the late 18th century by King Jeongjo, one of the most enlightened monarchs of the Joseon dynasty, partly to honour his father, Crown Prince Sado, who died tragically on the orders of his own father, locked inside a rice chest.
Hwaseong, built between 1794 and 1796, was not just a sentimental whim. Jeongjo planned to move the capital there and create a model city, far from the intrigues of the court in Seoul. Its construction used techniques and machines that were novel for the time, designed by the scholar Jeong Yak-yong, and the whole process was documented in such meticulous detail that it made a faithful restoration possible after the damage of the Korean War. The fortress is today the finest testimony to the late reformism of the Joseon.
Less than an hour from Seoul begins the most militarised border on the planet. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a strip about four kilometres wide and 250 long that has separated the two Koreas since the 1953 armistice, drawn roughly along the old front line, near the 38th parallel. Despite its name, it is anything but demilitarised: on both sides there are layers of barbed wire, minefields and troops.
At its centre lies Panmunjom, the 'truce village', where the armistice was signed and where the two sides still meet face to face in blue huts that the demarcation line cuts right through. On the southern side, tours show the infiltration tunnels North Korea dug under the border and the observation points from which you can glimpse the other country. The paradox is that, left empty and free of human activity for decades, the DMZ unintentionally became an ecological sanctuary where endangered species survive. It is at once the open wound of the war and a symbol of a divided Korea still waiting for peace.
Gangwon is the Korea of the mountains. Its name, coined in the 15th century under the Joseon dynasty, combines syllables from its two main cities, Gangneung and Wonju. But its most dramatic feature is more recent. It is the only one of Korea's historical provinces that was literally split in two when the country was divided. In 1945 the 38th parallel cut it down the middle, and after the Korean War the armistice line divided it again, leaving a South Gangwon and a North Gangwon on either side of the DMZ.
The Taebaek range runs through the province from north to south like a backbone and splits it into two worlds: Yeongseo to the west, with its inland valleys, and Yeongdong, the narrow coastal strip in the east that looks out over the East Sea (Sea of Japan). That rugged terrain kept Gangwon for a long time the most isolated and least developed region in the country, with an economy based on mountain farming, fishing and, above all, coal mining.
The natural heart of Gangwon is Seoraksan, the highest peak in the Taebaek range and one of the most revered mountains in Korea. Its name means 'snowy mountain', because snow lingers on its rocky summits well into spring. It is a massif of granite ridges, gorges, waterfalls and forests that turn red and gold in autumn and draw crowds of hikers.
Seoraksan matters for more than its scenery. In 1965 the government declared it a nature reserve, in 1970 it became one of the country's first national parks, and in 1982 UNESCO recognised it as a biosphere reserve for its ecological richness. Its slopes hide centuries-old Buddhist temples such as Sinheungsa, with its large bronze Buddha, showing that for centuries these mountains were a place of retreat and pilgrimage. For many Koreans, Seoraksan stands for the wild nature that survives in a heavily urbanised country.
On the coast at the foot of Seoraksan, Sokcho is the gateway to the park and a town of fishermen and seafood. It also holds a less visible story of Korea's division. Sokcho was under North Korean control until the Korean War. With the 1953 armistice it ended up on the southern side, and many of its people suddenly found themselves cut off for good from their families on the other side of the new border.
The symbol of that wound is Abai Village, a settlement built by refugees who had fled the North, many of them from Hamgyong Province, and who settled here hoping to go home when the war ended. They never could. Their descendants still keep North Korean cooking and customs alive, and the village has kept the 'gaetbae', an old barge pulled across the channel by hand with ropes. Abai's signature food, such as squid 'sundae' (stuffed squid), is now a tourist draw, but it grew out of the homesickness of people who ended up on the wrong side of the border.
For decades Gangwon was seen as the poorest and most isolated province in South Korea. That image began to change with one event: the 2018 Winter Olympics, held in Pyeongchang, a mountain county known until then mainly for its ski resorts and sheep farms. The bid took three attempts to succeed, but once Pyeongchang won, the Games became the lever for modernising the whole region, with new motorways and a high-speed rail line linking it to Seoul.
The 2018 Games also carried strong symbolic and diplomatic weight. At the height of the nuclear tension, athletes from both Koreas marched together under a unification flag at the opening ceremony, and a joint women's ice hockey team competed. It was a brief thaw that opened a round of summits between the South, the North and the United States. Beyond the politics, the Games left Gangwon better connected and with a new role as a winter tourism destination, as the snowiest region in the country.
For much of the 20th century, coal was the backbone of Gangwon's economy. The Taebaek Mountains held South Korea's main coalfields, and towns such as Taebaek and Jeongseon grew with the mines, which fuelled the industry and home heating of a fast-developing country. The work was gruelling and dangerous, and it drew thousands of families to the inland valleys.
As the economy modernised and switched to gas and oil, coal mining declined from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, and many of those towns emptied out. To slow the depopulation, the government allowed new activities in struggling mining areas, such as the Kangwon Land casino, the only one in South Korea that Korean citizens may enter, and promoted mountain tourism, festivals and industrial heritage. Gangwon's story in recent decades is one of a difficult reinvention: from the province of coal and the border to a destination for nature, skiing and memory.
The southeast of the peninsula was the heart of the Silla kingdom, and its capital, Gyeongju, was for almost a thousand years —from its traditional founding in 57 BC to the end of Unified Silla in 935— one of the great cities of the ancient world. Today it is called 'the museum without walls', because every hill has a royal tumulus and every field a pagoda or a carved stone. The great mounds that held the tombs of the Silla kings, with their treasures of gold crowns, still dominate the city centre.
From the golden age of Silla Buddhism come its two jewels, both World Heritage Sites and located on the outskirts of the city: Bulguksa Temple, built in the 8th century on stone terraces, and Seokguram Grotto, an artificial chamber in the mountain that houses an imposing granite statue of the Buddha, facing the sea where the sun rises. Cheomseongdae also survives, a 7th-century astronomical observatory considered one of the oldest still standing in the world. For Koreans, Gyeongju is the equivalent of what Athens or Rome represent in the West.
Busan, South Korea's second city, is its great gateway to the sea and its main port. Under Japanese rule it developed as the great commercial port for trade with Japan, and that maritime character shapes its whole history. But its decisive moment came in 1950. When the North Korean army occupied almost the entire peninsula in the first weeks of the Korean War, Busan was one of the last strongholds: around the city held the 'Pusan Perimeter', the defensive line that prevented the total fall of the south.
The government declared Busan the provisional capital on 18 August 1950, and it remained so for 1,023 days, almost the whole war. The city filled with displaced people fleeing the north and the front: it is estimated that by early 1951 there were half a million refugees crowded onto hillsides and ravines. From that human tide came entire neighbourhoods clinging to the hills, such as the now photogenic Gamcheon village, built by refugees. In 1963, Busan separated from South Gyeongsang Province to become the country's first directly governed city. Its port is still one of the busiest in the world.
If Gyeongju is the Buddhist spiritual capital, Andong is the Confucian one. It is known as 'the cradle of Korean spiritual culture' because in northern Gyeongsang, during the Joseon dynasty, Neo-Confucianism flourished with scholars of the stature of Yi Hwang (Toegye), one of the most influential thinkers in Korean history, whose portrait appears on the 1,000-won note. His academy, Dosan Seowon, is one of the seowon —private Confucian schools— inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Andong's symbol is Hahoe Folk Village, a clan village of traditional houses tucked into a bend in the river, also a World Heritage Site, where the noble Ryu family lived for centuries and where the architecture, the rites and the famous mask dances (talchum), which poked fun at monks and aristocrats, are still preserved. The region keeps a deeply traditional identity, with its ancestral rites and its own cuisine, such as the salted and cured fish typical of the area.
The Gyeongsang region, traditionally called Yeongnam, was the great engine of South Korea's economic take-off. Some of the country's largest industrial plants were built here: the Pohang steelworks (POSCO), founded in 1968 and today one of the biggest steelmakers in the world; the shipyards and car factories of Ulsan, heart of the Hyundai group; and petrochemical and machinery complexes that made this strip of the southeast the backbone of Korean heavy industry.
That is no coincidence: many of the leaders of the developmental era came from here, starting with President Park Chung-hee, born near Daegu, and several of his successors. Yeongnam became a stronghold of conservative politics, in contrast with Jeolla in the southwest, more closely tied to the opposition and to progressivism; that old regional rivalry still shows on electoral maps. Daegu, the country's fourth city, famous for its traditional medicinal herb market, and the rest of the region also keep their own dialect, Gyeongsang, unmistakable for its strong intonation and marked accents.
On the south coast, looking out over the maze of islands in the Korea Strait, Tongyeong has a history closely bound to the sea and to the Imjin War. The city owes its name and its origin to the naval headquarters of the three southern provinces (the 'Tongjeyeong'), established here in the early 17th century, after these waters had been the scene of Korea's great naval victories against the Japanese. Near here, in the Hallyeo Strait, Admiral Yi Sun-sin fought several of the battles that saved the country.
Today Tongyeong is the base for sailing through Hallyeohaesang Marine National Park, an archipelago of islands, coves and calm waters that is one of the most celebrated coastal landscapes in Korea. The city keeps its fishing and seafaring character, with fresh seafood markets, and a strong craft and musical tradition: it was the birthplace of the composer Isang Yun, one of the great figures of contemporary Korean music. The sea, a battlefield in the 16th century, is now its greatest attraction.
Jeonju, the historic capital of the Jeolla region, holds a place of honour in Korean history: it is the ancestral home of the Yi family, the clan that founded the Joseon dynasty in 1392. That is why the city has the Gyeonggijeon shrine, where the official portrait of King Taejo, the founder, was kept. For five centuries, Jeonju was one of the most important cities in the kingdom and the administrative seat of one of its richest regions.
Today Jeonju is famous for two things. One is its hanok village, the largest group of traditional Korean houses surviving in a city, with more than eight hundred homes with curved roofs: a whole neighbourhood to wander among courtyards, teahouses and hanji paper workshops. The other is the food: Jeonju is Korea's culinary capital and the birthplace of bibimbap, the famous dish of rice with vegetables, meat and egg, and of a banchan tradition —the small side dishes— so generous that UNESCO recognised it as a City of Gastronomy.
The plains of Jeolla, watered by rivers and with fertile soil, were for centuries Korea's granary, the region that produced most of its rice. That wealth had a bitter side: it was also the region most squeezed by taxes and by the corruption of court officials. Out of that tension came, in 1894, the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the largest popular uprising in modern Korean history.
The spark flew in Jeolla, when peasants, fed up with the abuses of a local magistrate and guided by the new religious doctrine of Donghak ('Eastern learning'), took up arms under the leadership of Jeon Bong-jun. The movement grew quickly and in the spring of 1894 the rebels even took Jeonju, the regional capital. The government, unable to put them down, asked China for military help, and Japan seized the chance to intervene; the clash between the two powers led to the First Sino-Japanese War. The rebellion was finally crushed, with more than ten thousand peasants killed, but it left a deep mark: the memory of a people who rose up against injustice.
Gwangju, the great city of the southwest, is today synonymous with a central episode in recent Korean history: the democratic uprising of 18 May 1980. When General Chun Doo-hwan staged a military coup and imposed martial law, Gwangju's students took to the streets in protest. The response was elite troops who cracked down with extreme violence, which, instead of cowing the city, drove it into open revolt.
For a few days, between 18 and 27 May, armed citizens managed to drive out the army and run the city themselves, in a kind of commune, until the troops retook it by fire and sword. The later official count acknowledged 193 dead, but many researchers argue that the real figure was considerably higher —many estimates put it above a thousand— because the regime concealed records; the debate over the exact number is still open. For years the dictatorship smeared the uprising as a communist revolt, but the truth eventually prevailed and Gwangju became the symbol of Korean democracy. UNESCO inscribed its archives on the Memory of the World register.
The Jeolla region, traditionally called Honam, bore real marginalisation for much of the 20th century. While the industrial southeast of Gyeongsang got the big factories and the regime's leaders, Jeolla —agricultural and peripheral— fell behind in investment and development, an inequality many experienced as deliberate discrimination. That wound fed a strong political identity of resistance.
It is no coincidence that Jeolla was the stronghold of Kim Dae-jung, the great opposition leader against the dictatorships, a native of the region, who was imprisoned, kidnapped and sentenced to death by the military regimes. In 1997, Kim Dae-jung won the presidency —the first democratic transfer of power to the opposition in South Korea— and in 2000 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his 'Sunshine Policy' of rapprochement with North Korea. The regional rivalry between Honam (Jeolla) and Yeongnam (Gyeongsang) is still one of the fault lines shaping Korean politics today.
North of Gwangju, Damyang is Jeolla at its most rural and refined. It is famous for its bamboo forests, the best known being Juknokwon, and for a long tradition tied to the plant: basketry, fans, furniture and even a cuisine based on bamboo shoots and rice cooked inside the canes. Bamboo is not just a crop. In Confucian culture it stood for the uprightness and integrity of the scholar, which is why it took such deep root in this land of scholars.
Damyang is also home to some of the most beautiful traditional gardens in Korea, such as Soswaewon, a 16th-century garden created by a scholar who withdrew from politics after a purge at court. These Joseon dynasty gardens, with pavilions, streams and ponds woven into the landscape, express the Confucian ideal of the sage who steps away from the world to live in harmony with nature. Damyang's avenue of metasequoias, planted in the 20th century, completes the picture of a county where life revolves around trees.
Hardly anything that happened to South Korea happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
