A Brief History of Korea: One People, Two States, and the Line Between Them

Follows: South Korea: A Condensed History of Division, Speed, and Reinvention

Companion piece: If I Was Born in South Korea: Tech, Hagwons, and the Bond of Jeong (what daily life in the South feels like now; this is how it got that way, and what happened on the other side of the line).

Some time between 19 and 23 January 2024, North Korea tore down one of its best-known monuments. The Arch of Reunification, about 30 metres tall, spanned the highway heading south out of Pyongyang towards Kaesong: two giant women in traditional dress, leaning towards each other and holding up between them a map of a single Korea. It had been completed in 2001. A few days earlier, the North's leader, Kim Jong Un, had told his parliament that South Korea was no longer a lost half of the nation waiting to be reunited, but the North's "primary foe and invariable principal enemy." He called the arch an eyesore. Satellite images soon showed it gone.

Less than a year later, on the night of 3 December 2024, the president of South Korea went on television and declared martial law. Soldiers in helicopters landed outside the National Assembly in Seoul. Thousands of citizens ran there to stop them, and lawmakers climbed the fences to get inside and vote. Within about six hours the order had been voted down and withdrawn. Within four months the president had been removed from office, and in February 2026 a court sentenced him to life in prison.

Those two scenes, a dictatorship erasing the idea of one Korea and a democracy defending itself in the street, are as far apart as two countries can be. Yet for more than a thousand years before 1945 they were one country, with one language and one royal court, and for the last five centuries of it, one border along the Yalu and Tumen rivers. This history tells that shared story first, then the moment the line was drawn, and then each state on its own terms. Because Korea is now two nations, it is longer than most pieces in this series.

Much of this history is argued over: between Korea and Japan, between Korea and China, between North and South, and inside South Korea between its two political camps. Where it is, this piece says who holds which view, and what the evidence shows.

In this history

1. The land, the legend and Gojoseon (to 108 BCE)
2. Three kingdoms, Unified Silla and Balhae (57 BCE–935)
3. Goryeo, the Mongols and the printed word (918–1392)
4. Joseon I: the Confucian kingdom and the alphabet (1392–1592)
5. Joseon II: invasions, the Manchus and the closed door (1592–1876)
6. The opening and the Korean Empire (1876–1910)
7. Colony: the first decades of Japanese rule (1910–1937)
8. Total war: mobilisation, forced labour and the "comfort women" (1937–1945)
9. Liberation and division (1945–1948)
10. The Korean War (1950–1953)
11. South Korea: from Rhee to Park (1948–1979)
12. South Korea: Gwangju and the road to democracy (1979–1997)
13. South Korea: crash, Sunshine and the Korean wave (1997–2022)
14. South Korea: martial law and after (2022–2026)
15. North Korea: Kim Il Sung's state (1945–1994)
16. North Korea: famine, military first and the bomb (1994–2011)
17. North Korea: Kim Jong Un and the "two hostile states" (2011–2026)
18. Inside North Korea: rights, markets and daily life
19. Two Koreas side by side
20. How to understand Korea today

Part 1 — The land, the legend and Gojoseon (to 108 BCE)

A peninsula between giants

Korea is a mountainous peninsula on the north-eastern edge of Asia. To the north, the Yalu and Tumen rivers separate it from China, and for a short stretch near the mouth of the Tumen, from Russia. To the west lies the Yellow Sea, and across it, China's coast. To the east is the sea that Koreans call the East Sea and Japanese call the Sea of Japan. To the south, a narrow strait separates it from the Japanese islands.

That position explains much of what follows. Korea has been a bridge, carrying rice farming, bronze, writing, Buddhism and Confucian ideas from the mainland and passing many on to Japan. It has also been a corridor for armies: Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Japanese, and in the twentieth century Soviets and Americans. A Korean proverb compares the country to a shrimp crushed in a fight between whales. Much of its history is the story of a people trying to stay whole between larger powers, and often succeeding for centuries at a time.

The founding story

Every Korean child learns the story of Dangun. In its oldest surviving version, written down in the thirteenth century by the monk Iryeon in the Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), Hwanung, son of the Lord of Heaven, came down to a mountain to rule. A tiger and a bear begged to become human. Only the bear endured the trial, living in a cave on garlic and mugwort, and became a woman. She bore Hwanung a son, Dangun, who founded the first Korean kingdom, Joseon.

A precise date came later. A fifteenth-century chronicle, the Tongguk t'onggam of 1485, fixed the founding at what we would call 2333 BCE. South Korea still marks 3 October as National Foundation Day (Gaecheonjeol, "the day the heavens opened"), and until 1961 the South officially counted its years from Dangun's founding.

North Korea took the legend further. In the early 1990s its archaeologists announced that they had found Dangun's tomb and bones near Pyongyang, and Kim Il Sung insisted that Dangun had been a real person. A large stepped mausoleum was completed in 1994. North Korean histories now place the founding of the first state in the early thirtieth century BCE, centred on Pyongyang. Archaeologists outside the North do not accept the claim; there is no independent dating of the remains.

What archaeology shows

People have lived on the peninsula since the Old Stone Age. The evidence for organised societies grows thick in the Bronze Age, which in Korea began around 1000 BCE (estimates range from the thirteenth to the eighth century BCE). Its signature object is a bronze dagger with a bulging blade, called "mandolin-shaped" or Liaoning-type after the region of north-east China where many have also been found, a sign of a culture spanning southern Manchuria and the peninsula.

The other signature is the dolmen, a tomb made of a huge flat capstone set on upright stones. Dolmens were built in Korea from roughly 2000 to 400 BCE, and the peninsula has more of them than anywhere else in East Asia. Building one took organised labour, which tells archaeologists that chiefdoms with real power over people had appeared.

Gojoseon in the written record

Chinese records describe a state called Joseon in the region of southern Manchuria and north-western Korea. Historians call it Gojoseon, "Old Joseon," to distinguish it from the dynasty of the same name founded in 1392. Old Chinese texts claimed a Chinese sage named Jizi (Gija in Korean) had come to rule it; most modern scholars reject that story as a later invention.

Firmer ground arrives around 194 BCE, when Wiman, a refugee from the north-eastern Chinese borderlands, seized the throne. His capital, Wanggeom-seong, is usually placed at or near modern Pyongyang, though the site is debated. In 108 BCE armies of the Han dynasty of China conquered the kingdom and set up four commanderies to govern the region. The most important, Lelang, near Pyongyang, lasted until the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo destroyed it in 313 CE.

The Dangun story is a myth, but it does real work: it tells Koreans, North and South, that they are one people with one origin, older than any of the empires around them.

Part 2 — Three kingdoms, Unified Silla and Balhae (57 BCE–935)

Three rivals

After the fall of Gojoseon, the peninsula and southern Manchuria filled with smaller peoples and confederacies. Out of them, over several centuries, grew three kingdoms that Koreans still treat as the foundation of their history.

The traditional founding dates come from the Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), compiled in the twelfth century: Silla in 57 BCE, Goguryeo in 37 BCE and Baekje in 18 BCE. Historians treat those dates as legend. Silla, given the oldest date by a chronicler working in a kingdom that descended from it, was probably the last of the three to become a true state.

Goguryeo, in the north, straddled what is now north-east China and northern Korea. It was a hard, horse-riding warrior state, constantly at war with Chinese dynasties and steppe peoples. Its greatest king, Gwanggaeto ("Broad Expander of Territory"), who came to the throne in 391 and died around 412, is remembered by a huge stone stele that his son raised in 414 near the old capital on the Yalu, today in China's Jilin province. That son, King Jangsu, moved the capital south to Pyongyang in 427.

Baekje, in the south-west, was a sophisticated, sea-facing kingdom, closely tied to southern China and to the islands of Japan, where it sent scholars, craftsmen and Buddhist texts.

Silla, in the south-east, centred on the city of Gyeongju, began as the most remote and least developed. It was organised by a rigid hereditary "bone-rank" system that set out what office, house and even clothing each family could have.

Between Baekje and Silla lay Gaya, a confederation of small states famed for its iron, until Silla absorbed the last of it in 562.

Buddhism arrived from China in stages: in Goguryeo in 372, in Baekje in 384, and in Silla, after resistance from its aristocrats, as late as 527 or 528. With it came Chinese characters, which Korean scholars used for writing for more than a thousand years.

Silla wins

In 612 the Sui dynasty of China sent an enormous army against Goguryeo. At the Salsu River, the Goguryeo general Eulji Mundeok trapped the invaders as they retreated; Chinese records say that only 2,700 of the 305,000 soldiers sent across the river made it home. The defeat helped bring down the Sui. Its successor, the Tang, kept attacking.

Silla's kings saw an opening. They allied with the Tang, and together they destroyed Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668. The Tang then tried to rule the whole peninsula itself. Silla fought its former ally for nearly a decade and drove the Tang out, keeping a kingdom that reached roughly as far north as Pyongyang. The result, called Unified Silla, ruled most of the peninsula for more than two centuries from Gyeongju, until its last king surrendered in 935.

Unified Silla was a high point of Buddhist art. Its stone temples, pagodas and the cave shrine of Seokguram, with its great granite Buddha, are among the treasures of Korean civilisation. Silla never conquered the far north, however. Much of Goguryeo's old land stayed outside it.

Balhae: whose kingdom?

In 698, in what is now north-east China and the far north of Korea, a former Goguryeo general named Dae Joyeong founded a kingdom that came to be called Balhae (Bohai in Chinese). Its population mixed people of Goguryeo descent with the Mohe, a Tungusic people of Manchuria. It lasted until 926, when the Khitan Liao dynasty destroyed it. Many of its people, including members of its royal family, fled south to the new Korean kingdom of Goryeo.

Balhae's identity is one of the sharpest history disputes in East Asia, and it involves its predecessor, Goguryeo, too.

The dispute is not only academic. From 2002 to 2007, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ran a state-funded research programme on China's north-eastern borderlands, known as the Northeast Project, whose publications described Goguryeo as a Chinese local ethnic regime. When this became public, it caused a diplomatic row with Seoul in 2004. In Korea, the claim was read as an attempt to take away a piece of the national past; in China it was presented as ordinary scholarship about the history of Chinese territory. Both Koreas reject it.

The kingdoms of 1,500 years ago are still argued over because they answer a modern question: where does Korea end?

Part 3 — Goryeo, the Mongols and the printed word (918–1392)

A new dynasty and a name

As Silla weakened in the ninth century, rebels carved out rival states in the old lands of Baekje and Goguryeo. One of their commanders, Wang Geon, took power in the northern one in 918 and named his kingdom Goryeo, a shortened form of Goguryeo, to claim its legacy. Silla's last king surrendered to him in 935, and Wang Geon defeated the rival "Later Baekje" kingdom in 936. Korea was united again, now from the city of Gaegyeong (today's Kaesong, just north of the border in North Korea).

Goryeo gave the world the name it still uses. Its trade reached far: the dynasty's official history records merchants arriving from Arabia in 1024, 1025 and 1040, and hundreds of traders from Song China each year from the 1030s. Foreign traders knew the country by its dynasty, and "Goryeo" became "Corea" and then "Korea." (Koreans in the South call their country Hanguk; in the North it is Chosŏn. The two names come from different eras of the same past, and that difference is itself a small sign of the division.)

Goryeo was an aristocratic, deeply Buddhist kingdom. In 958 King Gwangjong, advised by a Chinese official who had settled at his court, introduced Chinese-style civil service examinations in the classics, to build a corps of officials loyal to the throne rather than to the great clans. Power nonetheless stayed with a small number of great families, who intermarried with the royal house. Its potters made celadon, a jade-green glazed stoneware still counted among the finest ceramics of its age, and its temples held enormous wealth.

Generals and Mongols

In 1170 a group of military officers, angry at being treated as inferiors by civilian aristocrats, overthrew the court's officials and took power, keeping the kings as figureheads. From the late twelfth century one family, the Ch'oe, ran the country as military dictators for four generations, until 1258.

Then came the Mongols. From 1231 to 1270 the armies of the Mongol Empire invaded Korea again and again. In 1232 the Ch'oe moved the court to Ganghwa Island, near the mouth of the Han River, betting correctly that the Mongols could not cross the narrow, tidal strait. The court held out there for decades while the mainland was ravaged. After the Ch'oe fell, the court made peace and in 1270 returned to the mainland; rebel soldiers, the Sambyeolcho, fought on from southern islands until 1273.

For about eighty years Goryeo was a client of the Mongols' Yuan dynasty in China. Its crown princes were raised at the Mongol court and married Mongol princesses, and Korea was made to supply ships and soldiers for the failed Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. As the Yuan weakened, King Gongmin broke away in 1356, attacking pro-Mongol families and recovering northern territory.

Carved and cast

Two of Goryeo's achievements in printing survive and are now listed by UNESCO in its Memory of the World register.

The first is the Tripitaka Koreana, the complete Buddhist scriptures carved onto more than 81,000 wooden printing blocks. An earlier set had been burned by the Mongols; this one was carved from 1237 over about twelve years, as a prayer for the country's protection. Since 1398 the blocks have been kept at Haeinsa temple in the south-east, in storage halls designed to keep them dry and ventilated.

The second is the Jikji, a Buddhist text printed with movable metal type at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju in July 1377. It is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, about 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible. The only known copy of its second volume is in the National Library of France in Paris, where it arrived through a French diplomat in the late nineteenth century. Korea would like it back; France says it was acquired legally.

The end of Goryeo

By the 1380s Goryeo was squeezed between the rising Ming dynasty in China and coastal raids by Japanese pirates. In 1388 the court sent an army north to attack the Ming. Its general, Yi Seong-gye, a commander who had made his name fighting pirates and northern raiders, thought the plan was madness. At Wihwa Island in the Yalu River he turned his army around, marched on the capital and took control. Four years later, in 1392, he took the throne himself.

Part 4 — Joseon I: the Confucian kingdom and the alphabet (1392–1592)

A state built on a philosophy

Yi Seong-gye named his new dynasty Joseon, after the ancient kingdom, and moved the capital to Hanyang, the city we call Seoul. His family, the Yi, would rule for more than five hundred years, from 1392 to 1910 (from 1897 as the Korean Empire). That makes Joseon one of the longest-lasting dynasties in world history.

Its founders were backed by Neo-Confucian scholars who blamed Goryeo's decline on corrupt monasteries and greedy aristocrats. They set out to build a state on Confucian principles: rule by educated officials, loyalty to the king, duty to parents, strict hierarchy between ranks and between men and women. Buddhist temples were pushed out of the cities and their lands taken. Over two centuries, Confucian rules reshaped family life, especially for women, who lost much of the inheritance and freedom they had had under Goryeo.

Joseon accepted a place in China's tributary order: it sent missions to the Ming emperors and received recognition in return. Koreans of the time saw this less as submission than as membership of a civilised world centred on China, a relationship they called "serving the great." In practice, Joseon ran its own affairs.

Sejong and the alphabet

The fourth king, Sejong, who reigned from 1418 to 1450, is the one South Koreans put on the 10,000-won note. He founded a royal research institute, the Hall of Worthies, in 1420, and sponsored work on astronomy, rain gauges, water clocks, farming manuals and medicine.

His most famous achievement is the Korean alphabet. Educated Koreans wrote in Chinese characters, which took years to learn and did not fit the Korean language well; most people could not read at all. At the end of 1443 Sejong presented a new script of 28 letters, and in 1446 published it under the title Hunminjeongeum, "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." Its preface gives his reason: ordinary people had things they wished to say but could not write them down, so the king had "newly designed twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease," in one widely used translation.

The letters are a feat of design. The basic consonants are drawn to suggest the shape of the mouth, tongue and throat when making the sound, and the vowels are built from three elements standing for heaven, earth and humankind. Letters are grouped into syllable blocks, so written Korean looks somewhat like Chinese while working like an alphabet.

Many scholars at court opposed it, arguing that only Chinese writing was civilised. For centuries the script was looked down on as fit for women, children and commoners, and one later king, Yeonsangun, banned its use in 1504. It survived anyway, in letters, poetry and popular fiction. Only in 1894 did the government make it the preferred script for official documents. Today it is called Hangul in the South, where 24 of the original letters are in use and 9 October is Hangul Day, and Chosŏn'gŭl in the North.

Sejong's preface says the king had "newly designed twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease." Six centuries later, both Koreas write with his letters, and the South keeps a national holiday for them.

Yangban and slaves

Joseon society was steeply ranked. At the top were the yangban, the "two orders" of civil and military officials and the families entitled to hold office. In principle, office came through the civil service examinations (gwageo) in the Confucian classics, and in principle commoners could sit them. In practice, years of study were needed and the yangban dominated the exams and the government for five centuries. Below them were a small class of technical specialists and clerks, then the mass of commoners, mostly farmers, who paid taxes and did military and labour service.

At the bottom were the nobi, slaves or hereditary bondspeople, owned by the state or by private households, who could be bought, sold and inherited. Historians estimate that at the peak, in the middle centuries of the dynasty, they made up more than 30 percent of the population, one of the largest shares of any pre-modern society. Eighteenth-century reforms and an edict of 1801 freeing government-owned slaves shrank their numbers sharply. Hereditary slavery was abolished in the Gabo reforms of 1894, though its traces lingered.

For all its rigidity, the system produced long stability. Joseon's first two centuries saw few wars. That ended in 1592.

Part 5 — Joseon II: invasions, the Manchus and the closed door (1592–1876)

The Imjin War

In 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just finished unifying Japan after a century of civil war, demanded passage through Korea to conquer Ming China. Joseon refused. On 23 May 1592 (the date in the modern calendar) a Japanese army landed at Busan. Armed with muskets and hardened by decades of fighting, it took Seoul within weeks. The king fled north towards the Chinese border. Koreans call the war the Imjin War, after the name of that year in the traditional calendar.

Three things saved Korea. The first was the Ming: China sent large armies, a total of about 166,700 troops over the course of the war, and pushed the Japanese back from Pyongyang. The second was the "righteous armies," local militias of scholars, farmers and Buddhist monks who harassed Japanese supply lines. The third was the navy under Admiral Yi Sun-sin.

Yi's fleet, including a few covered warships known as turtle ships, cut the sea lanes the Japanese needed. At Hansan Island in 1592 it sank or captured 59 Japanese ships. When Japan invaded again in 1597, Yi, who had been jailed through court intrigue and then reinstated, faced a far larger fleet at the Myeongnyang Strait with just 13 ships against at least 133, and won. He was killed at the Battle of Noryang on 16 December 1598, as the Japanese withdrew after Hideyoshi's death. His statue stands in central Seoul.

The cost was immense. Farmland was ruined, palaces burned, and tens of thousands of Koreans taken to Japan as captives, among them skilled potters who founded famous Japanese ceramic traditions. The Mimizuka, a mound in Kyoto, holds the noses, cut off as war trophies, of at least 38,000 Koreans.

The Manchus

Korea had barely recovered when a new power rose to the north. The Manchus, uniting the Jurchen peoples, invaded in 1627 and again in the winter of 1636–37. The king, besieged in a mountain fortress south of Seoul, had to surrender and bow before the Manchu ruler, and two of his sons were taken as hostages. Joseon was forced to switch its loyalty from the Ming to the Manchus' new Qing dynasty, which conquered China in 1644.

Korean scholars privately despised the Qing as barbarians and began to see their own kingdom as the last true home of Confucian civilisation, a "little China" more faithful than China itself. That pride shaped Joseon's suspicion of everything new from outside.

The seventeenth century also brought disaster at home. A great famine in 1695–96, with epidemics, may have killed between a quarter and a third of the population, according to some historians' estimates.

Recovery and reform

The eighteenth century was calmer. Two long-reigning kings, Yeongjo (1724–1776) and Jeongjo (1776–1800), tried to calm factional fighting at court with a "policy of impartiality" (tangpyeong) and reduced the number of slaves. Scholars of Silhak ("practical learning") urged officials to study farming, trade, technology and Korea's own geography rather than only the classics. Markets spread, and with them novels, mask dances and genre painting.

In the nineteenth century the court fell under the control of in-law families who looted it, while the countryside suffered revolts, famines and cholera. In the early 1860s a scholar named Choe Je-u founded Donghak ("Eastern Learning"), a new religion that blended Confucian, Buddhist and folk beliefs and preached the equality of all people. The government executed him in 1864, but his movement spread.

The closed door

In 1864 a boy became king as Gojong, and his father, known by his title as the Daewongun ("Prince of the Great Court"), ruled in his name for a decade. The Daewongun rebuilt the royal palace, curbed the in-law clans and set out to keep Korea closed against the West, which had just humiliated China in the Opium Wars. The historian Bruce Cumings summarises his policy as "no treaties, no trade, no Catholics, no West, and no Japan."

In 1866 his government launched the largest of Joseon's persecutions of Korean Catholics, which went on until 1872; French missionary priests were among those executed, and a French punitive expedition withdrew. The same year, an armed American merchant ship, the General Sherman, sailed up the Taedong River towards Pyongyang and was burned, its crew killed. In 1871 an American expedition of about 650 men attacked forts on Ganghwa Island, killing 243 Koreans for the loss of three Americans, then sailed away without a treaty.

Westerners came to call Korea the "Hermit Kingdom." The name stuck, and is now applied, unfairly to the old kingdom and in a different sense, to North Korea.

Part 6 — The opening and the Korean Empire (1876–1910)

Forced open

Japan, which had itself been forced open by American warships in 1853 and had modernised at speed since 1868, broke Korea's isolation. In September 1875 a Japanese warship, the Un'yō, drew fire from the forts on Ganghwa Island and shelled them in return; Japan then demanded a treaty. The Treaty of Ganghwa, signed on 26 February 1876, declared Korea an "independent state," prying it loose from China, opened Busan and later Incheon and Wonsan to Japanese trade, and gave Japanese residents extraterritoriality. It was an unequal treaty of the kind the Western powers had imposed on China and Japan. A treaty with the United States followed in 1882.

The next two decades were a struggle among rival factions, each with a foreign patron: conservatives looked to China, young reformers to Meiji Japan, and the court, increasingly led by King Gojong's queen, Queen Min, played the powers against one another. After a soldiers' riot in 1882, China sent troops and tightened its grip; in 1884 Chinese troops crushed a coup by pro-Japanese reformers within days.

Donghak and the war over Korea

In 1894 the farmers of the south-west rose in revolt. Led by Jeon Bong-jun, a local Donghak leader, they demanded an end to corrupt officials and unfair taxes, the freeing of slaves and, increasingly, the expulsion of foreigners. When their army captured the fortress city of Jeonju, the court asked China for troops. China sent about 3,000; Japan, claiming the right to protect its interests, sent about 8,000, seized the royal palace in Seoul and installed a pro-Japanese government. The First Sino-Japanese War followed, fought largely on Korean soil. Japan won decisively.

The rebels rose again, this time against the Japanese. At the Battle of Ugeumchi, near Gongju, in November 1894, Japanese and government troops with modern rifles destroyed the peasant army. Jeon Bong-jun was captured and executed in 1895. In South Korea today, the Donghak movement is remembered as a revolution of ordinary people for equality and independence; North Korea, too, honours it as an anti-feudal, anti-foreign uprising.

Under Japanese pressure the government carried out the Gabo reforms of 1894–95, which abolished the legal class order, slavery and the old civil service examinations. Many Koreans welcomed the reforms but resented who was imposing them.

The murder of a queen

Queen Min resisted Japan by turning to Russia. At about six in the morning of 8 October 1895, a band of Japanese agents and soldiers, acting under the Japanese minister in Seoul, Miura Gorō, broke into Gyeongbokgung Palace and killed her; her body was burned. A Japanese court tried Miura and others and acquitted them for lack of evidence. In February 1896, Gojong and the crown prince fled to the Russian legation in Seoul and ruled from there for about a year. The queen, posthumously named Empress Myeongseong, became a national martyr.

The Korean Empire

In October 1897, back in his own palace, Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire and took the title of emperor, to stand equal with the emperors of China and Japan. His government built telegraph lines, electric streetcars and modern schools. A reform movement, the Independence Club, founded in 1896, published a newspaper in Hangul and held mass public debates calling for constitutional government; Gojong suppressed it in 1898. Among its young members was Syngman Rhee.

Independence depended on a balance of powers that collapsed in 1904, when Japan went to war with Russia and won. In July 1905 a memorandum of talks between the American secretary of war, William Howard Taft, and Japan's prime minister, Katsura Tarō, recorded that the United States would not oppose Japanese control of Korea, while Japan accepted American rule in the Philippines. The peace treaty with Russia that September left Japan free in Korea.

Protectorate and annexation

In November 1905, with Japanese troops surrounding the palace, Itō Hirobumi, Japan's elder statesman, pressed the Korean cabinet to sign a treaty making Korea a protectorate (the Eulsa Treaty). Japan took over Korea's foreign relations, with Itō as resident-general. Gojong refused to put his seal on it. In 1907 he secretly sent three envoys to the peace conference at The Hague to protest; they were refused a hearing. Japan forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, Sunjong, and disbanded the Korean army, many of whose soldiers joined guerrilla "righteous armies."

In October 1909, at the railway station in Harbin, in Manchuria, a Korean independence fighter named An Jung-geun shot Itō dead. He was hanged by the Japanese at Lüshun on 26 March 1910. In both Koreas he is a national hero; in Japan, Itō is honoured as a founder of the modern state, and An has long been called a terrorist. When China opened a memorial hall to An at Harbin station in 2014, Tokyo protested.

Annexation came in August 1910. The treaty was signed on 22 August by Korea's prime minister, Yi Wan-yong, and the new resident-general, Terauchi Masatake, and took effect on 29 August. Sunjong did not sign it.

A rock in the sea

One more act of 1905 still matters. On 28 January 1905, Japan's cabinet decided to incorporate a pair of rocky islets in the sea between Korea and Japan into Shimane Prefecture, treating them as land that belonged to no one. Koreans call them Dokdo, Japanese Takeshima; some Western maps use the neutral name Liancourt Rocks. Korea points to old records of an island called Usan-do and to an imperial decree of 25 October 1900 placing an island called "Seokdo" under a Korean county, which it identifies with Dokdo; Japan disputes both identifications and says its title was established by the seventeenth century and confirmed lawfully in 1905. South Korea has held the islets, with a coast guard garrison, since the early 1950s. Japan has proposed going to the International Court of Justice; Korea refuses, saying there is no dispute to settle.

In thirty-five years, Korea went from a kingdom that refused to sign treaties with anyone to a country that no longer existed on the map.

Part 7 — Colony: the first decades of Japanese rule (1910–1937)

The Government-General

From 1910 Korea, renamed Chōsen, was ruled by a Japanese governor-general, always a senior army or navy officer, answerable to the emperor in Tokyo. The first was Terauchi Masatake. In its first decade, often called the period of "military rule," Japanese military police kept order, Korean political organisations and newspapers were shut down, and nationalists were jailed.

The colonial state carried out a vast land survey from 1910 to 1918, registering ownership on the basis of written proof. Korean nationalist historians long described it as a mass seizure. Later research, including by Korean scholars, found that most land stayed in Korean hands, but that the survey favoured those with documents and connections, enriched Japanese companies and settlers, and helped push many farmers into tenancy. As more rice was shipped to Japan, the amount each Korean ate fell in the early 1930s. By 1939 about 981,000 Koreans lived in Japan; by 1934 about 561,000 Japanese lived in Korea, among more than 21 million people.

1 March 1919

The turning point came in 1919. The former emperor Gojong died in January, amid rumours that he had been poisoned. Korean students in Tokyo and religious leaders in Korea, inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's call for the self-determination of nations at the end of the First World War, planned a protest to coincide with his funeral.

On 1 March 1919, thirty-three religious and civic leaders, Cheondoist (the renamed Donghak), Christian and Buddhist, signed a Declaration of Independence written by the scholar Choe Nam-seon. Twenty-nine of them gathered at a restaurant in Seoul called Taehwagwan, read the declaration and then called the police to arrest them. At nearby Tapgol Park, a student read it aloud to a crowd, which marched through the city shouting "Manse!" ("Long live [Korean independence]!").

The protests spread across the country for months: historians count roughly 1,500 to 1,800 demonstrations, with between 800,000 and 2 million participants out of a population of about 16 to 17 million. They were overwhelmingly peaceful. The response was not. Japanese figures to 11 April counted 553 killed and more than 12,000 arrested; the independence activist and historian Park Eun-sik, writing in exile in 1920, counted 7,509 dead and 46,948 arrested. On 15 April, at Jeam-ni, south of Seoul, soldiers locked villagers in a church and set it on fire. A sixteen-year-old student, Yu Gwan-sun, whose parents were shot dead at a protest she helped organise, died of her injuries in Seodaemun Prison in September 1920; she is now the movement's best-known face.

The March First Movement failed to free Korea, but it created something the colonisers could not take away: a nation that had spoken with one voice.

In April 1919, exiled nationalists founded a Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai. It was weak and divided; its first president, Syngman Rhee, who lobbied from the United States, was impeached by its assembly in 1925, and Kim Ku later became its leading figure. It moved with the Chinese Nationalist government into China's interior during the war, ending up in Chongqing. South Korea's constitution today names the Provisional Government, and the March First Movement, as the foundation of the republic, and 1 March is a national holiday in the South.

"Cultural rule"

Shaken by 1919, Tokyo sent a new governor-general, Saitō Makoto, who announced a softer "cultural rule." The military police were replaced by an ordinary police force, and Korean-language newspapers were allowed again; Chosun Ilbo and Dong-a Ilbo, both founded in 1920, are still among South Korea's biggest papers. Korean writers, artists, filmmakers, nationalists and communists organised. Industrial growth picked up, especially from the 1930s, when Japan turned northern Korea into a base for mines, dams, chemical plants and steel to support its expansion into Manchuria.

Whether that growth benefited Koreans is one of the most charged arguments in Korean history. One school, sometimes called "colonial modernisation," points to railways, factories, rising output and the first generation of Korean industrialists, some of whose firms grew into later conglomerates. Its critics answer that the economy was built to serve Japan, that Koreans were kept out of senior and skilled posts, and that the gains went mainly to Japanese firms and a small Korean elite. In South Korea the argument tracks politics: conservatives are readier to see colonial development as part of the country's later rise, progressives to stress exploitation and collaboration.

The colonial years were also violent beyond Korea. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1 September 1923, rumours that Koreans were poisoning wells led vigilantes, sometimes with police and soldiers, to massacre Koreans in the Tokyo area; estimates range from a few hundred in official counts at the time to several thousand. In Manchuria, Korean guerrillas, nationalist and communist, fought on; among the communist partisans was a young man who called himself Kim Il Sung.

Part 8 — Total war: mobilisation, forced labour and the "comfort women" (1937–1945)

Making Koreans into Japanese

When Japan went to full-scale war with China in 1937, colonial policy hardened into an attempt to erase Korean identity. Under the slogan naisen ittai, "Japan and Korea as one body," Koreans had to recite oaths of loyalty to the emperor and worship at Shinto shrines, and Christians who refused were arrested. By 1943 Korean-language courses had been phased out of the schools; in 1940 the remaining Korean-language newspapers were shut. From 1940, under ordinances issued the year before, Koreans were pressed to adopt Japanese-style names, and most families did. In 1942 the police arrested the scholars compiling a Korean dictionary.

Labour and soldiers

From 1939 the colonial government mobilised Koreans for labour: first through company "recruitment," then official "mediation," and from 1944 outright conscription. By one widely cited count, about 5.4 million Koreans were mobilised, most within Korea, with about 670,000 sent to Japan itself, to mines, factories and construction sites, often in dangerous conditions for little or no pay. From 1944 about 200,000 Korean men were also conscripted into the Japanese army. Some Korean guards at prisoner-of-war camps were later tried as war criminals.

Forced labour remains a live legal fight. On 30 October 2018 South Korea's Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel to pay 100 million won to each Korean plaintiff forced to work for its predecessor. Japan's government says all such claims were "settled completely and finally" by the 1965 agreement, under which Japan provided $300 million in grants and $200 million in loans, and called the ruling a violation of international law; relations collapsed into a trade dispute in 2019. In March 2023 President Yoon Suk Yeol's government had a Korean state-backed foundation pay the compensation instead, a step its supporters called bold and its critics, including some victims, a humiliating surrender. Most of the winning plaintiffs or their families eventually accepted.

The "comfort women"

From the early 1930s, and on a large scale after 1937, the Japanese military set up "comfort stations," military brothels, across its empire and the territories it occupied. The women held in them were called "comfort women," a euphemism. Many came from Korea, which was then part of Japan's empire, and many others from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and elsewhere. There is no agreed count. Historians' estimates range from about 20,000 (the Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko) to about 200,000 (the Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki), and some Chinese scholars put the total far higher.

In August 1991 a Korean woman, Kim Hak-sun, became the first survivor to tell her story in public: that she had been taken to a comfort station at seventeen and repeatedly raped. In January 1992 Yoshimi found wartime military documents in Japan's own archives showing the army's role in setting up and running the stations. Others came forward across Asia.

What Japan's government says. In 1993 the Kono Statement, issued by Japan's chief cabinet secretary, acknowledged that the military was directly or indirectly involved in setting up and managing the stations and in transferring the women, that recruitment was often against the women's will, and offered "sincere apologies and remorse." Japan later created a fund, financed largely by private donations, to compensate survivors; many Korean survivors refused its money as not coming from the state. Japan's later governments have maintained the Kono Statement while contesting other parts of the story. In a statement to a UN committee in February 2016, its deputy foreign minister, Sugiyama Shinsuke, said that "'forceful taking away' of comfort women by the military and government authorities could not be confirmed" in any of the documents the government had found, that the figure of "200,000 persons" "lacks concrete evidence," and that "the expression 'sex slaves' contradicts the facts." He noted that a widely cited story by a Japanese man, Yoshida Seiji, of rounding up women by force on Jeju Island had been shown to be "fabricated."

What South Korea and the survivors say. Survivors and their advocates in Korea say that whether women were seized by soldiers or tricked by recruiters working for the army, the result was the same: they were held and raped under military control, a system of sexual slavery, and Japan's state bears legal responsibility. They regard Tokyo's apologies as hedged and its later statements as backsliding.

The two governments tried to close the matter on 28 December 2015. Japan's foreign minister, Kishida Fumio, said the issue, "with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women," that Japan was "painfully aware of responsibilities," and Japan paid ¥1 billion into a Korean foundation for the survivors. Both sides declared the issue resolved "finally and irreversibly." Many survivors rejected the deal, made without consulting them. The next South Korean government shut the foundation down in November 2018.

The courts have gone further. On 23 November 2023 the Seoul High Court ordered Japan to pay 200 million won to each of 16 plaintiffs, among them the survivor Lee Yong-soo, rejecting Japan's claim of sovereign immunity. Japan refused to take part in the case, did not appeal and does not accept the ruling, which its foreign minister, Kamikawa Yōko, called "extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable." Of the 240 women registered as survivors with the South Korean government, only seven were still alive in February 2025.

On these questions the two governments are not arguing about whether something terrible happened. They are arguing about how it happened, what to call it, and who owes what to whom.

Part 9 — Liberation and division (1945–1948)

A line on a map

Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Koreans call it Gwangbokjeol, "the day the light returned," and both Koreas still mark it. But the country's fate had been decided days before, in Washington, by men who knew little about it.

On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and its troops poured into Manchuria and, within days, northern Korea. American forces were far away, in Okinawa. On the night of 10–11 August, two American colonels, Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk, working at short notice and without consulting any Korea experts, were asked to propose where American and Soviet forces should accept Japan's surrender. Using a National Geographic map, they picked the 38th parallel, which put Seoul in the American zone. Rusk later said that had he known more, he "almost surely" would have chosen differently. Stalin accepted the line. About 16 million Koreans lived south of it and 9 million north.

The line was meant only for accepting a surrender. It became a border because each occupier built a Korea in its own image on its side.

Two occupations

As Japanese rule collapsed, a respected moderate leftist, Lyuh Woon-hyung, organised a Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, and local "people's committees" sprang up across the country. On 6 September 1945 a gathering in Seoul proclaimed a Korean People's Republic.

In the north, Soviet troops entered Pyongyang on 24 August and steered power to Korean communists they trusted. Their choice was Kim Il Sung, then 33, the former guerrilla, who had spent the war years as a captain in a Soviet unit of Korean and Chinese exiles and landed at Wonsan on 19 September 1945. In February 1946 a Provisional People's Committee for North Korea was set up with Kim as chairman; in March it confiscated land from Japanese owners, "collaborators" and large landlords and gave it to those who farmed it. Industry was nationalised. Landlords, Christians and many of the middle class fled south.

In the south, American troops under General John Hodge landed at Incheon on 8 September and took the Japanese surrender in Seoul the next day. The United States Army Military Government in Korea refused to recognise the People's Republic, which it regarded as communist-led, and declared it illegitimate in December 1945. For a time it kept Japanese officials in their posts and relied heavily on Korean police and officials who had served the colonial regime, which outraged many Koreans. It favoured conservative and anti-communist Koreans, among them Syngman Rhee, who returned from decades in the United States in October 1945.

The trusteeship fight

In December 1945 the foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, meeting in Moscow, agreed on a plan: a joint commission of the two occupiers would help form a provisional Korean government, and Korea might be placed under a four-power trusteeship for up to five years before full independence. News reached Korea at the end of December, garbled at first by reports that the Americans had wanted immediate independence and the Soviets trusteeship.

Almost every Korean opposed trusteeship at first, as a humiliating return to foreign tutelage. Then, on Soviet instructions, the communists switched to supporting the Moscow plan, while the right made opposition to trusteeship its rallying cry. The issue split Korean politics into two camps and destroyed the middle ground. The joint commission met, deadlocked over which Korean groups to consult, and collapsed in 1947. Moderates who tried to bridge the camps were squeezed out, and some were murdered: Lyuh Woon-hyung was assassinated in Seoul on 19 July 1947.

Two states

In 1947 the United States took the question to the United Nations, which voted for elections across Korea under a UN commission. The Soviet Union kept the commission out of the north. Elections went ahead in the south alone on 10 May 1948, boycotted by the left and by Kim Ku, who opposed any vote that would make division permanent. The new assembly elected Syngman Rhee president, and the Republic of Korea was proclaimed on 15 August 1948. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea followed in the north on 9 September, with Kim Il Sung as premier. Each claimed to be the only legitimate government of all Korea.

On 12 December 1948 the UN General Assembly, in Resolution 195, declared that there had been established "a lawful government" with "effective control and jurisdiction over that part of Korea where the Temporary Commission was able to observe," and that "this is the only such Government in Korea." Seoul has always read that as recognition of the Republic as the only lawful government in Korea; others read "only such Government" as limited to the south. The ambiguity was deliberate.

Blood before the war

The south was already at war with itself. On 3 April 1948, on Jeju Island, communist-led rebels attacked police stations, protesting against the separate election and brutal policing. Government forces and right-wing youth groups crushed the uprising with extreme violence against villagers. A government truth commission reported in 2003 that it had received reports of 14,373 victims, about 86 percent of them killed by security forces, and estimated the total dead at up to 30,000. President Roh Moo-hyun apologised on behalf of the state that year. In October 1948 soldiers in Yeosu mutinied rather than be sent to Jeju; the revolt and its suppression killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians. Kim Ku was assassinated by a South Korean army officer on 26 June 1949, and through 1949 the two armies fought hundreds of skirmishes along the 38th parallel.

Nobody in Korea chose the 38th parallel. But Koreans on both sides chose, and fought over, what to build on either side of it.

Part 10 — The Korean War (1950–1953)

Who started it

At 4:40 in the morning of 25 June 1950, North Korean artillery opened fire along the 38th parallel, and the Korean People's Army crossed it in force, with Soviet-made tanks.

How the war began was once fiercely argued. It no longer is about the basic facts. Soviet documents opened in the 1990s show that Kim Il Sung had been asking Stalin for permission to invade for more than a year; that Stalin agreed during Kim's visit to Moscow from 30 March to 25 April 1950, on condition that Mao Zedong in China also approved; and that Kim then won Mao's backing in May. Soviet officers helped plan the attack.

North Korea's official account is different. It calls the conflict the Fatherland Liberation War and says the South, egged on by the United States, attacked first near the western town of Haeju, and the People's Army counter-attacked. Outside historians reject that account. Some, notably Bruce Cumings, argue that the war is best understood as a civil war rooted in 1945, in the division, the land question and the guerrilla war and border clashes already under way. Most historians accept both points: the North planned and launched the invasion, with Soviet approval, in a conflict that was already a civil war.

Down, up, down

The invasion nearly succeeded. Seoul fell on 28 June; South Korean engineers blew the Han River bridge while it was crowded with refugees and soldiers. The UN Security Council, which the Soviet Union was boycotting, passed Resolution 82 on 25 June calling the attack a breach of the peace and Resolution 83 on 27 June recommending that members help the South repel it. American forces, soon joined by contingents from 15 other countries under the UN flag, were driven back with the South Korean army into a pocket around Busan, the Pusan Perimeter.

On 15 September General Douglas MacArthur landed troops at Incheon, behind the North Korean lines, and the People's Army collapsed. UN forces retook Seoul, crossed the 38th parallel to unify Korea by force, and drove towards the Chinese border. On 19 October 1950, Chinese "People's Volunteer Army" troops began crossing the Yalu in secret. Their winter offensive pushed UN forces back south of Seoul, which changed hands for the fourth time when UN forces recaptured it on 14 March 1951. A city of 1.5 million before the war had about 200,000 people left.

From mid-1951 the front stabilised near the 38th parallel. Armistice talks began in July 1951 and dragged on for two years, mainly over prisoners of war: many Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to go home, and the UN side refused to force them. Meanwhile, the fighting for hills along the front went on, and American bombing destroyed most of the North's cities and towns.

The armistice

At 10 a.m. on 27 July 1953, at Panmunjom, the American general William Harrison and the North Korean general Nam Il signed the armistice. It was then countersigned by the UN commander, General Mark Clark, and by Kim Il Sung and the Chinese commander, Peng Dehuai. South Korea's president, Syngman Rhee, who wanted to keep fighting to unify the country, refused, and the Republic of Korea never signed.

The armistice was only a ceasefire between armies. It created a Demilitarised Zone along the front line, about 4 kilometres wide and 250 kilometres long, and called for a political conference to settle the war. That conference, at Geneva in 1954, failed. No peace treaty has ever been signed. Technically, the Korean War has never ended.

The dead

No one knows how many died. Estimates of the total, soldiers and civilians of every nation, are usually around 3 million, most of them Korean civilians. The North suffered worst: the historian Charles Armstrong estimates that 12 to 15 percent of its people died.

Civilians were killed deliberately by both sides. In the summer of 1950, as the North advanced, South Korean police and soldiers executed political prisoners and members of the Bodo League, a "re-education" organisation for suspected leftists; estimates of the dead run from 60,000 to 200,000. In late July 1950, at No Gun Ri, American troops fired on refugees under a railway bridge; a South Korean government committee in 2005 certified 163 dead or missing, and survivors' groups say 250 to 300. After an Associated Press investigation in 1999, President Bill Clinton expressed regret in 2001. North Korean forces killed "reactionaries" in the territories they held; South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission counted at least 129,000 South Korean civilians killed by them. North Korea teaches that American troops massacred about 35,000 people at Sinchon in 1950; outside historians agree that mass killings took place there but dispute who carried them out and how many died.

The war killed perhaps one Korean in ten, destroyed most of both halves of the country, and changed the border only slightly. Then it stopped, without ending.

Part 11 — South Korea: from Rhee to Park (1948–1979)

The old man

Syngman Rhee was 73 when he became president. Born in 1875, he had been jailed as a young reformer under the Korean Empire, taken a doctorate at Princeton and spent most of the colonial era in the United States, lobbying for Korean independence. He was a fierce anti-communist and a skilled operator, and he governed as an autocrat. A National Security Law passed in 1948 gave the state wide power to jail suspected leftists, and versions of it remain in force. In 1952, in the middle of the war, when the National Assembly would not amend the constitution to let the people elect the president directly (and so let Rhee bypass a hostile assembly), he had opposition legislators arrested until it did. In 1954 another amendment exempted him from the limit of two terms.

The South after the war was among the poorest countries in the world, heavily dependent on American aid. Rhee did accomplish a land reform, under a law of 1949 put into effect from 1950, that broke the power of the old landlord class and created a nation of small farmers. Schooling spread fast. But the economy stagnated and corruption was everywhere.

The April Revolution

On 15 March 1960 Rhee's government rigged the presidential and vice-presidential elections so crudely that protests broke out at once. In the southern port of Masan, police fired on demonstrators. On 11 April the body of a high-school student, Kim Ju-yul, who had disappeared during the protests, was found floating in Masan harbour with a tear-gas canister lodged in his eye. Fury spread to Seoul. On 19 April tens of thousands of students marched on the presidential residence, and police opened fire. In all, 186 people were killed in the uprising. When university professors marched too, and the army declined to suppress the crowds, Rhee resigned on 26 April and left for exile in Hawaii, where he died in 1965.

The parliamentary Second Republic that followed, under Prime Minister Chang Myon, was South Korea's first real democracy. It was chaotic, and lasted barely a year.

The general

On 16 May 1961, a group of army officers led by Major General Park Chung Hee seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Park, born in 1917 to a poor farming family in Gumi, had been a village schoolteacher. In 1939 a Manchurian newspaper reported that he had applied to Japan's puppet state of Manchukuo for officer training with an oath written in his own blood; he trained there under the Japanese name Takagi Masao and served as an officer in its army. After 1945 he joined the South Korean army. In 1948 a military court sentenced him to death for alleged membership of a communist cell; senior officers persuaded Rhee to spare him, and he rose again during the war. He would rule for eighteen years.

Park put the economy at the centre. From 1962 the government launched five-year plans and directed cheap credit to firms that met export targets, turning a handful of family-owned groups, the chaebol (Samsung, Hyundai, LG and others), into giant conglomerates. The state created a steel company at Pohang, opened a Seoul–Busan expressway in 1970, and pushed into shipbuilding, chemicals and cars. The New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong), launched in 1970, brought electricity and roads to villages.

Two decisions of the 1960s, both deeply unpopular at the time, brought money. In 1965 Park normalised relations with Japan, despite mass student protests, in exchange for $300 million in grants and $200 million in government loans that helped fund industrialisation. And from the mid-1960s he sent troops to fight alongside the Americans in Vietnam, about 320,000 over the course of the war, more than any other ally, in return for American aid, military contracts and access to markets.

The results were extraordinary. South Korea's economy grew by an average of about 9.9 percent a year from 1962 to 1991, according to the World Bank. In constant 2015 dollars, its income per person rose from about $1,040 in 1960, slightly less than that of the Philippines, to about $4,140 by 1980. The cost was paid by workers, many of them young women in textile and electronics factories working very long hours for low pay; in 1970 a young garment worker, Jeon Tae-il, set himself on fire in Seoul in protest at sweatshop conditions, and his death made him a lasting symbol of the labour movement.

Yushin

Park won the 1971 presidential election only narrowly against an opposition politician from the south-west, Kim Dae-jung. In October 1972 he staged a coup against his own constitution, declaring martial law, dissolving the National Assembly and imposing the Yushin ("revitalising reform") Constitution, approved in a referendum under martial law on 21 November. It let him be re-elected indefinitely by an electoral college he controlled and rule by decree. Critics were jailed and tortured. In August 1973 agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) kidnapped Kim Dae-jung from a Tokyo hotel; a government panel concluded in 2007 that Park had probably given the operation implicit approval. On 15 August 1974 a North Korean sympathiser fired at Park during a speech; a bullet killed his wife, Yuk Young-soo.

In October 1979, protests broke out in Busan and Masan. On the evening of 26 October 1979, at a dinner in a KCIA safe house near the presidential residence, the director of the KCIA, Kim Jae-gyu, shot Park dead.

South Korea's economy was built by a dictator, and its democracy was built by the people who fought him. Both halves of that sentence are true, and South Koreans still argue about which matters more.

Part 12 — South Korea: Gwangju and the road to democracy (1979–1997)

The Seoul spring and the coup

Park's death opened a brief "Seoul spring" of hope for democracy. It lasted a few months. On 12 December 1979, Major General Chun Doo-hwan, head of the military's Security Command, which was investigating Park's assassination, arrested the army chief of staff, General Jeong Seung-hwa, and seized control of the military in a mutiny within the army. When students and workers demonstrated for democracy in the spring of 1980, Chun's group extended martial law across the country on 17 May 1980, closed the universities and the National Assembly, and arrested opposition leaders, among them Kim Dae-jung.

Gwangju, May 1980

Kim Dae-jung's home region was the south-west, and its largest city, Gwangju, rose. On 18 May students protesting against martial law were attacked by paratroopers of the army's special forces, who beat, bayoneted and shot not only demonstrators but bystanders. Citizens joined in their tens of thousands, seized weapons from police stations and armouries, and drove the troops out of the city. For several days Gwangju governed itself through citizens' councils, with remarkable order. On 27 May the army retook it in a dawn assault.

How many died is still disputed. Official counts recognised about 165 civilians killed and dozens missing; some estimates run to about 600. The government's May 18 truth commission, reporting in 2023, confirmed 135 people shot dead by troops, part of a larger toll it was still investigating. The military regime branded the uprising a communist-inspired riot; in 1997 South Korea made 18 May a national day of commemoration. A fringe on the far right still repeats the claim that North Korean agents were behind it; declassified American intelligence cables and later South Korean investigations found no evidence of that.

Many South Koreans also blamed the United States, which held wartime operational control of South Korea's forces and was seen to have approved the movement of troops to Gwangju. Anti-Americanism among students grew from Gwangju onwards.

Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death for sedition. Under pressure from the incoming Reagan administration, Chun commuted the sentence in January 1981.

Chun's Fifth Republic

Chun made himself president in 1980 and ruled under a new constitution that limited the president to a single seven-year term. He purged the press, and in 1980–81 about 42,000 people were sent to brutal military "purification" camps, known as the Samchung camps. The economy boomed. Seoul won the right to host the 1988 Olympic Games.

The North, meanwhile, turned to terrorism. On 9 October 1983, North Korean agents set off a bomb at a mausoleum in Rangoon, Burma, during a visit by Chun; he escaped, but the blast killed 21 people, among them four South Korean cabinet ministers, including the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister. On 29 November 1987, Korean Air Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 aboard; a North Korean agent arrested in Bahrain, Kim Hyon-hui, confessed that she and a colleague had planted the bomb on orders from Pyongyang. North Korea denies both attacks.

June 1987

In January 1987 a Seoul National University student, Park Jong-chul, died under police torture, and the police tried to cover it up. On 13 April Chun suspended debate on constitutional reform until after the Olympics, which meant his successor would be chosen indirectly, in effect by Chun himself. On 9 June a Yonsei University student, Lee Han-yeol, was struck in the head by a tear-gas canister and later died. From 10 June, hundreds of thousands, then millions, of students and office workers filled the streets for nearly three weeks: the June Democratic Struggle.

On 29 June 1987, Chun's chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, a fellow general from the 1979 coup, gave way. His "June 29 Declaration" promised direct presidential elections, an amnesty for Kim Dae-jung and freedom of the press. A new constitution, still in force today, was approved that autumn.

In the election of December 1987 the two great opposition leaders, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, both ran, splitting the vote, 28 percent and 27 percent. Roh won with 36.6 percent. The Olympics went ahead in Seoul in 1988. Under Roh's "Nordpolitik," South Korea opened relations with the Soviet Union in 1990 and China in 1992, and in 1991 both Koreas joined the United Nations as separate members.

In 1990 Kim Young-sam merged his party with Roh's, and in December 1992 he won the presidency, the first civilian elected to it since 1960. He had his predecessors arrested. In 1996 Chun and Roh were convicted of mutiny, treason and corruption over the 1979 coup and the Gwangju killings. Chun was sentenced to death, commuted on appeal to life imprisonment; Roh received a long prison term. Both were pardoned in December 1997.

Democracy did not come to South Korea as a gift. It came, in 1960 and again in 1987, because students and then ordinary citizens kept coming back into the streets after being shot at.

Part 13 — South Korea: crash, Sunshine and the Korean wave (1997–2022)

The IMF crisis

By 1996 South Korea had joined the OECD, the club of rich countries. Its chaebol had borrowed heavily, often short-term and in foreign currency. When the Asian financial crisis broke in 1997, the debts came due: the steel group Hanbo collapsed early in the year, the carmaker Kia sought emergency loans in July, and foreign lenders pulled out. By late 1997 the central bank had almost run out of foreign currency.

On 4 December 1997 the International Monetary Fund approved a $21 billion loan, the core of a rescue package of about $55 billion including money from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and individual countries. In return, South Korea had to cut spending, raise interest rates, open its markets and restructure its banks and conglomerates. Of the 30 largest chaebol, 11 collapsed; Daewoo went under in mid-1999 with about $80 billion in debts. The economy shrank by 4.9 percent in 1998, by the World Bank's figures. Koreans call it simply "the IMF crisis."

What people remember most is the gold-collecting campaign of early 1998, when about 3.5 million citizens donated wedding rings, medals and jewellery, about 227 tonnes of gold in all, to help repay the debts. The economy bounced back with 11.6 percent growth in 1999, but the old promise of a job for life was gone, and insecure temporary work spread.

Kim Dae-jung and the Sunshine Policy

In the middle of the crisis, in December 1997, Kim Dae-jung, the long-persecuted opposition leader, won the presidency. It was the first time in South Korean history that power had passed peacefully to the opposition.

Kim's North Korea policy, named after Aesop's fable in which the sun, not the wind, persuades a traveller to take off his coat, was the Sunshine Policy: aid, trade, tourism and family reunions, in the hope of changing the North gradually. From 13 to 15 June 2000 Kim flew to Pyongyang for the first-ever summit with Kim Jong Il, and that year won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hyundai ran tourist trips to Mount Kumgang in the North, and from 2004 South Korean firms employed North Korean workers at the Kaesong Industrial Region, just north of the border. Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, held a second summit in Pyongyang on 2–4 October 2007.

Sunshine still divides South Koreans. Its supporters say it lowered tension, reunited families and showed North Koreans the South's prosperity. Its critics say it sent cash to a regime that used the breathing space to build nuclear weapons; in 2003 it emerged that Hyundai had secretly paid the North hundreds of millions of dollars before the 2000 summit.

The conservative presidents who followed, Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), tied aid to nuclear disarmament. The Kumgang tours ended in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot a South Korean tourist. On 26 March 2010 the navy corvette Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors; an international investigation led by South Korea concluded that a North Korean torpedo had sunk it, which the North denies. In November 2010 the North shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing four people. The Kaesong complex closed in 2016.

Tragedy and impeachment

On 16 April 2014 the ferry Sewol capsized off the south-west coast, and 304 people died, most of them high-school students on a school trip who had been told by the crew to stay in their cabins. The disaster, and the government's slow and confused response, became a national trauma.

Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung Hee and South Korea's first woman president, was brought down in 2016 by a scandal over her confidante, Choi Soon-sil, who held no office but edited the president's speeches and extracted money from chaebol for foundations she controlled. Millions joined weekly candlelight protests. On 9 December 2016 the National Assembly impeached Park by 234 votes to 56, and on 10 March 2017 the Constitutional Court removed her unanimously. She was sentenced to a long prison term and pardoned in December 2021.

The progressive Moon Jae-in, elected in May 2017, revived engagement with the North (Part 17). He left office in 2022, succeeded by a conservative former prosecutor, Yoon Suk Yeol, who beat Lee Jae-myung by less than one percentage point, the narrowest margin since direct elections returned in 1987.

The Korean wave

Over these same years, South Korea became a cultural superpower. Chinese journalists coined the term Hallyu, the "Korean wave," in 1999 for the spreading popularity of Korean dramas and pop music. The romance drama Winter Sonata became a phenomenon in Japan in 2003–04; K-pop groups, trained for years by entertainment companies, followed, and Psy's "Gangnam Style" in 2012 and BTS from the late 2010s took the wave worldwide.

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or in 2019 and, in February 2020, the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first film not in English to do so. Netflix's Squid Game, a bleak drama about debt, became the platform's most-watched series after its release in September 2021. In 2024 the novelist Han Kang, born in Gwangju in 1970, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Asian woman to do so, for what the Swedish Academy called her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." Her novel Human Acts is about Gwangju in 1980.

The disappearing children

The same society produces fewer children than any other on Earth. South Korea's total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime, fell to 0.72 in 2023, according to official statistics, and stood at 0.75 in 2024, the lowest of any country in the World Bank's data (only the Chinese territory of Macao reported lower). It rose to about 0.80 in 2025, with 254,300 births, a 6.7 percent increase, according to South Korea's national statistics agency, the second rise in a row after years of decline. A replacement-level rate is about 2.1. Already more than a fifth of South Koreans are 65 or older.

The reasons people give are the ones the companion piece in this library describes: Seoul's housing costs, the expense and intensity of schooling, long working hours, and a culture in which women who have children pay a heavy career price.

The country that grew rich fastest is also the country that is shrinking fastest. South Korea's success and its demographic crisis come from the same place: a society that asks almost everything of its young.

Part 14 — South Korea: martial law and after (2022–2026)

The night of 3 December 2024

Yoon Suk Yeol's presidency was troubled from the start. The opposition Democratic Party, which controlled the National Assembly, blocked his budgets and impeached a series of his officials; his wife, Kim Keon-hee, was dogged by scandals; and his party lost the parliamentary election of April 2024 heavily. A crowd crush during Halloween in Seoul's Itaewon district on 29 October 2022, which killed more than 150 young people, had left another lasting grievance.

At 10:27 p.m. on 3 December 2024, Yoon appeared on television and declared emergency martial law, saying he needed to protect the country from "anti-state" forces and to root out what he called pro-North Korean elements in the opposition. A martial law decree banned all political activity, including by the National Assembly, and put the press under military control. Special forces troops arrived at the National Assembly by helicopter and tried to enter the building.

What happened next became one of the defining images of South Korean democracy. Thousands of citizens rushed to the Assembly and confronted the soldiers. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung live-streamed himself climbing over the fence. Aides barricaded doors with furniture. At about 1 a.m. on 4 December, all 190 lawmakers who had made it inside, including members of Yoon's own party, voted to lift martial law. Yoon withdrew it at about 4:30 a.m.

On 14 December the National Assembly impeached him, with 204 of its 300 members voting in favour, including 12 from his own People Power Party. On 15 January 2025, after weeks in which his security service blocked arrest attempts at his residence, investigators detained him, the first time a sitting South Korean president had been arrested. He was indicted on charges of leading an insurrection on 26 January, released on procedural grounds on 8 March, and on 4 April 2025 the Constitutional Court removed him from office by a unanimous 8–0 vote.

President Lee Jae-myung

The snap election of 3 June 2025 was won by the Democratic Party's Lee Jae-myung with 49.42 percent of the vote, against 41.15 percent for the conservative Kim Moon-soo and 8.34 percent for Lee Jun-seok, on a turnout of 79.38 percent. Lee took office the next day. Born into poverty near Andong, he had worked in factories as a child, where an accident left him with a permanently injured arm, before becoming a human-rights lawyer, mayor of Seongnam and governor of Gyeonggi province. His supporters see a self-made outsider who defends ordinary people; his critics, a populist who faced several criminal trials of his own, which the courts postponed once he became president.

Lee set out to calm relations with Japan and the United States and to reopen contact with the North, which rebuffed him. A trade deal with the Trump administration, agreed in October 2025 and set out in a joint fact sheet on 14 November, capped American tariffs on most South Korean goods at 15 percent in exchange for $350 billion in South Korean investment in the United States, $200 billion of it in cash at no more than $20 billion a year and $150 billion in shipbuilding. Washington also agreed to support South Korea's plans for nuclear-powered submarines.

The trials

Special prosecutors pursued Yoon, his wife and his former officials. On 16 January 2026 a court sentenced Yoon to five years for obstructing his arrest and abusing his power. On 21 January his former prime minister, Han Duck-soo, received 23 years. On 19 February 2026, the Seoul Central District Court found Yoon guilty of leading an insurrection and sentenced him to life imprisonment; prosecutors had sought the death penalty. His former defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, received 30 years. As of late October 2026 Yoon's appeal was still before the Seoul High Court, where the special counsel again asked for death; a ruling was expected around the end of the year. (South Korea has not carried out an execution since 1997.)

The country in late 2026

In local elections on 3 June 2026, Lee's Democratic Party won most of the races for provincial governors and big-city mayors, though the conservative mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, held on with 49.15 percent to 48.13 percent. The vote was marred by a shortage of ballot papers at some polling stations, which forced the head of the National Election Commission to resign and led to a joint parliamentary investigation.

By late October 2026, Lee's approval rating in Gallup Korea's weekly poll was around 40 percent, with half the public disapproving; housing prices were the top complaint. The Democratic Party led the People Power Party in party support by 37 percent to 28.

On the night of 3 December 2024, a South Korean president tried to use the army against the parliament, and citizens, legislators and in the end the courts stopped him. Few events say more about how far the country has come since 1980.

Part 15 — North Korea: Kim Il Sung's state (1945–1994)

The founder

North Korea is the creation of one man and the family that succeeded him. Kim Il Sung was born Kim Song-ju near Pyongyang on 15 April 1912, a date the North celebrates as the Day of the Sun. His family moved to Manchuria, where in the 1930s he became a guerrilla commander in a Chinese Communist–led army fighting the Japanese. His best-known exploit was a raid on the town of Pochonbo, on the Korean side of the border, on 4 June 1937. In October 1940, hunted by the Japanese, he fled across the Amur into the Soviet Union, where he served as a captain in a Soviet brigade of Korean and Chinese exiles. He returned to Korea in a Soviet uniform in September 1945.

North Korea's official histories tell a different story: that Kim led a great Korean People's Revolutionary Army that fought the Japanese for fifteen years and liberated the country in 1945, with the Soviet Army in a supporting role. Outside historians agree that Kim was a genuine, brave and relatively successful guerrilla leader, but say his units were small, part of a Chinese-led force, and that Korea was liberated by Japan's defeat in the Pacific and the Soviet invasion, not by Korean partisans.

Building a one-man state

After the war, Kim removed every rival. Pak Hon-yong, leader of the southern communists who had come north, was blamed for the war's failure and executed in the mid-1950s. In August 1956, while Kim was abroad, officials from pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions planned to criticise his personality cult at a party meeting. Kim outmanoeuvred them; when a joint Chinese–Soviet delegation, led by Peng Dehuai and Anastas Mikoyan, came to force him to restore those he had purged, he gave way briefly and then completed the purge. By the end of the 1950s no faction remained but his own.

In December 1955 Kim gave a speech calling for juche in ideological work, a word usually translated as "self-reliance" or "subjecthood": Korea should do things in its own way, not copy the Soviet Union or China. Over the next two decades, Juche was elaborated, largely by the party theorist Hwang Jang-yop (who defected to the South in 1997), into an all-embracing state ideology centred on the leader. In 1972 a new constitution made Kim president.

Economic mobilisation followed the Soviet model: collective farms, state industry and mass campaigns. The Chollima Movement, launched in the late 1950s and named after a mythical winged horse that could gallop a thousand li a day, urged workers to superhuman effort. For a time it worked. Rebuilding from the war's ruins, with Soviet, Chinese and East European aid, the North grew fast, and most economists believe it was richer per person than the South until at some point in the 1970s.

The state also sorted every citizen by family background. The system called songbun, set up by the late 1960s, divides the population into three broad classes, "core," "wavering" and "hostile," with about 50 subcategories. Descendants of anti-Japanese fighters and war dead sit at the top; descendants of landlords, Christians, collaborators and people who went south sit at the bottom. Songbun decides where people may live, what schooling and jobs they get, and whether they may join the party.

Between two patrons

North Korea depended on the Soviet Union and China but played them against each other, especially after their split in the early 1960s. In July 1961 it signed mutual defence treaties with both; the one with China, signed in Beijing on 11 July 1961, is still in force. Kim tilted towards one patron or the other as it suited him, and Juche's stress on independence was partly a way to keep both at arm's length.

He never gave up on taking the South. On 21 January 1968, 31 North Korean commandos got within a few hundred metres of the Blue House, the South Korean presidential residence, in an attempt to kill Park Chung Hee. Two days later, the North seized the American intelligence ship Pueblo and held its crew for eleven months. On 18 August 1976, at Panmunjom, North Korean soldiers killed two American officers with axes during a dispute over trimming a tree. From 1977 to 1983 North Korean agents abducted Japanese citizens, which the North admitted only in 2002; Japan recognises 17 victims.

There were moments of contact. On 4 July 1972, after secret visits by envoys, the two Koreas issued a joint statement committing to unification "independently," "peacefully" and through "great national unity." Little came of it.

The cult and the succession

Kim Il Sung's personality cult grew to a scale unmatched in the modern world. His portrait hung in every home and workplace; children were taught to thank him for their food. From the 1970s he groomed his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, to succeed him, the first hereditary succession in a communist state. Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack on 8 July 1994, at 82. A 1998 revision of the constitution named him the "eternal President of the Republic," and the North counts its years in a Juche calendar beginning with his birth in 1912.

North Korea's founding myth says Kim Il Sung liberated Korea. The truth, that the Soviet army did, is the first thing the state had to hide, and the habit of hiding has never stopped.

Part 16 — North Korea: famine, military first and the bomb (1994–2011)

The collapse of the patrons

By the time Kim Il Sung died, the world that had sustained his state was gone. The Soviet Union, which for decades had supplied oil, machinery and fertiliser on easy terms, began demanding payment at world prices in hard currency at the start of the 1990s, and then dissolved in 1991. China normalised relations with South Korea in 1992. North Korea's collective farms depended on fertiliser, fuel and electric pumps it could no longer get, and its factories stalled for lack of energy and parts. The economy shrank year after year in the early 1990s.

The Arduous March

Then came the floods of 1995, which destroyed crops and grain stores, followed by more floods and drought. The state's Public Distribution System, which had fed most of the population with rations, broke down; by 1997 it was supplying only a small fraction of the people, about 6 percent by one estimate. Millions survived by foraging, bartering, crossing into China or trading in illegal markets. The regime called the period the "Arduous March," after a legendary winter retreat by Kim Il Sung's guerrillas in the 1930s, and urged endurance.

How many died is not known and may never be.

The World Bank's modelled figures for life expectancy show the scale of the shock: from 70.5 years in 1990 to 60.9 in 2000. International agencies, led by the UN's World Food Programme, delivered large amounts of food aid from 1995, though the regime controlled where it went and restricted monitoring.

The famine changed North Korea permanently, in a way the regime never intended. When the state stopped feeding people, they began to feed themselves through private trade, and the markets (Part 18) never went away.

Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il was born on 16 February 1941, most likely in a Soviet army camp in the Russian Far East, where his father was then based. His official biography says he was born a year later, in 1942, in a secret guerrilla camp on Mount Paektu, Korea's sacred mountain, under a double rainbow. He had been groomed as heir since the 1970s and ran much of the state, including its film industry, before his father died. He let three years of mourning pass before taking the top party post of general secretary on 8 October 1997.

His signature policy was songun, "military first," proclaimed from 1995: the army, and its needs, came before everything else, including the party. In practice it gave the military first claim on food and resources during the famine, and justified the nuclear and missile programmes as the guarantee of the state's survival.

The nuclear road

North Korea's nuclear work went back to a Soviet-supplied research reactor at Yongbyon in the 1960s. In 1993, in a dispute over international inspections, the North announced that it would withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The Agreed Framework of October 1994 defused the crisis: the North froze its plutonium programme in exchange for fuel oil and two light-water reactors to be built by an international consortium. In 2002 the United States accused the North of a secret uranium enrichment programme; the deal collapsed, and in January 2003 the North left the NPT for good.

From 2003, six-party talks (the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia) produced statements of principle, including one in September 2005 in which the North committed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs," but never a lasting deal. On 9 October 2006 North Korea conducted its first nuclear test. A second followed on 25 May 2009. The six-party talks last met in December 2008, and North Korea quit them in April 2009.

The missiles went on alongside. In August 1998 the North launched a Taepodong-1 rocket over Japan, which it said carried a satellite.

The 2000 summit and its limits

Kim Jong Il was also the leader who embraced Kim Dae-jung at Pyongyang airport in June 2000, took South Korean aid and investment, and admitted to Japan in 2002 that the North had abducted Japanese citizens. Supporters of engagement saw an opening; sceptics saw a leader who took the money and kept building weapons. Both may have been right.

In August 2008 Kim suffered a stroke. He began preparing his youngest son for power. On 17 December 2011 he died of a heart attack, aged 70, while travelling on his train.

The famine and the bomb belong to the same years. While hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, were dying of hunger, the state chose to put what it had into the army and the weapons it believed would keep the regime alive.

Part 17 — North Korea: Kim Jong Un and the "two hostile states" (2011–2026)

The third Kim

Kim Jong Un was born in 1982, 1983 or 1984; the date is uncertain. He spent several years of his childhood at schools in Switzerland under an assumed name, then studied in Pyongyang. Almost unknown outside the country when his father died, he took over in December 2011, in his late twenties.

He moved fast to secure his position. Many senior officials and generals were replaced. In December 2013 his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, long seen as the second most powerful man in the country, was arrested at a party meeting and executed for treason. On 13 February 2017, his elder half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who lived in exile, was killed at Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia when two women smeared his face with VX nerve agent; Malaysian authorities identified several North Korean suspects, who had flown home. North Korea denies involvement.

At home Kim at first allowed farms and factories more say over what they produced and sold, tolerated the markets, and gave Pyongyang new apartment towers and a ski resort. He also restored the party's central place, quietly downgrading songun.

The race to an ICBM

Above all, Kim made the nuclear programme the centre of state policy. Four of the North's six nuclear tests came in his first six years. In 2017 the North tested its first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Hwasong-14 on 4 July and the larger Hwasong-15 on 28–29 November, which analysts calculated could reach the whole of the United States. President Donald Trump threatened "fire and fury like the world has never seen." The UN Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions yet, restricting the North's exports of coal, textiles and seafood and its imports of oil.

Summits

Then Kim changed course. His sister, Kim Yo Jong, attended the opening of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February 2018. On 27 April 2018 Kim met President Moon Jae-in at Panmunjom, stepping briefly into the South, and the two promised to work towards "complete denuclearization" of the peninsula. On 12 June 2018, in Singapore, Kim met Trump, the first meeting between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader. They signed a short statement of principles, and Moon visited Pyongyang in September.

At a second summit in Hanoi on 27–28 February 2019, the deal collapsed. North Korea offered to dismantle its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon in exchange for lifting the UN sanctions imposed in 2016–17, the ones that hit hardest; the Americans wanted more, and walked away. A brief meeting at Panmunjom on 30 June 2019, when Trump stepped into the North, produced nothing. In January 2020 the North sealed its borders against COVID-19, and on 16 June 2020 it blew up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, opened under the 2018 agreements.

"Two hostile states"

At a party meeting in December 2023, Kim declared that relations between North and South were no longer those of one nation temporarily divided, but of "states hostile to each other" and "two belligerent states." On 15 January 2024, he told the Supreme People's Assembly that the constitution should define South Korea as the "primary foe and invariable principal enemy." The bodies that had handled relations with the South for decades, including a committee for peaceful reunification that dated back to 1961, were abolished. The Arch of Reunification was torn down within days. On 15 October 2024 the North blew up the roads and railway lines that had connected it to the South across the border.

The constitution has been revised several times since. Its March 2026 version, as analysed by the North Korea specialist Rachel Minyoung Lee for the website 38 North, deleted language about unification and about a single Korean nation, and added a clause defining the country's territory by its borders with China and Russia to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south, without mentioning the disputed sea border. The text does not, however, codify the phrase "hostile state" that North Korean state media had used. At the party's Ninth Congress in February 2026, Kim called the South the North's "most hostile state," said the North would never treat South Koreans as "fellow countrymen," and said Pyongyang could get along with the United States if Washington accepted its nuclear status.

Why the turn? Pyongyang's own explanation is that the South, allied with the United States, wants to absorb the North, so talk of unification was pointless. Outside analysts add that the regime fears its people's exposure to South Korean culture and wants to cut the idea of a shared nation at the root, and that with nuclear weapons and a Russian partner, Kim no longer needs the South. The South's progressive government under Lee Jae-myung responded with conciliation, halting some propaganda broadcasts, and in March 2026 its unification minister for the first time referred to the North by its official name. Pyongyang brushed the overtures aside.

Russia

The biggest change in North Korea's position came from the war in Ukraine. From 2023 the North supplied Russia with artillery shells, millions of them by most estimates, and ballistic missiles. On 19 June 2024 Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, which promises mutual military assistance if either is attacked. From October 2024 North Korean troops were sent to Russia's Kursk region against a Ukrainian incursion. Russia's chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, acknowledged their role on 26 April 2025, and North Korea two days later. South Korea's National Intelligence Service estimated in February 2026 that about 11,000 had been sent and about 6,000 killed or wounded. In return, the North is believed to receive oil, food, money and military technology.

The nuclear arsenal has kept growing. North Korea wrote its status as a nuclear weapons state into its constitution in September 2023. On 31 October 2024 it tested the Hwasong-19, a solid-fuel ICBM that flew for about 86 minutes, its longest flight yet. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated in its 2026 yearbook that the North had about 60 assembled nuclear warheads and enough fissile material for up to 90.

Kim Il Sung said Korea was one nation and must be united on his terms. His grandson has decided it is two states, and that his half needs only the bomb and the friends it can buy.

Part 18 — Inside North Korea: rights, markets and daily life

What the UN found

In 2013 the UN Human Rights Council set up a Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea, led by the Australian judge Michael Kirby, with Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia and Sonja Biserko of Serbia. North Korea refused to let it in. More than 80 witnesses and experts testified at its public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, and it conducted more than 240 confidential interviews, mostly with people who had escaped. Its report, dated 7 February 2014 and released on 17 February, concluded:

"Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials. In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. ... The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

It estimated that "between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large political prison camps," where the inmate population had been "gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape" and other abuses, and hundreds of thousands had died over five decades. It described songbun discrimination, the near-total denial of freedom of thought, expression and religion, the punishment of whole families for one member's offence, and the abduction of foreigners, and found that North Koreans forcibly returned from China were systematically tortured and imprisoned.

What Pyongyang says

North Korea rejected the report "categorically and totally." Its officials called the evidence "fabricated and invented," described the inquiry as a political conspiracy by the United States and "hostile forces" and an "instrument of political plot" aimed at overthrowing its system, and dismissed the witnesses as criminals and "human scum." North Korea denies that political prison camps exist. It says its constitution guarantees the rights of its citizens, who enjoy free housing, education and health care, and that it is the victim of a hostile United States that has kept it under sanctions and nuclear threat since 1950.

Outside researchers weigh the evidence this way: the commission could not visit, and individual testimonies can be wrong, but the accounts of hundreds of witnesses, from different places and years, are consistent with each other and with satellite images of the camps. Most independent experts accept the commission's central findings.

The markets

The single biggest change in ordinary life since the 1990s is the jangmadang, the market. When rations stopped during the famine, people started selling whatever they could: vegetables from private plots, goods smuggled from China, home-made food. The state first tried to stamp out the trade, then tolerated it, and then licensed and taxed it. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington counted 436 official markets visible in satellite images in 2018.

Women run most of the trading. Men are tied to their official jobs, which pay almost nothing but must be attended; married women were freer to trade, and in many families they became the main earners. A generation that grew up after the famine, sometimes called the "jangmadang generation," learned to rely on the market rather than the state.

The regime has swung between tolerance and crackdown. In 2009 it suddenly revalued the currency, wiping out many traders' cash savings, and backed down after protests and inflation. Since the early 2020s it has again tightened control; according to reports from informants inside the country collected by outlets such as Daily NK and Asia Press, private sales of rice and corn were banned in 2023 in favour of state grain shops. Such reports are hard to confirm independently, and should be read with that in mind.

Daily life

North Korea is two countries itself. Pyongyang, where the most loyal families are allowed to live, has the most reliable electricity, new towers, restaurants and shops for those with money. The countryside is far poorer; the World Bank estimates that only about 61 percent of North Koreans had access to electricity in 2024, and that close to half the population was undernourished in the late 2010s.

Every adult belongs to an organisation, a party cell, a youth league, a women's union, and attends weekly sessions of self-criticism. Neighbourhood units of a few dozen households watch each other. Radios and televisions are fixed to state channels. Military service for men has long been among the longest in the world, by most accounts close to a decade. Travel within the country needs a permit, and travel abroad is forbidden without state approval.

Information is the regime's greatest fear. South Korean dramas and K-pop, smuggled in on USB sticks and memory cards from China, became widespread in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2020 law, the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture, set punishments ranging from forced labour to death for distributing South Korean material. Defectors report that teenagers have been punished for using South Korean slang.

North Korea's people have not stopped living their lives because their state is cruel. They trade, watch forbidden dramas, raise children and look after one another, in a system that treats most of what they do as a crime.

Part 19 — Two Koreas side by side

One people, two outcomes

In 1945 the two halves of Korea had the same language, the same history and broadly the same culture. The north had more of the colonial-era industry and the south more of the farmland. Eighty years later, the gap between them is one of the widest between any two neighbouring countries on Earth.

The Bank of Korea's estimates for the North are the most widely cited, but they rest on limited information and are converted using South Korean prices, so they are best read as a rough guide.

People who crossed

Since the 1990s, more than 34,000 North Koreans have reached South Korea, most through China and then South-East Asia, a dangerous journey usually arranged by brokers. Arrivals peaked at 2,914 in 2009, fell after Kim Jong Un tightened the border, and collapsed when the North sealed it in 2020: 236 arrived in 2024 and 224 in 2025. More than seven in ten are women, many of whom spent years in China, some sold into forced marriages. In the South they are citizens on arrival and go through a three-month resettlement programme at a centre called Hanawon. Many struggle with discrimination and a school system nothing prepared them for; a few have become well-known politicians and writers.

Families that never met again

The division separated hundreds of thousands of families, many of whom fled south during the war expecting to return within weeks. Since 1988, 134,516 South Koreans have registered with their government hoping to find relatives in the North. By the end of 2025 more than 100,000 of them had died, and about 34,600 were still alive, most of them very old. Government-organised reunions, a few hundred people at a time meeting for a few hours under official watch, became regular after the 2000 summit; the last took place in August 2018. For most of the living, there will be no more.

A language drifting apart

Korean is still one language, but eighty years apart have pulled it in two directions. The South absorbed thousands of English loanwords; the North replaced many foreign and Chinese-derived words with native coinages and bases its standard on the speech of Pyongyang. The South teaches 24 basic letters, the North a list of 40 that includes double and compound letters. Defectors say they understand South Koreans, but are instantly identified by their accent and vocabulary.

What unification would mean

Both Koreas spent decades saying they wanted unification, but the meaning always differed. For Pyongyang it meant a confederation on its terms or unification under its system; for Seoul, in practice, the North joining the democratic South, though progressive governments put reconciliation and coexistence first. The South still has a Ministry of Unification; the North has abolished its counterparts. President Lee Jae-myung said in March 2026 that the South "respects North Korea's system" and would not pursue "unification by absorption."

The costs would be enormous: rebuilding the North's infrastructure, integrating two populations with very different skills and expectations, and dealing with an army of over a million, a nuclear arsenal and the legacy of the camps. Germany's experience after 1990, when the gap between east and west was far smaller, is the usual comparison, and the usual warning.

The line of 1945 was drawn in one night by two officers with a small map. Eighty years later, it divides two populations that differ in health, wealth and freedom more than almost any other neighbours on Earth.

Part 20 — How to understand Korea today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the peninsula

1. One nation, very old; two states, very new. Korea had a single, mostly stable kingdom on roughly the same territory from the tenth century to 1910. That long unity is why both Koreas long insisted that division was temporary, and why North Korea's decision to call the South a separate, hostile state is such a break with the past.

2. Between whales. Korea's location has always meant pressure from bigger neighbours. China was the centre of its world for two thousand years; Japan conquered it; the United States and the Soviet Union divided it. Today the South relies on the American alliance while trading heavily with China, and the North relies on China and now Russia. Much of each state's behaviour makes sense as an answer to that old problem.

3. The colonial past is not past. Japan's rule from 1910 to 1945 shaped Korean nationalism, the economy, the division and the political divide inside South Korea. The questions of forced labour and the "comfort women" are still argued in courts and cabinets in both countries.

4. Two models, one test. From the same starting point, one half became a rich, open democracy and the other a poor, closed dictatorship with nuclear weapons. That is the clearest natural experiment of the twentieth century in what institutions do to people's lives. It is also a reminder that the South's success was not inevitable: it came out of dictatorship, massacre, crisis and protest.

5. South Korea argues with itself. The South's conservatives and progressives disagree about almost every chapter of this history: Park Chung Hee, Japan, the North, the United States, China, even Gwangju for a fringe. Each camp has its own memory of the past, and each election is partly a vote on which memory wins.

For a thousand years, the question in Korea was how one people could stay free between empires. Since 1945, it has also been what that people does with two states, one line and a war that never formally ended.

The takeaway

Korea's history is the story of one people who built a lasting civilisation between larger powers: ancient kingdoms, a Buddhist Goryeo that printed with metal type before Europe, and a Confucian Joseon that invented its own alphabet and lasted five centuries. Forced open in 1876 and annexed by Japan in 1910, Koreans endured thirty-five years of colonial rule, including wartime forced labour and the "comfort women" system that the two countries still argue over. In 1945 two American officers drew a line at the 38th parallel; by 1948 two hostile states stood on either side of it, and the war of 1950–53 killed perhaps three million people without ending. The South went from poverty and dictatorship to wealth, democracy and global cultural influence, and in 2024–25 showed that its democracy could stop a president who turned the army against parliament. The North became a hereditary dictatorship that survived famine, built nuclear weapons, allied itself with Russia and now says the South is a foreign enemy. Both still carry the same past.

Try this: find a map of the Korean peninsula and trace the 38th parallel and the Demilitarised Zone. Then pick one family story from this history (a divided family, the Jeju villagers of 1948, a defector) and ask: if the line had been drawn fifty kilometres further north or south, how would that person's life have been different? Then read the first chapter of Han Kang's Human Acts or Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, and notice how much of each country's present is still about what happened to ordinary people in its past.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (accessed October 2026): population, GDP per person, life expectancy, child mortality, fertility, urbanisation, electricity access, undernourishment and age structure for both Koreas.
- Bank of Korea, North Korean GDP estimates for 2025 (31 July 2026).
- United Nations: General Assembly Resolution 195 (III) (1948); Security Council Resolutions 82 and 83 (1950); Commission of Inquiry report A/HRC/25/63 (7 February 2014), quoted directly; North Korea's response as reported by Reuters and Al Jazeera (17 February 2014).
- "Comfort women" and forced labour: statement by Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Sugiyama Shinsuke to the UN women's-rights committee (16 February 2016, archived Ministry of Foreign Affairs text); the Kono Statement (1993) and the 2015 agreement as quoted in the scholarly literature; South Korean court rulings of 30 October 2018 and 23 November 2023 as reported by Yonhap, The Korea Herald and The Korea Times.
- War deaths: Peace Research Institute Oslo; Bruce Cumings; Guenter Lewy; South Korea's Ministry of National Defense; US Department of Defense; Chinese official figures (2010, 2020). Famine: North Korean figures (1999); US Census Bureau (2011); Andrew Natsios; Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea (2007).
- North Korea since 2023: KCNA via Yonhap and NK News; Rachel Minyoung Lee, 38 North (21 May 2026); Korea Economic Institute of America (27 February 2026); National Intelligence Service briefings via Yonhap; SIPRI Yearbook 2026.
- South Korea 2024–26: Constitutional Court ruling (4 April 2025); National Election Commission results (2025, 2026); court rulings of January–February 2026 via Yonhap and The Korea Herald; US–ROK joint fact sheet (14 November 2025); Gallup Korea (October 2026); official birth and fertility statistics.
- Earlier periods cross-checked against the scholarly works cited in standard reference articles; each claim is logged with its source.

Go deeper
- 📘 Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings (a vivid, opinionated history from Joseon to the present, strongest on 1945–53 and the American role)
- 📘 A Concise History of Korea — Michael J. Seth (a clear, balanced survey from the beginnings to the present, good for every part of this piece)
- 📘 The Real North Korea — Andrei Lankov (a Russian scholar who studied in Pyongyang explains how the North's system actually works)
- 📘 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea — Barbara Demick (six people from one northern city live through the famine; reported from defector interviews)
- 📘 Human Acts — Han Kang (the Nobel laureate's novel of the Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath)
- 🌐 Columbia University, Asia for Educators (http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/): free primary sources and short essays on Korean history
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: South Korea: A Condensed History of Division, Speed, and Reinvention; If I Was Born in South Korea; A Brief History of Japan and A Brief History of China (this series)