At dawn in Seoul, the express trains are already running and the city is half awake beneath a mountain of apartment blocks. Half of South Korea’s 52 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, and yet the country is only the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, pressed between North Korea and the Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and the Sea of Japan to the east.

This place began long before the Republic of Korea. The peninsula was inhabited in the Lower Paleolithic period, and Chinese records noted a first kingdom in the early seventh century BC. From the mid first century BC, Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla rose as rivals, before Silla unified most of the peninsula in the late seventh century AD. Later came Balhae in the north, then Goryeo, founded in 918 by Wang Geon, which gave Korea a lasting unity and the very name that merchants carried west as “Korea”.

Joseon followed in 1392 under Yi Seong-gye, who moved the capital to Hanseong, now Seoul. In that long dynasty, Sejong the Great created Hangul in 1446 to widen literacy, while Admiral Yi Sun-sin fought Japan in the invasions of 1592 to 1598 with his famed turtle ships. But by the 19th century, isolation was failing, and in 1910 Japan annexed Korea outright, suppressing language and culture until surrender in World War II ended the occupation in 1945.

After Japan’s defeat, the peninsula was split into Soviet and American zones. The South became the Republic of Korea in August 1948, with Syngman Rhee as its first president. Then, on 25 June 1950, North Korea invaded, and the Korean War drew in the United Nations Command and Chinese forces. The armistice of 1953 ended the fighting but not the war itself, and about three million Koreans were dead while the economy lay in ruins.

What followed was dictatorship, protest, and astonishing growth. Park Chung Hee seized power in the May 16, 1961 coup and drove export-led industrialisation, before his assassination on 26 October 1979. Chun Doo-hwan’s rule was challenged by the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980 and then by the June Democratic Struggle of 1987, after the death of Park Jong-chul helped force the June 29 Declaration. That opened the way to the current Sixth Republic.

In the decades after, South Korea became one of Asia’s most advanced democracies and one of the Four Asian Tigers. Kim Dae-jung won the presidency in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis, hosted the North-South summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, and later received the Nobel Peace Prize. Seoul then hosted the 1988 Olympic Games, Pyeongchang the Winter Olympics in 2018, and South Korean pop culture, from K-pop to Parasite and Squid Game, spread worldwide as the Korean Wave.