Seoul

• 1. Introduction

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  Seoul is the only city in South Korea allowed to carry the title special metropolitan city. That status was not inherited. It was declared in a charter the U.S. military government published in an official gazette on the 10th of October 1946, which named eight districts and made the city an independent administrative unit answering to no province. The full charter even spelled the districts phonetically, beginning Chong Koo, Chong No Koo, Sur Tai Moon Koo. From that legal seed grew a place whose history reaches back to 18 BC, when the people of Baekje founded a settlement here. How does a city change its own name to outrun a foreign empire? Why did its courts later rule that it must stay the capital forever? And how does a place keep ruling a country while quietly handing ministries to a rival city 121 kilometers to the south?

• 2. The Many Names

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  Seoul is one of the few place names in Korea with no corresponding Hanja, the Chinese characters used in Korean, because it is not a Sino-Korean word. The native common noun seoul simply meant capital city, and is believed to have descended from Seorabeol, which once referred to Gyeongju, the capital of Silla. The same patch of ground answered to many names across the centuries. It was Bukhansan-gun under Goguryeo, Namcheon under Silla, Hanyang in the Northern and Southern States period, Namgyeong under Goryeo, and Hanseong under Joseon. French missionaries, hearing the capital called seoul colloquially as early as the 17th century, wrote it as Seoul in their texts, which is why that romanization persists across languages. After Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire in 1897, the city was briefly called Hwang Seong. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary still lists both the common and the proper noun meanings of the word. China kept calling the city Hanchang, the Chinese reading of Hanseong, until the 18th of January 2005, when the Seoul Metropolitan Government changed its official Chinese name to Shou'er, a phono-semantic match using the character meaning head, chief, or first.

• 3. Disputed Frontier

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  In July or August of 553, Silla seized the Han River region from Baekje and folded it into a newly created Sin Province, whose name carried the double meaning of New and Silla. The decades that followed read like a tug-of-war over a border. In November 555, Jinheung Taewang made a royal visit to inspect the frontier, and in 557 Silla replaced Sin Province with Bukhansan Province. In 568, on another northern visit, the king reached Hanseong, lodged at Namcheon on his return, and set up the Jinheung Taewang Stele before reorganizing the region yet again into Namcheon Province. War kept reshuffling the map. In 603, Goguryeo attacked Bukhansanseong and lost to Silla, and the next year Silla abolished Namcheon Province and rebuilt Bukhansan Province to harden its northern defenses. Only in the 11th century, under Goryeo, did the place begin growing into something larger, when a summer palace was raised here and called the Southern Capital.

• 4. A Confucian Blueprint

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  Yi Seong-gye, founder of the Joseon dynasty, made Seoul a planned capital by design rather than by accident. After taking the throne at the old Goryeo capital in 1392 and renaming his kingdom from Goryeo to Joseon in 1393, he searched for a new seat of power. In September 1394 he chose Hanyang over a rival site called Muak, and construction began that October as a geographic embodiment of Korean Confucianism. Some major palaces, including Gyeongbokgung, were finished in 1395, and the Fortress Wall around the city was partially complete by about 1396. Administration ran through an agency that split Hanyang in two: the Seong-jung areas inside the wall, and the Seongjeosimni, the land roughly ten Korean miles around it. The inner zone earned the popular name meaning areas inside the Four Great Gates, and became the single downtown of the city. Late in the 19th century, after centuries of isolation, the city opened its gates to foreigners. It became the first city in East Asia to bring electricity into its palace, installed by the Edison Illuminating Company, with electrical street lights following a decade later.

• 5. Empire And Erasure

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  On the 1st of October 1910, after the annexation treaty, Imperial Japan demoted Seoul to the level of any other city in Gyeonggi Province. Japan renamed it Gyeongseong, Keijo in Japanese, literally capital city, chosen to avoid a character associated with the Han people and with China. The colonial state remade the place physically. It tore down the city walls, paved roads, and put up Western-style buildings, while shrinking the official city to the area inside the Fortress Wall plus present-day Yongsan District. War needs redrew the lines again, and on the 1st of April 1936 Yeongdeungpo District was absorbed to serve as an industrial complex for steel and metalworking factories. U.S. forces liberated the city at the end of World War II, and after liberation Seoul became the official name of the Korean capital.

• 6. Four Times Taken

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  During the Korean War, the city changed hands four times between North Korean forces and the South Korean side. It fell to the North in the First Battle of Seoul in June 1950, was retaken by UN forces in the Second Battle in September 1950, fell again to a combined Chinese and North Korean force in the Third Battle in January 1951, and was recaptured once more by UN forces during Operation Ripper in the spring of 1951. The capital was moved temporarily to Busan. One estimate of the wreckage counts at least 191,000 buildings, 55,000 houses, and 1,000 factories left in ruins. Refugees poured in even as the fighting raged, swelling the city and its surrounding area to an estimated 1.5 million people by 1955. North Korea kept claiming the city as its own de jure capital, written into Article 103 of its 1948 constitution, until 1972.

• 7. Reclaiming The Flood Plains

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  In 1963 Seoul more than doubled in size, growing from roughly 268 square kilometers to 613 square kilometers across two expansions. In August it annexed parts of several surrounding counties to stretch its northeastern edge, and in September it took in present-day Gangnam. Turning that new land into a city meant fighting water. Gangnam was low-lying and prone to flooding, so its development leaned on key projects: the Hannam Bridge built from 1966 to 1969, and the Gyeongbu Expressway from 1968 to 1970. Mayor Kim Hyun-ok ordered an expressway that doubled as an embankment, the present-day Gangbyeon Expressway, with construction running from March to September 1967. The same approach drained other flood-prone tracts into buildable ground, including today's Ichon-dong, the Banpo apartment complex, Apgujeong-dong, and Jamsil-dong. That reclaimed southern bank would later hold one of the country's three central business districts, the Gangnam district known for tech, luxury, and private education.

• 8. Capital By Custom

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  The de facto administrative capital has been drifting south to Sejong City, a planned city that opened in 2012 about 121 kilometers from Seoul. By 2019, Sejong hosted 10 of the South Korean government's 18 ministries. Yet the move has a hard legal ceiling. In 2004 the Constitutional Court of Korea ruled that Seoul must remain the national capital because that status is an unwritten constitutional custom, unchangeable except by a nationwide referendum. The city it protects has become a concentrated heart for the whole country. By the 2018 census, 49.8 percent of South Korea's population lived in the Seoul metropolitan area, up from 49.1 percent in 2010. Seoul holds 15 Fortune Global 500 companies, among them Samsung, LG, and Hyundai, and it has carried the title World Design Capital since 2010. Its low birth rate hints at the strain underneath: in 2023 Seoul's fertility rate was just 0.55, below even the national figure of 0.72.