The history of South Korea

South Korea occupies the southern half of a peninsula whose people have shared a language, a written culture and for most of the last thousand years a single state. Kingdoms such as Gojoseon, the Three Kingdoms, Silla, Goryeo and Joseon rose and fell between the great powers of China and Japan, absorbing Buddhism and Confucianism while developing a distinct civilisation. Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 was followed by the division of the peninsula, the devastating Korean War and decades of military rule in the south. Since the democratic transition of 1987 the Republic of Korea has become one of the world's largest economies and a source of global popular culture, while the peninsula remains divided.

People lived on the peninsula in the Palaeolithic, and by around 8000 BCE Neolithic communities were making pottery, later the distinctive comb-patterned ware found across Korea. Farming of millet and then rice spread from the mainland, and in the Bronze Age, from roughly 1500 BCE, villages grew larger and chiefs were buried under thousands of stone dolmens, more than survive anywhere else in the world.

Korean tradition dates the first state, Gojoseon or "Old Joseon", to 2333 BCE, when the legendary Dangun, grandson of the lord of heaven, is said to have founded it. Historians see Gojoseon as a real kingdom of the first millennium BCE centred in the Liao River basin and northern Korea. In 108 BCE the Han dynasty under Emperor Wu destroyed it and set up commanderies, the most lasting of which, Lelang near modern Pyongyang, survived until 313 CE and spread Chinese writing, iron working and administration. In the south, the Jin state was followed by three confederations of small polities known as Mahan, Jinhan and Byeonhan.

From these beginnings grew the Three Kingdoms. Goguryeo, by tradition founded in 37 BCE, was a martial state of the northern mountains and Manchuria that drove out the last Chinese commandery and became the largest power in the region, famed for its tomb paintings and its victory over invasions launched by the Sui dynasty in 612. Baekje, traditionally founded in 18 BCE near the Han River, grew from Mahan in the south-west, traded with southern China and passed Buddhism, writing and craft skills to Japan. Silla, traditionally founded in 57 BCE at Gyeongju in the south-east, was the slowest to develop but had a tight aristocracy organised by the "bone rank" system. The Gaya confederacy between Baekje and Silla, a centre of iron production, was absorbed by Silla by 562.

Buddhism arrived from China in the late fourth century and was adopted as a state religion by all three kingdoms. In the seventh century Silla allied with the Tang dynasty. Their armies conquered Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668. When the Tang tried to keep control of the conquered lands, Silla fought them off, and by 676 it ruled the peninsula south of roughly the Taedong River.

Unified Silla, ruling from Gyeongju, was a period of Buddhist art and learning that produced the Bulguksa temple and the Seokguram grotto. Students and monks travelled to Tang China, and a national academy taught the Confucian classics. North of Silla, former Goguryeo people and Mohe tribes founded the kingdom of Balhae in 698, which ruled much of Manchuria until it fell to the Khitan in 926; Korean historians often call this the North and South States period. From the late eighth century Silla's aristocracy fought among themselves, regional strongmen gained power, and around 900 two rival states arose claiming the legacy of Baekje and Goguryeo, opening the Later Three Kingdoms period.

In 918 the general Wang Geon founded Goryeo, a name from which the word "Korea" derives. Silla surrendered to him in 935 and he defeated Later Baekje in 936, reuniting the peninsula. Goryeo, ruling from Kaesong, combined a Confucian civil service examination system, introduced in 958, with an aristocratic society and a strongly Buddhist court. Its celadon pottery became famous across East Asia. Goryeo fought the Khitan Liao dynasty in a series of wars between 993 and 1019 and later accepted the overlordship of the Jurchen Jin.

In 1170 military officers overthrew the civilian officials, and from 1196 the Choe family ruled as military dictators behind the throne. The Mongol Empire invaded in 1231 and returned repeatedly over nearly thirty years while the court held out on Ganghwa Island. During the wars Goryeo carved the more than 80,000 woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana, the Buddhist canon still kept at Haeinsa temple. Peace in 1259 and the fall of the military regime in 1270 made Goryeo a subordinate ally of the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan, whose princesses married Korean kings and whose failed invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 used Korean ships and soldiers. Goryeo printers also developed movable metal type; the Jikji, printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book made this way. As Mongol power collapsed, Goryeo was attacked by Red Turban rebels and Japanese pirates, and its generals grew powerful.

In 1388 the general Yi Seong-gye, ordered to attack the new Ming dynasty in Liaodong, turned his army back and took control of the government. In 1392 he founded the Joseon dynasty, which moved its capital to Hanyang, today's Seoul, and ruled until 1910. Joseon made Neo-Confucianism its ruling ideology, curbed the wealth of Buddhist monasteries and governed through a scholar-official class, the yangban, selected through examinations. It accepted a tributary relationship with Ming China, which brought trade, recognition and security.

The fifteenth century was a high point. Sejong the Great, who reigned from 1418 to 1450, sponsored advances in astronomy, agriculture and medicine and in 1443 created Hangul, an alphabet designed so that ordinary people could write Korean, which was promulgated in 1446. Literary Chinese remained the language of government and scholarship for centuries, but Hangul is now regarded as the great cultural achievement of the age.

In 1592 the Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea as a step towards conquering China. His armies took Hanyang and Pyongyang within weeks, but the admiral Yi Sun-sin, with his armoured "turtle ships", cut Japanese supply lines at sea, volunteer militias rose across the country and Ming armies came to Joseon's aid. The war ended with Hideyoshi's death in 1598, but much of the country had been devastated. Further invasions came from the north in 1627 and 1636, when the Manchus forced Joseon to submit to the state that became the Qing dynasty.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought recovery under kings such as Yeongjo and Jeongjo, a growth of commerce, and the Silhak or "practical learning" movement, whose scholars called for reforms in land, administration and technology. Catholicism entered from China and was repeatedly persecuted; thousands of converts were killed in 1866. In the nineteenth century Joseon was ruled by powerful in-law families and became known as the "Hermit Kingdom" for its policy of excluding Western ships, repelling French and American expeditions in 1866 and 1871.

Japan, transformed by the Meiji Restoration, forced the Treaty of Ganghwa on Korea in 1876, opening its ports. The following decades saw rival reformers and conservatives, Chinese and Japanese intervention, and in 1894 the Donghak Peasant Revolution, whose suppression drew Chinese and Japanese troops into the country and set off the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan's victory ended Korea's tributary ties to China. In 1895 Japanese agents murdered Queen Min, and in 1897 King Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire, but Japan's defeat of the Russian Empire in 1905 left Korea without a protector. It became a Japanese protectorate that year and was annexed in August 1910.

Under the Empire of Japan Korea was governed by a governor-general backed by military police. Land surveys transferred much farmland to Japanese companies and settlers, and the economy was organised to supply Japan with rice and later industrial goods. On 1 March 1919 a declaration of independence read in Seoul set off nationwide peaceful demonstrations, the March First Movement, which were suppressed with thousands of deaths and arrests. Exiles formed a Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai the same year, while other nationalists and communists fought as guerrillas in Manchuria.

After a period of slightly looser "cultural rule" in the 1920s, Japan pursued forced assimilation from the late 1930s. The use of Korean in schools was suppressed, Koreans were pressed to worship at Shinto shrines and to adopt Japanese-style names, and during the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilised as labourers and soldiers. Many women and girls were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese army as so-called comfort women, an issue that remains a source of bitter dispute between South Korea and Japan.

Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945 ended colonial rule, but the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel into a Soviet zone in the north and an American zone in the south, a line drawn as a temporary military arrangement. As the Cold War hardened, plans for a joint trusteeship and unified government failed. In the south the United States military government relied on conservative Koreans and former colonial police, and left-wing movements were suppressed. On Jeju Island an uprising that began in April 1948 was crushed in a counter-insurgency campaign that killed an estimated 14,000 to 30,000 people, most of them civilians.

United Nations-supervised elections, held only in the south, led to the proclamation of the Republic of Korea on 15 August 1948, with the veteran nationalist Syngman Rhee as president. In September the north, under Kim Il Sung and backed by the Soviet Union, became the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, whose separate history is told under North Korea. Each government claimed to be the legitimate state of the whole peninsula.

On 25 June 1950 North Korean forces invaded the south with the approval of Joseph Stalin and quickly captured Seoul. The Korean War drew in a United Nations force led by the United States, which landed at Incheon in September and pushed north towards the Chinese border, and then Chinese troops sent by Mao Zedong, who drove the UN forces back south. Seoul changed hands four times. Both sides committed mass killings of civilians, among them the southern government's execution of tens of thousands of suspected leftists in the Bodo League massacre of 1950. After two years of stalemate an armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, leaving a demilitarised zone close to the 38th parallel. Perhaps three million people died, and millions of families were separated. No peace treaty has ever been signed.

Rhee ruled increasingly autocratically until student-led protests in the April Revolution of 1960 forced him into exile. A short-lived parliamentary Second Republic followed, but on 16 May 1961 General Park Chung-hee seized power. Park, elected president from 1963, made economic growth the national goal. Five-year plans, state-directed credit and family-run conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai turned one of the poorest countries in the world into an exporter of textiles, then steel, ships and electronics. He normalised relations with Japan in 1965, in return for grants and loans, and sent some 300,000 troops in rotation to the Vietnam War.

The growth came with repression. In 1972 Park's Yushin constitution allowed him to rule indefinitely, and dissidents, students and labour activists were jailed and tortured. Park was assassinated by his own intelligence chief on 26 October 1979. Within weeks General Chun Doo-hwan took control of the army, and in May 1980 he extended martial law. In the south-western city of Gwangju, citizens rose against military rule and paratroopers responded with extreme violence; officially around two hundred people were killed, and many accounts put the toll considerably higher.

In June 1987 nationwide protests forced the regime to accept direct presidential elections. Chun's ally Roh Tae-woo won that December after the opposition split, and Seoul hosted the Olympic Games in 1988. Both Koreas joined the United Nations in 1991, and South Korea established relations with the Soviet Union and China. In 1993 Kim Young-sam became the first civilian president in three decades, and Chun and Roh were later convicted for the 1979 coup and the Gwangju killings. The 1997 Asian financial crisis forced an IMF rescue, after which the long-time dissident Kim Dae-jung pursued a "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with the north, holding the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in 2000.

The following decades brought alternating conservative and liberal governments, the rise of the technology industry and the worldwide spread of Korean music, film and television. Relations with the north swung between summits, as in 2018, and periods of tension over its nuclear and missile programmes. In 2017 President Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung-hee, was removed from office over a corruption scandal. The country's birth rate fell to the lowest in the world, raising concerns about an ageing and shrinking population.

On 3 December 2024 President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, accusing the opposition of anti-state activities; the National Assembly voted unanimously to lift it within hours. Yoon was impeached on 14 December, and on 4 April 2025 the Constitutional Court unanimously removed him from office. Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party won the snap election and took office on 4 June 2025. In February 2026 a court convicted Yoon of leading an insurrection and sentenced him to life imprisonment.