Who ruled Gyeongju?

Gyeongju lies in the far south-east of South Korea, in North Gyeongsang Province, about 55 kilometres east of Daegu and close to the Sea of Japan. Under the name Seorabeol it was the capital of the kingdom of Silla for close to a thousand years, and after Silla unified most of the Korean peninsula in the seventh century it was the political and cultural heart of the country. Its royal burial mounds, temple sites and Buddhist carvings have earned it the nickname "the museum without walls".

Bronze Age relics and dolmens show that the area was settled long before the kingdom. Korean histories, probably drawing on Silla's own chronicles, say that six villages in the Gyeongju area united in 57 BCE under Bak Hyeokgeose to form the state of Saro; legend adds that he hatched from an egg. These traditions are not attested in Silla's own inscriptions, and the 57 BCE date is traditional rather than proven. Saro grew within the Jinhan confederacy, absorbed the Gaya states and took the name Silla. Its capital was known as Seorabeol, Gyerim or Geumseong, and Seorabeol is thought to be the origin of a Korean word for capital that survives in the name Seoul. From the fourth century the throne was held by the Kim clan of Gyeongju. Dozens of royal tombs and hundreds of burial mounds survive in and around the city, and finds from mounds such as the Gold Crown Tomb and the Heavenly Horse Tomb are among the finest examples of Silla art.

In alliance with Tang China, Silla conquered Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668, then fought its former ally for nearly a decade to drive Tang forces from the peninsula. The Gyeongju court now ruled most of Korea, and the capital filled with the aristocracy of the whole kingdom. Royal patronage of Buddhism produced the great temple of Hwangnyongsa, the temple of Bulguksa and the cave shrine of Seokguram, while the slopes of Namsan were covered with carved Buddhas. The Cheomseongdae tower, often described as one of East Asia's oldest surviving observatories, also stands in the city. The medieval history Samguk yusa gives the capital 178,936 households at its peak, which would imply close to a million people, though such figures are hard to verify. According to the ninth-century Book of Roads and Kingdoms, its prosperity was known as far away as Persia.

Silla broke apart in the late ninth century into the rival states known as the Later Three Kingdoms, suffered defeat at the hands of Later Baekje, and finally submitted to Goryeo in 935. In 940 the Goryeo founder, King Taejo, renamed the city Gyeongju. It was briefly honoured as the Eastern Capital from 987 until 1012 and remained the seat of a large province, but national power had moved north to Kaesong. Under the Joseon dynasty the city was a regional centre only, and in 1601 it lost even its role as provincial capital.

The monuments suffered heavily over these centuries. In the thirteenth century Mongol invaders destroyed Hwangnyongsa's nine-storey wooden pagoda. Early in the Joseon period, Neo-Confucian zealots defaced many of the Buddhist sculptures on Namsan, and during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s the wooden buildings of Bulguksa were burned.

Many of the largely intact tombs were excavated in the early twentieth century, and a museum, forerunner of today's Gyeongju National Museum, opened in 1915. The railway lines built in the later colonial years made the city a junction. After liberation in 1945 the surrounding mountains became notorious for guerrilla activity, and in late 1950, during the Korean War, North Korean forces briefly brought the front line close to the city, although it stayed in South Korean hands.

Bulguksa and Seokguram became, in 1995, the first Korean properties inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, followed by the Gyeongju Historic Areas in 2000; the nearby Yangdong Folk Village is also listed. The city was merged with the surrounding county in 1995 and now has about 264,000 people. Tourism, drawing several million visitors a year, remains central to the economy of this corner of South Korea, alongside industry linked to neighbouring Ulsan and Pohang.