Who ruled Seoul?

Seoul sits on the lower Han River in the west-central part of the Korean peninsula, in a basin guarded by granite mountains and close enough to the Yellow Sea for river traffic. Whoever held the Han valley could reach every corner of the peninsula, so the site was fought over for centuries before it became a capital. Its defining history is more than five hundred years as the royal seat of the Joseon kingdom, followed by colonial rule, near-total destruction in war and one of the fastest transformations of any city in the twentieth century.

Farmers lived along the Han in the Neolithic period; the excavated village at Amsa-dong is several thousand years old. According to tradition the kingdom of Baekje founded its first capital, Wiryeseong, in the area in 18 BCE, and earthen walls from that period survive south of the river. Goguryeo seized the region in 475 CE and pushed Baekje south, and in the 550s Silla took it in turn, later uniting most of the peninsula. Under the Goryeo dynasty the town became a secondary capital called Namgyeong, the Southern Capital, where a palace was built in 1104. After repeated invasions between 1231 and 1259, Goryeo itself was forced to accept the overlordship of the Mongol Empire, which is the period the map marks as Mongol rule.

Yi Seong-gye overthrew Goryeo in 1392 and founded the Joseon dynasty, and in 1394 he moved the capital to this site, then called Hanyang. Planners chose it according to geomancy, with mountains behind and the river in front. A stone wall with great gates ringed the city, and the main palace, Gyeongbokgung, was completed in 1395, with the royal ancestral shrine and an altar to the gods of earth and grain beside it. Under Sejong the Great in the fifteenth century the court here devised the Korean alphabet, hangul. Seoul remained the capital of the Joseon dynasty until its end in 1910.

The city suffered badly in the Japanese invasions of 1592 to 1598, when its palaces were burned, and again in the Manchu invasion of 1636 to 1637. Gyeongbokgung was not rebuilt until the 1860s. In the late nineteenth century Seoul opened to foreign trade and diplomats, gained electric trams and streetlights, and became capital of the short-lived Korean Empire proclaimed in 1897.

In 1910 the Empire of Japan annexed Korea and renamed the city Keijō (Gyeongseong in Korean). The colonial government built a massive headquarters directly in front of Gyeongbokgung and pulled down much of the old wall. After Japan's surrender in 1945 the south of the peninsula came under American military government. The city was officially named Seoul, an old Korean word for capital, in 1946, and in 1948 it became the capital of the Republic of Korea.

The Korean War devastated it. Seoul changed hands four times between June 1950 and March 1951, and much of it lay in ruins by the 1953 armistice. Recovery from the 1960s onward was spectacular: factories, apartment towers and bridges spread across both banks of the Han, the subway opened in 1974, and the 1988 Summer Olympics showcased a new industrial nation that had just moved from military rule to democratic elections. Today Seoul has about nine million people, and its metropolitan region holds around half of South Korea's population, making it one of the largest urban areas in the world.