In this century, few countries have been as visibly successful as South Korea. China’s vertiginous economic rise once absorbed vast amounts of news-media attention, but its soft power has comparatively little reach across the wider world, at least in English-speaking countries. By this point, many if not most Westerners haven’t just eaten Korean food, but also driven a Korean car, heard Korean pop music, or watched a Korean film or TV show. The resulting sense of familiarity can prove deceptive to those who eventually make the trip there, but it does, at least, mark an improvement on the scant knowledge of the place they had before. Not so long ago, they could say little with certainty except this: South Korea’s got Seoul.
I first saw that pun on a T‑shirt in high school, long before I knew much of anything about Korea myself. Now, having lived there for more than a decade, I’ve been able to watch from the inside as the country’s capital has become an unlikely object of general interest. As evidence, take the 1.2 million views already racked up by the new video from Latos Charts above, a 3D animated time lapse showing the evolution of Seoul over six and a half often tumultuous millennia.
It reveals, among other things, that the city didn’t exist for most of the history of Korean civilization — but then, neither did the country. The postwar division of the peninsula into North and South has a kind of precedent in the warring kingdoms that occupied it before its unification by a series of states culminating in the 500-year rule of the Joseon Dynasty.
If you’ve watched one of the many popular historical “K‑dramas,” Joseon was most likely its period setting. Now generally regarded as the predecessor of modern-day Korea, it passes in two minutes of the time lapse, during which Seoul, then known as Hanyang, takes amid its geomantically protective mountains more or less the shape it has today, at least north of the Han River. In fact, up until the seventies, there was no city to speak of south of the Han: the development of the more recently musically satirized Gangnam, literally “south of the river,” was part of the top-down push for economic development — in effect, hitting the fast-forward button on history — that followed the devastation of the Korean War. That chapter of history comes around eight minutes into the video, after which lookalike high-rise complexes start popping up like mushrooms after a monsoon.
However comfortable a lifestyle they’ve offered to middle-class Seoulites, the sight of those apateu danji unsettles some Western observers, who encounter them in photographs meant to depict the city as a kind of futuristic dystopia. They exaggerate, of course, but even someone who appreciates Seoul as much as I do has to admit that, alongside its impressive qualities — the magnificent subway system, for example, extolled in the Not Just Bikes video above — the city has its problems, as does the nation for which it stands. Understanding it in all its complexity requires first (even before learning the Korean language) grasping its sheer centrality, greater than Tokyo’s to Japan or even Paris’ to France. To a great extent, South Korea hasn’t just got Seoul, it is Seoul. And maybe, if its prominence in the wider world continues to grow, the punning will eventually stop. In Korean history, stranger things have certainly happened.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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