This is an archive story, published in the September 1988 edition of Geographical magazine. All facts, figures and statistics were accurate at the time of original publication.
So extraordinary and so rapid has been South Korea’s economic revival since the war
This is an archive story, published in the September 1988 edition of Geographical magazine. All facts, figures and statistics were accurate at the time of original publication.
So extraordinary and so rapid has been South Korea’s economic revival since the war that so nearly destroyed it, that it is not at all fanciful to call the country, as many Koreans do, the land of miracles.
Even to those South Koreans who are too busy and too determined to stop and ponder the wonders they have wrought, one event does appear truly miraculous: the fact that the international community, which not so long ago had written off the country as just another anonymous corner of the backward world, has now awarded it the honour of staging the games of the 24th Olympiad. The fact that Seoul now joins the ranks of Melbourne and Tokyo and London and Los Angeles is a source of inestimable pride to every one of the 50 million South Koreans – a just reward, as some see it, for their three-and-a-half decades of single-minded and utterly tireless effort.
And what an effort it has been! The Korean peninsula was a glum and impoverished corner of the world in 1945 when, after 35 years of dour domination, the Japanese colonists were defeated and forced to withdraw. What took place next made a long-suffering country suffer even more: the Russians and the Americans partitioned Korea according to a plan hatched, with astonishing lack of foresight, by the US State Department.
The 38th parallel was chosen as the line of separation: the Russians drove out the Japanese to the north of it, the Americans did the same to the south. Then both settled back and began to rule their newly-made fiefdoms.
The Koreans themselves, weakened by occupation and war, railed at the division of their land by two sets of alien newcomers, but could do little. For a while the barbed-wire frontier was open – people from Pyongyang in the north could visit relatives in Seoul, liaison offices were opened in both capitals, relations between north and south were