Korean cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 6 learning regions, matching the rounds on the South Korea guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Seoul

About 9.4 million people in the city and 26 million in the region, which is roughly half the country inside a circle 60km across. It sits on the Han in a bowl of mountains, and the palaces at its centre have been the seat of government, on and off, since 1394.

Busan

The second city and the great port: about 3.3 million people, and a container terminal that handles more than half of everything the country ships. It held out through 1950 as the last corner of South Korea not overrun, which doubled its population in a year, and it has run the biggest film festival in Asia since 1996.

Incheon

The country’s gateway: the main airport is here, built on reclaimed land between two islands, and so was the landing in September 1950 that turned the Korean War around. Songdo, on more reclaimed land beside it, was built from nothing after 2003 as a business district and is one of the largest such projects anywhere.

Daegu

About 2.4 million people in a basin that traps heat, which makes Daegu the hottest city in the country most summers. It was the centre of the textile industry and is still the apple capital, and the oriental medicine market at Yangnyeongsi has been trading on the same street since 1658.

Daejeon

Daejeon exists because of the railway: a village of a few hundred until the Seoul line reached it in 1905, and about 1.5 million people now. The Daedeok science town on its northern edge holds the national research institutes and KAIST, which is as much public science as any Korean city carries.

Gwangju

The largest city of the southwest, about 1.4 million. The uprising of May 1980, when citizens held the city for nine days and several hundred were killed retaking it, is the event modern Korean democracy dates itself from, and the cemetery for its dead is a national site.

Ulsan

A fishing village of 30,000 chosen for the first industrial plan in 1962 and now the richest city per head in the country. The Hyundai yard here is the largest shipbuilding site in the world and the car plant beside it the largest on one site; between them they employ a good share of the city.

Suwon

The seat of Gyeonggi province and about 1.2 million people. Hwaseong, the walled fortress King Jeongjo built around the town between 1794 and 1796, is nearly six kilometers of wall and is on the UNESCO list; it was rebuilt after the Korean War from the illustrated construction record kept at the time. Samsung Electronics has its home campus here.

Changwon

Changwon was laid out from nothing in 1974 as a planned machinery city, on a grid, which almost nothing else in Korea is. In 2010 it absorbed Masan and Jinhae next door, taking it over a million people. Jinhae’s cherry blossom festival is the biggest in the country.

Jeonju

Jeonju is where the house that founded the Joseon dynasty came from, and its hanok village is about 700 traditional houses in one quarter. It is also the city Koreans name first when they talk about food: bibimbap is from here, and so is the version of the fermented-soy-and-rice table everybody else copies.

Gyeongju

Gyeongju was the capital of Silla for nearly a thousand years, from 57 BC to 935, and at its height was one of the largest cities in the world. What is left is the densest ruin field in Korea: the royal tomb mounds sit in the middle of the modern town, and Bulguksa and the Seokguram grotto are in the hills east of it.

Pohang

Pohang is a steel town: the mill POSCO opened here in 1973, built with Japanese reparations money, made the cheap steel the shipyards and car plants were built on and is still among the largest in the world. The ferry to Ulleungdo, 220km out in the East Sea, leaves from its harbour.

Yeosu

Yeosu was Yi Sun-sin’s naval headquarters, and the turtle ships that fought the 1592 invasion were built in its yards. It held the World Expo in 2012 and it is the site of one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the country, which is an unusual combination of things for one small harbour town.

Mokpo

Mokpo is the end of the line in every sense: the last stop on the Honam railway, the port the ferries to the southwestern islands leave from, and the place the Japanese shipped the rice of the Honam plain out through after 1897. The Yellow Sea coast west of it is a maze of a thousand islands.

Jeju

Jeju City is on the north coast of the island, facing the mainland, and holds most of the island’s half a million people. The Seoul route into its airport carries more passengers than any other air route in the world, at something like fourteen million a year.

Gangneung

Gangneung is the main town of the east coast and was the coastal half of the 2018 Winter Olympics: the mountain events were at PyeongChang an hour inland, the ice events were here. The high-speed line built for the games put it under two hours from Seoul, through the Taebaek range.

How this one works

The other maps of South Korea

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. All three together on the South Korea atlas page, the country itself on the South Korea guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.