Korean provinces and metropolitan 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 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Seoul

Seoul holds about 9.4 million people inside the city and roughly 26 million in the region around it, which is about half of South Korea in one metropolitan area. It has been the capital since 1394, it sits 40km from the demilitarized zone, and it changed hands four times in the first year of the Korean War.

Gyeonggi

Gyeonggi means the area around the capital, and that is exactly what it is: about 13.6 million people, more than any other province, living in a ring of cities that the capital has spread into. Suwon is its seat. The province also holds the southern half of the demilitarized zone and the Han estuary the border runs down.

Incheon

Incheon is the country’s second port and the site of the amphibious landing in September 1950 that cut the North Korean army off from its supply lines. Its airport, opened in 2001, was built on reclaimed land between two islands and is the way most visitors arrive. The tidal range here is about nine meters, among the largest anywhere.

Busan

Busan is the second city at about 3.3 million and the sixth or seventh busiest container port in the world. It was the temporary capital for most of the Korean War and the only major city the North never took, which is why so much of its population arrived as refugees in 1950 and stayed.

Daegu

Daegu sits in a basin ringed by mountains, which traps the summer heat and makes it reliably the hottest city in the country. It was the textile capital through the industrial decades and is still where the apples come from. About 2.4 million people live there.

Ulsan

Ulsan has the highest output per head of any city in South Korea and is a company town at national scale: the world’s largest shipyard and the largest car plant on one site are both here, and the country’s biggest oil refinery is beside them. It was a fishing village of 30,000 when the industrial plan picked it in 1962.

Daejeon

Daejeon is where the railway from Seoul splits for the southwest and the southeast, which is what made it: a village until the line arrived in 1905, and about 1.5 million people now. Its Daedeok district holds the government research institutes and KAIST, so a large share of the country’s public science is done inside one city.

Sejong

Sejong was farmland until 2007 and was built to move the government out of Seoul. Most of the ministries are there; the president, the National Assembly and the foreign, defence and justice departments are not, so the country has run a two-city government since 2012. It is named for the king who commissioned the Korean alphabet.

Gwangju

Gwangju is the largest city of the southwest at about 1.4 million. In May 1980 its citizens held the city for nine days against the incoming military government and several hundred were killed putting the rising down. The uprising is the founding event of South Korean democracy and the reason the city carries the weight it does in national politics.

Gangwon

Gangwon is the emptiest province: the Taebaek range runs down the whole of it, the coastal strip is a few kilometers wide, and the population density is roughly a twentieth of Gyeonggi’s. It was cut in half by the armistice line in 1953 and there is a Gangwon on the North Korean side too. PyeongChang, in the middle of it, held the 2018 Winter Olympics.

North Chungcheong

The only landlocked province in South Korea, which in a country this shape takes some doing. Cheongju is its seat. Its mountains hold the Cheongju and Chungju dams and a good deal of the water Seoul drinks, and Sobaeksan along its southern edge is the range that separates the Chungcheong provinces from the Gyeongsang ones.

South Chungcheong

South Chungcheong has had two pieces taken out of it in living memory: Daejeon left in 1989 and Sejong in 2012, and the provincial government itself moved out of Daejeon to Hongseong in 2012. Its west coast is tidal flats, which is where a great deal of the country’s salt and shellfish come from.

North Jeolla

The Honam plain here is the widest flat farmland in South Korea and has been the country’s rice bowl for a thousand years. Jeonju, its seat, is where the founding house of the Joseon dynasty came from and is the city most associated with Korean food. The Saemangeum seawall on its coast is 33km long, the longest in the world.

South Jeolla

South Jeolla has something like 2,000 islands, well over half of all the islands in the country, and its coastline is longer than any other province’s. Yi Sun-sin fought most of his naval campaign against the Japanese invasion of 1592 in these waters, including the battle at Myeongnyang where thirteen ships held a strait against more than a hundred.

North Gyeongsang

The biggest province by area, at about 19,000 square kilometers. Gyeongju in its southeast was the capital of Silla for nearly a thousand years and is the densest concentration of ruins and tombs in the country. Ulleungdo lies 120km off its coast and Dokdo 90km beyond that, which is the far edge of the map.

South Gyeongsang

The Nakdong comes down through this province to its delta, and the industrial belt along the south coast — Changwon’s machinery, the Geoje shipyards, the Ulsan plants next door — is the densest concentration of heavy industry in the country. Jirisan, on its western border, was the first national park South Korea designated.

Jeju

Jeju is a shield volcano, and Hallasan at its centre is the highest point in South Korea at 1,947 meters. It was a kingdom of its own until 1404, has its own barely intelligible dialect, and its haenyeo — women who free-dive for shellfish, most of them now in their seventies — are on the UNESCO intangible heritage list. It has been a self-governing province since 2006.

How this one works

The other maps of South Korea

China has the same map in Chinese provinces. Turkey has the same map in Turkish provinces. 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.