Daejeon's name is a Chinese-character translation of Hanbat, great fields
Daejeon, South Korea's fifth-largest metropolis with close to 1.5 million people, grew up as a railway town in a valley between the Sobaek Mountains and the Geum River. Its name first appears in a 1481 geography, a character-by-character translation of the older native word Hanbat, meaning great fields.
The translation is neat. Han, meaning big, became the character dae, and bat, a field, became jeon, so both names say the same thing. The native form never disappeared: a 12.7-kilometre road, Hanbat-daero, links Yuseong district with Dong-gu, and Hanbat National University and a baseball stadium carry it too. Nobody knows exactly when people first settled here, though a Paleolithic site at Seokjang-ri in nearby Gongju and another at Yongho-dong in Daedeok District hint at very early occupation, and Bronze Age houses, pottery and metalwork show continuous habitation after that.
The modern city owes much to government policy. Beginning in the 1980s, national agencies moved out of Seoul into what is now the Government Complex, pulling in more residents, and Daejeon became a metropolitan city in 1989. It now ranks with Seoul, Gwacheon and Sejong as one of the country's administrative centres, and high-speed KTX or SRT trains reach Seoul in about 50 minutes.
Research is the other pillar. The city holds 23 universities and colleges, among them KAIST and Chungnam National University, plus state research institutes and laboratories run by conglomerates such as Samsung and LG, most clustered in Daedeok Innopolis. Daejeon helped host the 1986 Asian Games, staged Expo '93 and the 2000 International Mathematical Olympiad, and is to be the lead city of the 2027 Summer World University Games.
Three rivers cross the valley and all reach the Yellow Sea through the Geum. Low mountains ring the city, which lies roughly 170 kilometres south of Seoul, 290 north of Busan and 70 east of the coast. Summers are wet and hot and winters drier and cold, under a four-season monsoon pattern. The municipality covers about 540 square kilometres and counted 1,518,775 residents in 2015, split into five districts with the city hall in Dunsan-dong in Seo District. Neighbours include Sejong City and Cheongju to the north and Gongju and Gyeryong to the west.
Source: Daejeon
