Seoul kept the crown while ministries packed for Sejong
Seoul, South Korea's capital and the peninsula's largest city, anchors a metro that ranked as the world's sixth-largest metropolitan economy in 2022 with Gyeonggi and Incheon. Baekje roots in 18 BC and Joseon fortress-wall capital status frame a basin under Bukhansan now sharing ministries with planned Sejong City to the south.
People lived here 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. By about 4000 BC they built sunken-floored huts called umjip, by 3000 BC they ate cooked grain and fish, and around 1500 BC they moved into the Bronze Age and large-scale farming. Because the city has been so heavily built over, Amsa-dong is the only major Stone Age site found within it. After Wiman Joseon collapsed in 108 BC, refugees carried Iron Age techniques south to the Han River basin, and rival statelets sprang up.
Baekje, founded in 18 BC as one member of the Mahan confederacy, dominated by the second century AD from its capital Wiryeseong, thought to lie between the earthen ramparts of Pungnaptoseong and Mongchontoseong in today's southeast. Silla seized the region in 553, and King Jinheung inspected the frontier at Bukhansan in 555. Over the centuries the city was called Namcheon, Hanyang, Namgyeong and, under Joseon, Hanseong.
The name Seoul is not Chinese in origin: it is a native Korean noun meaning capital, probably descended from Seorabeol, an old name for the Silla capital Gyeongju, and it was used informally for Hanseong by the seventeenth century. Japanese colonial rulers renamed the city Keijō, and Seoul became official after liberation. Because the word has no matching characters, Chinese speakers long used Hancheng, until in January 2005 the city adopted Shou'er, which echoes the sound and uses a character meaning head or first.
The capital changed hands four times during the Korean War and was left largely in ruins before its rapid rebuilding. In 2004 the Constitutional Court ruled that its status as capital is an unwritten constitutional custom that only a national referendum could overturn. Its population peaked above 10 million and has slipped to about 9.6 million since 2014, and it hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics.
Source: Seoul
