South Korea

The Korean peninsula has been continuously inhabited since the Paleolithic, with settled agricultural communities established by the Neolithic and bronze working appearing in the second millennium BCE. Traditional historiography traces the earliest polity to Gojoseon, conventionally dated by later chronicles to 2333 BCE under the legendary founder Dangun, though the historically attested kingdom flourished in the first millennium BCE before its conquest by Han China in 108 BCE. From the fragmentation that followed emerged the Three Kingdoms of Goguryeo in the north, Baekje in the southwest, and Silla in the southeast, alongside the Gaya confederacy. Silla, in alliance with Tang China, unified most of the peninsula by 668 CE, while the successor state of Balhae held the northern territories until its fall to the Khitan in 926.

Unified Silla gave way in 918 to the Goryeo dynasty, from which the modern English name "Korea" derives. Goryeo presided over notable cultural achievements, including the world's earliest surviving movable metal type and the Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks, but it was weakened by Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century and ultimately replaced in 1392 by the Joseon dynasty founded by Yi Seong-gye. Joseon adopted Neo-Confucianism as its governing ideology, promulgated the hangul alphabet under King Sejong in 1443, and endured devastating Japanese invasions led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590s and Manchu incursions in the 1630s. After a long period of relative isolation, Joseon was forced open by foreign powers in the late nineteenth century and was proclaimed the Korean Empire in 1897 in an effort to assert sovereignty amid regional rivalry.

Following the Russo-Japanese War, Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and was formally annexed in 1910, ending dynastic rule. Japanese colonial administration lasted until liberation on 15 August 1945 with the surrender of Japan in the Second World War. The peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American zones of occupation, and competing governments were established in 1948: the Republic of Korea in the south under Syngman Rhee, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north under Kim Il-sung. The Korean War, initiated by a northern invasion in June 1950, drew in United Nations and Chinese forces and ended in an armistice in July 1953, leaving the peninsula divided along the Demilitarized Zone with no formal peace treaty.

Postwar South Korea experienced authoritarian rule, including the long presidency of Park Chung-hee, who took power in a 1961 coup and oversaw rapid industrialization until his assassination in 1979. After the suppression of the Gwangju uprising in 1980 and continued military-led government under Chun Doo-hwan, mass protests in June 1987 produced constitutional reform and direct presidential elections, inaugurating the Sixth Republic. Subsequent decades saw consolidation of democratic institutions, peaceful alternations of power between conservative and liberal blocs, accession to the OECD in 1996, and the 2017 impeachment and removal of President Park Geun-hye following large-scale public protests.

Today the Republic of Korea is a unitary presidential republic under the 1987 constitution, with a directly elected president serving a single five-year term, a unicameral National Assembly, and an independent judiciary headed by a Constitutional Court.