Introduction to Korea

INTRODUCTION TO KOREA

Formal Name: Republic of Korea.
Short Form: South Korea.
Term for Citizens: Korean(s).
Capital: Seoul.
Date of Independence: August 15, 1948.

FOR NEARLY A HALF-CENTURY, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the United States have maintained a close relationship. Since the mid-1980s, South Korea has been the seventh or eighth largest trading partner of the United States,and the United States has ranked as South Korea's first or second trading partner. In 1991, nearly four decades after the end of the Korean War (1950-53), Washington retained more than 45,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula committed to the defense of South Korea. During the 1991 conflict in the Persian Gulf, Seoul joined other coalition partners of the United States and provided a military medical team and several hundred million dollars in support of the campaign to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Ties between the two countries extend to language, education, and culture. In 1991 English was the primary foreign language studied in South Korea, and for some time it has been popularly said that more Ph.Ds from American universities work for the South Korean government than for the United States government. Hundred of thousands of United States servicemen, businessmen, Peace Corps volunteers, and missionaries have lived and worked in South Korea, and as many as 1.5 million South Koreans--one fourth of all overseas Koreans--have emigrated to the United States.

The Korean Peninsula has been inhabited since paleolithic times, and Korean historians trace the ethnic roots of the Korean people at least as far back as the pottery-using cultures of the fourth and third centuries B.C.. Early tribal groups formed numerous federations, and over the centuries these combined into larger state-like entities. Sometime before the fourth century B.C., at least one of these entities had begun to refer to its leaders by the Chinese title for king, wang. Three of these states, boasting an aristocratic social structure and centralized institutions.