Photo Essay: Scenes from modern yet tradition-filled Korea
Posted By Admin on January 12, 2012
Toward the end of October, 2011, I spent a week in my birth country, South Korea, to visit landmarks and tour historical sites, in addition to experiencing modern culture, infrastructure and technology, in and around the nation’s capital city, Seoul.
With its origins as a dynasty — united by emperors and kings for over a thousand years, then colonized and occupied by the Japanese through the first half of the 20th century, and forced into war in the 1950s as a political victim of the Cold War that separated the country into two governments (North Korea controlled by the Soviet Union, and South Korea backed by the United States) — what remained as the Republic of Korea was a land of impoverished, hungry and destitute people, with a Gross Domestic Product per capita of $87 in 1962.
Through emphasis in education and the manufacturing and export of ships, industrial chemicals, automobiles and electronics in the 1960s through the 1980s, however, the country grew its economy from a Gross National Income per capita of $82 in 1961 to almost $21,000 in 2007.
Currently, the Republic of Korea ranks 15th in the world by nominal Gross Domestic Product and is a member of the G20 (the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors). With the additional growth in high-tech industries biotechnology, South Korea has become the seventh largest exporter of goods and services and tenth largest importer in the world.
Today, Korea is a nation of traditions and customs mixed with technology and pop culture. Watch a slide show of this modern, yet tradition-filled Korea, set to the music of the folk song, “Arirang.”
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