South Korea Built a Mediocre New Capital in the Middle of Nowhere

Seoul.

It’s an economic powerhouse, and renowned for its food, culture, and NewJeans.

But we’re not here to talk about Seoul, we’re here to talk about Sejong City: the

new guy replacing Seoul as South Korea’s administrative capital.

Like Seoul, Sejong has an economy, and I’m sure at least some of their jeans are new.

But if you’ve never heard of it before, it’s probably because it was just a bunch

of peach farms until the South Korean government whipped it up into a capital city about a

decade ago.

But how did they do that?

And why?

Our journey begins on the presidential campaign trail in 2002.

At this point, things have been going pretty well in South Korea for a while: they’ve

hosted the Olympics, they got into the UN, and the GDP’s as high as it’s ever been.

And as such, people are starting to think less about making the country richer, and

more about making sure everyone gets a slice of the national money pie.

Because, the money pie is very much in Seoul.

The Seoul Capital Area—comprising the city itself, plus Incheon and the Gyeonggi Province—has

just under half of the whole country’s population on under 12% of its land, and the income gap

between there and everywhere else is widening.

So out on the campaign trail, candidate Roh Moo-hyun floats a big idea: take a bunch of

the people and jobs in Seoul, and push them somewhere else.

Because, come on, Seoul has enough going on without the government kicking around.

Sharing is caring, right?

So when Roh gets elected, he sets his big move-the-government plan in motion.

But not everyone’s into it.

It’ll disrupt a lot of people’s lives, plus there are certain operational conveniences

that come from having the country’s financial, cultural, and administrative capitals in the

same place.

One not-into-it party, namely the oppositional Grand National Party, filed a complaint with

the Korean Constitutional Court, which ruled in 2004 that Seoul’s capital status was

so universally understood that it was part of the “unwritten and customary constitution.”

And sure, an “unwritten and customary constitution” is, by definition, nothing, but turns out

robe guys can say whatever.

So now the government has three options: get a written Constitutional amendment passed

to call Sejong the capital, ditch Sejong entirely, or adjust their plans a bit.

They did the last one.

Under the new plan, Sejong would be the administrative capital, home to most of the government’s

ministries, while leaving a few back in Seoul, along with the presidential residence and

the legislature.