Five palaces for the price of a coffee.

What it is

Seoul is the capital of South Korea and the country’s largest city by a very wide margin — around 9.4 million people inside the city limits and roughly 26 million in the metropolitan area, which makes it one of the largest urban regions on earth and puts about half the national population within an hour of it.

It sits in a bowl on the Han river, ringed by four mountains that the Joseon dynasty deliberately built between. That geography still organises the city: the historic centre is north of the river inside the line of the old wall, and the post-1970 city — Gangnam — is south of it on a grid.

How it got here

A settlement here goes back two thousand years, but the city as it exists was founded in 1394, when the first Joseon king moved his capital to what was then called Hanyang and laid out a walled city between the four mountains. The wall went up in 1396, the palaces followed, and the street pattern of central Jongno is essentially that plan.

The dynasty lasted five centuries. Japan invaded in 1592 and burned the palaces; they were rebuilt in the 1860s. Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, and the colonial administration demolished much of what had just been rebuilt and put its own buildings on the sites. Liberation came in 1945, and five years later the Korean War did what the previous four hundred years had not: Seoul changed hands four times and was left largely in ruins.

What happened next has no close parallel. Within a single lifetime the city went from a destroyed capital of a very poor country to the centre of one of the world’s largest economies — an industrial transformation Koreans call the Miracle on the Han. Democracy arrived through mass protest in 1987, the Olympics came in 1988, and since then Seoul has spent thirty years rebuilding what the twentieth century took: the palaces are still under reconstruction, the city wall is still being relinked, and in 2005 the city tore down an elevated motorway to uncover the stream it had been built over.

What it is known for

Seoul is known for the five palaces and the shrine at the centre of it; for markets that have traded on the same ground since the fifteenth century; for a subway that is among the best in the world and a phone signal in every tunnel of it; for eating late and in company; and — since the 2000s — for being the place the rest of the world now takes its music, its television and its cosmetics from.

What visitors tend to remember is smaller than any of that: how much of it is free, how safe it is at two in the morning, and how completely the old and the new are stacked on the same street.