The Three Kingdom Period
Between 1st centruy BCE and 7th century BCE, the Korean peninsula was home to three separate kingdoms - Goguryo, Shilla and Pekche.
Koguryo is considered to be the 1st of the original three kingdoms which comprise modern-day South Korea. It occupied the lands in present-day north-of-Seoul, North Korea, Manchuria and parts of Inner Mongolia. Around year 500 BCE, succession wars, internal division and attacks from Turkic nomads gradually weakened the kingdom. Korea's traditional dress, hanbok, is said to be originally from Koguryo.
Pekche was located southern of Koguryo, around present-day Seoul, with its inhabitants belonging to the same ethnicity as Koguryo. It held most of the agricultural land on the peninsula and as a result was able to enjoy a relatively affluent and comfortable life. This material abundance gave rise to a vibrant cultural life, heavily influenced by Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Over the course of its existence, Pekche had to fight several times with the more militaristically inclined Koguryo.
Silla, the third kingdom, occupied the lands around present-day Kyongju. Although it was late to grow politically and culturally compared to the other two kingdoms (it embraced Buddhism about a century and a half after the other two in 535), Shilla was able to gain the support of the Chinese Tang dynasty and mounted an attack on Pekche and Koguryo. The victory was followed by a 8-year power struggle with the Tang dynasty which attempted to take advantage of the war between the three kingdoms to take over all three of them.
The period between 668-935 is known as Unified Shilla and was marked by relative peace and prosperity. The kingdom had a harmonious tributary relationship with the Tang dynasty and borrowed heavily from the Tang governance model. While Buddhism was officially adopted as the state religion, Confucianism also received patronage and in 682, the National Confucian College was established. Modern historians consider Shilla culture to be the root of mainstream Korean culture.
The Koryo Dynasty (918 - 1392)
Internal strife in Unified Shilla led to the ascend of new powerful military figures who later established the Koryo Dynasty. One of the ways in which he cemented his power was by marrying the daughters of local leaders (at some point having some 29 wives) which eventually led to too many contenders for the throne. After a period of quick successions and instability, King Gwangjong organised a purge and strengthened his grip on the throne. Much of the following political and administrative processes were aimed at streamlining governance and centralizing power, something that will be fully achieved only in the subsequent Chosun period.
Culturally and socially, the Koryo period was a patchwork of different local traditions, practices and beliefs. It was a complex and multilayered society in which Buddhism, Taoism, Shamanism, geomancy, feng shui and other local traditions all had their influence. Buddhism was promoted by the officials in power and some of the most important pieces of Buddhist art, such as woodblocks of the Buddhist Tripitaka, originated in this period. The Celadon pottery, one of Korea's traditional artistic creations, also has its roots in the Koryo Dynasty.
Around year 1231, power dynamics on the Korean peninsula started to shift. The Mongols began regular incursions into the kingdom which gradually weakened the court's power. The solution proposed were a series of marriages between Korean and the Mongol royals which eventually led to the Koryo Dynasty being seen as not purely Korean (mixed-blood dynasty) and as more pro-Mongolian than pro-Korean. From a global historical perspective, it is useful to mention here that the spread of Mongolian influence on the Korean peninsula was part of the general wave of Mongolian conquests across all of Eurasia.
Chosun
In the 14th century, the Koryo Dynasty fell into social unrest. The reason - a social order centered around a "private rule" excersised by a group of court officials and those close to them. In 1392, a group of loyal land-owning Confuscian literati led by General Lee overthrew the pro-Mongol dynasty and founded a new, pro-Ming (Chinese) dynasty, called Chosun. It existed until 1910 (when Chosun fell under Japanese occupation) and had as its capital the city of Hanyang, present-day Seoul.
The new Dynasty came with a new vision for the social order. The government considered the common people to be Heaven's people, or people belonging to the Heavens, and thus a part of it. As such, they were granted a high status in the new kingdom (this is not unsimilar to the Western notion of human rights) and seen as an extention of the Heavens just like the ruler is an extension of it too. This idea extended even further and all public life and public posts were seen from the point of view of the relationship they had with the Heaven. The land of the country was not seen as belonging to the King but rather as "All under Heaven". The minsters were not the King's assistants but rather together with the King, they were assisting in the administration of public affairs on behalf of the common people, implementing their will.
The government adopted an isolationist policy towards other coutrnies with the exception of China and to some extent Japan. Neo-Confucianism became the philosophy of the state, Buddhism lost its previous influence. The economic life was centered around agriculture with industrial development largly lagging behind and a notable (characteristic of Confucianism) disdain for commerce and trade.
Nevertheless, several key cultural and philosophical events took place during the Chosun period which influence South Korea until today. The first one was the invention of the Korean alphabet, Hangul, in 1443. Hangul is a phonetic system, a marked difference form the until-then-used Chinese characters.
The Chosun period also saw the emergence of Shirhak, or Practical Learning, a school of thought promoting research and writing on issues indigenous to Korea. Later on, another philosophical movement developed - Tonghak, or Eastern Learning, was a nationalistic religious cult which rose as a response to Sohak, or Western Learning, which consisted of the Catholic doctrine and later Protestanism.
In the late 16th century, the Chosun dynasty began to decline mainly as a result of external invasions.
Japanese Occupation
In 1905, in wake of the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese government unilaterally declared that Korea would henceforth be a Japanese protectorate. In August 1910, this status was altered, and Korea became a formal colony of the Japanese empire ruled by a Governor-General.
The occupation period lasted until the end of World War II in 1945 and consisted of roughly three sub-periods. At the beginning of the occupation (period I - 1910-1919), many basic civic liberties were rescinded. The continious deterioration of life eventually led to the March First Movement, a wide-spread demonstration held on March, 1, 1919 which compelled the Japanese government to review its approach and loosen its grip on the common people.
This event was followed by a period (1919-1932) of more freedom of speach and assembly with newspapers printed in Korean and several Korean political parties being formed. Modern universities where education was carried out in Korean were also established.
In 1932, following the outbreak of the war in Manchuria, and until 1945, Korea saw a return to the brutalities of the first sub-period. This was largly due to the wartime needs of the Japanese economy and government which required the exploitation of the Korean people and natural resources to fund the war effort. As part of the official policy, Korean people were forced to adopt Japanese names, stop speaking Korean and convert to Shinto, Japan's state religion.
The Korean War (1950-1953)
During the Japanese Occupation, many Koreans fled the country to Russia, China and the USA. There, they developed different ideas about governance and came into contact with different ideologies. When the Japanese government collapsed at the end of World War II, many of these Korean national leaders returned to the country with diffferent ideas about its future and with financial, technical and political backing from warring global players such as Russia and the USA. This led to a civil war which went on for three years and destroyed much of the industrial base that the Japanese had left behind. On 27 July 1953, a temporary armistice was signed which divided the Korean peninsula along the 38th paralel resulting in two countries - North Korea and South Korea.
Post-War Restoration
In South Korea, the years immediately after the war were a period of povery, starvation and further bloodhsed as the government tried to "cleanse" the country of "communist elements". Most of the industrial base was in the North which further plunged Korea into poverty. The country survived thanks to financial aid from the USA which was mostly in the form of consumer products. This kept the Korean people alive but offered them little independence or a chance to advance their economy. The Park Chung-Hee government (in office 1961 - 1979) took decisive measures to remedy this. Park Chung-Hee is one of the most, if not the most, controversial figures in Korea's modern history. His government is credited with being the driving force behind "The Miracle on Han River", the metaphore for Korea's meteoric economic rise. His government took it upon itself to build Korea's industrial base and laid the foundations and later nurtured conglomerats such as Samsung, Hyundai, POSCO, etc., companies which to this day lead Korea's advancement. The price for this was that his tenure also saw rampant human rights violations and the intense use of the military and the police to ensure control of the population.