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Heart and Seoul

From the ashes of war, Korea’s capital rises like a phoenix to world-class.

Seoul throbs with a vigor and vitality that come as a shock to anyone returning years after visiting the shattered capital in the aftermath of the Korean War—or even a generation ago, when it remained a distant Asian outpost, clearly fallen behind other major regional centers. Just 40 miles below the line that separates North from South Korea, Seoul sprawls on either side of the Han River, 20 miles inland from industrial Incheon—that’s the port city that’s building even farther into the sea in hopes of becoming the transportation hub of Northeast Asia. Together, the Seoul-Incheon megalopolis, including surrounding Kyonggi Province, shelters half of South Korea’s 48 million citizens. Often at odds with one another on such hot-button issues as the economy, labor, the Korean-American alliance and how to deal with North Korea, locals swagger with an ebullience that belies headlines of the North’s nuclear weapons, anti-American demos and political in-fighting.

Beneath shining office towers and apartment blocks that rise like giant matchboxes everywhere, the city is expanding its cultural and business horizons so rapidly that an official from the tourist office warns that “everything keeps changing.” Sturdy stone bridges span a bubbling stream that was hidden beneath an expressway two years ago. A few months earlier, those bridges were heaps of stones, their gently arched walkways blocked by barriers, as workers strived mightily to meet the deadline for completion set by Seoul’s dynamic mayor, Lee Myung Bok, who once ran the enormous construction company that covered the stream with asphalt in the first place.

Now Mayor Lee’s dream is to beautify the capital, defying critics who say it grew so rapidly in the explosion of the ’60s and ’70s that civic planners and builders sublimated aesthetic values in the interests of Korea’s “economic miracle.” Strollers wander by the stream in the shadow of some of the country’s largest corporations, down to an old-but-new district of all-night shopping centers, textile factories, clothing outlets and sporting goods stores near Tongdaemun, the city’s historic East Gate. Cheong Gye Cheon, translated as “pristine stream,” infuses a fiercely bustling commercial enclave with serenity and charm. The other way, on the broad avenue sweeping south to Seoul Station, traffic swirls around Namdaemun, the city’s equally venerable South Gate, lording it over a warren of shops offering terrific bargains, above ground and in a winding underground arcade.

But Mayor Lee’s vision does not stop there. In front of the historic City Hall, a massive pile of cement built under Japanese colonial rule, the vast City Hall plaza, once a magnet for enormous demonstrations, is now a grassed-over circle fit for concerts, parties—and a daily parade of figures dressed in bright Chosun-dynasty costumes as they reenact the “changing of the guard” in front of Deoksu Palace across the way. The square is truly the center of the capital, although many of the biggest chaebol, or conglomerates, have set up headquarters several miles away, south of the broad Han, whose twists and turns divide “old” from “new” Seoul. Wide, sweeping avenues, enormous department stores and soaring skyscrapers add a special luster “south of the river,” even as Cheong Gye Cheon revitalizes the traditional city center.