Seoul: A significant development in Korean history occurred on April 3, 1906, with the opening of the railway linking Seoul, now in South Korea, and Sinuiju, now in North Korea. This 518.5-kilometer multi-rail line once carried the largest traffic volume on the Korean Peninsula until the division of the country in 1948. South and North Korea agreed to reconnect the railway during the first inter-Korean summit in August 2000 and have been working on its construction since. The South Korean government anticipates that the railway will enhance exchanges with Pyongyang and reduce costs for the delivery of South Korean exports to China and Russia.
According to Yonhap News Agency, on the same date in 1938, Sookmyung Women's College, the predecessor of Sookmyung Women's University, opened its doors. Another notable event was the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island when the U.S.-backed South Korean government attempted to hold elections separately from the communist North. This led to violence resulting in an estimated 14,000 civilian deaths, leaving a lasting impact on Jeju's residents, who have been cautious in electing lawmakers with political affiliations.
In 1954, the Korea Development Bank began operations, marking a significant step in the nation's economic development. By 1974, President Park Chung-hee announced an emergency bill to suppress anti-government forces, allowing the government to sentence leaders of civic protests to death and effectively stifling the press.
The year 2000 saw the Citizens' Coalition for the 2000 General Election label 86 candidates as unfit for public service, with 68.6 percent failing to secure National Assembly seats. Two years later, in 2002, Lim Dong-won, the national security adviser to President Kim Dae-jung, visited Pyongyang as a special presidential envoy.
Fast forward to 2017, when Moon Jae-in was nominated to lead the liberal Democratic Party in the May 9 presidential election after winning all four rounds in the party primary. By 2020, South Korea's confirmed COVID-19 cases surpassed 10,000, with the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reporting 86 new virus patients that day, bringing the total caseload to 10,062.
In 2022, President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol nominated former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo as the first prime minister of his incoming government. Most recently, in 2024, North Korea claimed to have successfully test-fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) equipped with a hypersonic warhead, asserting that all the country's missiles are now solid-fuel and nuclear capable with warhead control capability.