East Asia · Empire, war and the modern states
North Korea
drawn on the map 1948–2024
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded on 9 September 1948 under Kim Il-sung with Soviet backing after the division of Korea at the 38th parallel. It launched the Korean War (1950–1953), which ended in an armistice restoring roughly the prewar border.
- Shown on the map
- 1948–2024
- Peak area
- 129k km²
- Region
- East Asia
Overview
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded on 9 September 1948 under Kim Il-sung with Soviet backing after the division of Korea at the 38th parallel. It launched the Korean War (1950–1953), which ended in an armistice restoring roughly the prewar border. A one-party socialist state built on the Juche ideology and dynastic Kim family rule (Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un), it became internationally isolated, militarized, and a nuclear-weapons state, while facing chronic economic hardship.
Common questions
- What was North Korea?
- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded on 9 September 1948 under Kim Il-sung with Soviet backing after the division of Korea at the 38th parallel. It launched the Korean War (1950–1953), which ended in an armistice restoring roughly the prewar border.
- When is North Korea shown on the map?
- The border data draws North Korea 1948–2024. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was North Korea?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, North Korea covered about 129,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia article for each polity as the basis of these profiles, supplemented by Encyclopaedia Britannica, chinaknowledge.de, the World History Encyclopedia, museum and university sources, and the academic works it lists. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — North Korea en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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