Monday, August 22, 2011

Line 1 under construction

On January 7, 1970, the Korea Times published the following article:


Two years later, on January 1, 1972, the Korea Herald published this photo of the subway construction.


Even back then things got built very quickly.

3 comments:

Aaron said...

Good thing there were fewer private cars on the roads of Korea back then. I can only imagine the traffic snarls around City Hall if they tried something like that nowadays.

Chris in South Korea said...

No need to imagine! The traffic snarls around Gangnam / Yangjae with the construction of the Sinbundang line are worth mentioning in the same breath.

Were you able to dig up anything on the author? The article sounds written by a native English speaker, and could serve as a standard for the Korea Times of today.

matt said...

Chris in South Korea,

The Korea Times used to be a better paper back in the 60s and early 70s. In the introduction to his second book (published in 1976) James Wade lamented leaving the Times, and described how it used to be quite fondly (but a change in editor (overseen by the ever-increasingly authoritarian Park regime?) in 1974 led things to change for the worse, and he quit writing for the paper. (I'll have to post that introduction sometime). Back in the 70s writer/translator Ahn Jung-hyo used to write for the Times as well...