TikTok video transcript

This is one of the most dangerous places on Earth, a border stretching over 200 kilometers lined with 2 million landmines. On either side of that line sit South Korea and North Korea, the same people, the same ethnicity, yet each treating the other as its greatest enemy, technically in a state of war for decades.

And yet just 100 years ago, they were the same country, the Korean Empire. In 1910, Japan expanded outward and annexed the Korean Peninsula. For the decades that followed, the peninsula remained under Japanese control. Until the end of World War II, Soviet forces entered the Korean peninsula from the north, American forces pushed up from the south.

To prevent the Soviet Union from swallowing the entire peninsula, the United States proposed splitting it in two along the 38th parallel, the north under Soviet administration, the south under American administration. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement for joint administration, but it dropped the Korean peninsula into the grip of two opposing ideologies.

Then, two separate governments took shape, a communist regime in the north, a capitalist government in the south. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate government. Both wanted to unify the other under their own rule. On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and launched a full-scale invasion southward. The Korean War had begun.

At first, North Korean forces swept through almost all of South Korea. Then, the United States led a United Nations force in a counterattack, pushing North Korea all the way back to near the Chinese border. Then China sent 2 million volunteer soldiers into the conflict, driving the front line back to roughly where it had started.

After that, both sides signed an armistice. But since no formal peace treaty has ever been signed, so the two countries are still in a state of war.