Grand Korean Waterway
canal between Seoul and Busan, within South Korea
The Grand Korean Waterway, officially known as the Pan Korea Grand Waterway, was a proposed 540-kilometer-long (340 mi) canal connecting Seoul and Busan, South Korea's two largest cities. The canal would run diagonally across the country connecting the Han River, which flows through Seoul into the Yellow Sea, to the Nakdong River, which flows through Busan into the Korea Strait. The proposed canal would traverse difficult mountainous terrain.
The Pan Korea Grand Waterway was a project of Lee Myung-bak, the 10th president of South Korea. It met with huge controversy and disapproval and was later abandoned. Lee stated that the canal would bring clear water source by cleaning layers of sediments that formed in the rivers, create tourist infrastructure and prevent disturbance of logistics.
Many Koreans were anxious about Lee's plans. They argued that the canal would prove disastrous to the natural environment and potentially hazardous to the freshwater sources that nearly 50 million residents of the country depend on. In addition, many researchers and interested distribution industries prospected the canal would be economically unprofitable because land transportation may be more cost-effective.
Supporters of the plan insisted that the length of the construction would only be 40 km, linking the Han River with the Nakdong River.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Grand Korean Waterway” is canal between Seoul and Busan, within South Korea. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Grand, Korean and Waterway, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grand Korean Waterway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.