Korea is a civilization, formerly unified nation, and geographic area currently composed of two sovereign states located on the Korean Peninsula in East Asia. It borders China to the northwest, and Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait.

Korea was divided in 1948, with the southern portion of the peninsula controlled by the capitalistic democracy South Korea. South Korea, formally Republic of Korea, is a developed country and it has an international outlook with memberships in the United Nations, WTO, OECD and G-20 major economies and home to such global brands as Samsung, LG Electronics, and Hyundai.

The northern portion is controlled by the single-party communist North Korea, formally the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The north follows the unique ideology of Juche, a form of Communism based on self-reliance. Led by Kim-Jong-il, Chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea, North Korea has close relations with the People's Republic of China and Russia.

Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest origin of the Korean people were Altaic language-speaking migrants from south-central Siberia, who populated ancient Korea in successive waves from the Neolithic age to the Bronze Age. The adoption of the Chinese writing system ("Hanja" in Korean) in the 2nd century BC, and Buddhism in the 4th century AD, had profound effects on the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Baekje later passed on a modified version of these cultural advances to Japan.

Since the Goryeo Dynasty, Korea was ruled by a single government and maintained political and cultural independence until the 20th century, despite the Mongol invasions of the Goryeo Dynasty in the 13th century and Japanese invasions of the Joseon Dynasty in the 16th century. In 1377, Korea produced the Jikji, the world's oldest existing document printed with movable metal type. In the 15th century, the turtle ships were deployed, and King Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet Hangul to increase literacy among his people who could neither read nor write Hanja (Chinese characters).

During the latter part of the Joseon Dynasty, Korea's isolationist policy earned it the Western nickname the "Hermit Kingdom". By the late 19th century, the country became the object of the colonial designs of Japan and Europe. In 1910, Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan and remained occupied until the end of World War II in August 1945.

In 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed on the surrender and disarming of Japanese troops in Korea; the Soviet Union accepting the surrender of Japanese weaponry north of the 38th parallel and the United States taking the surrender south of it. This minor decision by allied armies soon became the basis for the division of Korea by the two superpowers, exacerbated by their inability to agree on the terms of Korean independence. The two Cold War rivals then established governments sympathetic to their own ideologies, leading to Korea's current division into two political entities: North Korea and South Korea.