SHINING EXAMPLE Downtown Ulsan sprang up over a generation of dizzying growth

The Miracle Workers
A South Korean backwater called Ulsan is where Asia's quest for a better life was forged

By Michael Schuman

Ulsan is not the Asia of mountaintop monasteries, palm-fringed beaches or opulent royal palaces. A tourist guide for the gritty South Korean coastal city spotlights the petrochemical complex as a major attraction. The streets are mostly jumbles of gray, concrete buildings. Fume-belching smokestacks line the Taehwa River. Looking out from a grass-topped hill near the coast, all you can see is industrial wasteland. Below sprawls a mammoth shipyard, a sea of towering cranes, boxy brown office buildings, and dark factories as big as airplane hangars. The roar of trucks drowns out that of the ocean. Rows of docks and heavy machinery seem to have mauled the shoreline forever. There isn't a pagoda in sight.

Ulsan doesn't need to be pretty. The shipyard, run by South Korean industrial behemoth Hyundai, is the world's biggest. House-sized steel chunks of oil tankers and container vessels are wheeled out of the factories on giant, flatbed lorries. The cranes haul them into place along the docks, where welding machines stitch the pieces together, sometimes into ships three times as long as a football pitch. Those ships venture out in all directions, carrying the oil, chemicals, cars and toys that make the world's economy go round. Ulsan's monuments are not a Taj Mahal or an Angkor Wat, testaments to Asia's past glory, but its shipyards, car factories and ports—symbols of the region's prosperity and importance today.

The grassy hill doesn't overlook urban blight, therefore, but global might. What happened atop it three decades ago tells you why—and why it means so much to Woo Doo Myung. Now 57, Woo can rightly lay claim to be one of South Korea's industrial pioneers. He came to Ulsan from Seoul in 1972 for a job building Hyundai's first oil tanker. Back then, Ulsan was a very different place. The shipyard had only two docks and a handful of scattered buildings. Hyundai was in its infancy. No one in South Korea had ever produced anything as big as an oil tanker, and the shipyard was in utter confusion. "We didn't even know how to read the blueprints," Woo recalls. He slaved 17 hours a day welding together the massive steel plates of the ship's hull, snatching only a few hours of sleep each night at a company-run dormitory. The workers struggled to make the huge pieces fit together. Hyundai founder Chung Ju Yung marched along the docksides, rallying the men to work harder with bold promises. "You'll have a TV and a refrigerator in five years," he told them. "And a car in 15." At the time, such goods seemed an impossible dream—Woo was earning a mere $360 a year.

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For two years the workers toiled, until finally the tanker was ready to be launched. Woo watched anxiously from the shore. Would the ship actually float, he wondered? Would all of their hard work go to waste? The tanker drifted off effortlessly, and the docks erupted into relieved cheers and applause. "You can't imagine how proud we felt," Woo says. "No one believed it was possible." Chung invited the entire staff to a lavish celebration on top of that grassy hill. They set up makeshift shrines and offered rice cakes to the gods in thanks, then drank, danced and sang through the night. "We were usually too poor to eat meat," says Woo. "That night, we ate a lot of meat."

Today, Woo can eat as much meat as he likes. Chung's promises of future riches proved vastly understated. Woo still works at the yard, providing safety training to the shipbuilders. He earns a respectable $60,000 a year, owns a large apartment, and he and his wife each own a car. Both of his children are doctors. Woo's rise to wealth is far from unique. In 1960, per capita income in South Korea was only a bit more than $150 a year, making the country poorer than Iraq, Liberia or Zimbabwe. Since then, incomes in South Korea have surged more than 90 times to $14,100. The nation is now the 11th largest economy in the world, and it dominates high-tech industries such as LCD panels and memory chips. South Korea's boom has been echoed across the region. In Taiwan during the same period, per capita income jumped 88 times, in Singapore, 62, and in Thailand, 25.

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Economists call it the Asian economic miracle, and a Miracle it was. Hundreds of millions of Asians who lived in mud huts and barely had enough to eat now dwell in high-rise apartments with stuffed refrigerators. They watch DVDs on plasma TVs, sip Starbucks cappuccinos and chat on mobile phones instead of wading in rice paddies behind ox-drawn plows. Asians were once lucky to complete a basic sixth-grade education; today they have the cash to send their kids to Harvard. And it all happened in one generation. Of all the major trends that have influenced the past half-century in Asia—the rise of democracy, war and revolution, the threat of terrorism—it is the Miracle that has touched the most lives, and been the biggest factor in shaping the Asia we know today.

Ulsan was at the heart of the Miracle. Before the factories came along in the mid-1960s, it was a miserable village of clay-and-thatch huts, and most residents were poor rice farmers and fishermen.

Seo Byung Jo, who was born in Ulsan in 1932 when Korea was still a Japanese colony, describes life there before the Miracle as "not a human existence." His family of five survived on a bowl of rice in the morning and another of thick soup for dinner. The low point for Ulsan came during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Hungry children followed U.S. Army trucks hoping for handouts from the soldiers, who tossed a few biscuits as they passed. "When the children ran for the cookies," Seo recalls bitterly, "the soldiers would take pictures and laugh." That sad stage in Ulsan's history has since been paved over. Rows of high-rise apartment blocks with parking lots packed with cars line the streets. In the bustling nightlife district of Seongnam, crowds of jeans-clad twentysomethings stroll past bright neon signs munching McDonald's fries or cram the local Pizza Hut. A giant Ferris wheel covered in flashing green, red and yellow lights hovers next to the ritzy Lotte department store. Ulsan residents still head to the shore to eat fish, but now in pricey sashimi restaurants.

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