Vietnamese people in
Korea
| Regions with significant
populations |
 South
Korea |
90,931 |
(2009 |
 North
Korea |
? |
|
|
| Languages |
|
Vietnamese, Korean
|
Vietnamese people in Korea have a history going back to the latter
days of Vietnam's Lư
Dynasty; several princes of Ly sought refuge with the kingdom of Goryeo. After the division of Korea and the Korean War, Vietnamese people had various contacts with both North and South Korea. In the latter, Vietnamese are the second-largest group of foreigners, after Chinese migrants.
Early history
One of the earliest Vietnamese people in Korea was Lư Dương Côn (李陽焜), an adopted son of Emperor Lư Nhân Tông; following a succession crisis, he fled to Goryeo. He is remembered in modern-day Korea as the founder of the Jeongseon-gun, Gangwon-do bon-gwan of the Lee family. Later, a Vietnamese prince of the Lư Dynasty, Lư Long Tường (the seventh son of emperor Lư Anh Tông) and his crew of several thousand mandarins and servants sailed directly to Korea after hearing that the Lư Dynasty would be overthrown by the Trần Dynasty. Lư Anh Tông and his crew sought refuge in Goryeo in 1226. A report on Lư Long Tường was broadcast by the South Korean TV channel KBS in December 1995.Legend has it that King Gojong of Goryeo (1213–1259) had dreamt of a grand phoenix flying from the south landing in his nation; therefore, he ordered the local government of Haeju, Hwanghae to give the Vietnamese refugees a red-carpet welcome and let them live in a manor in the nearby countryside. Lư Long Tường thus became the patriarch of the Lee family of Hwasan, Ongjin-gun.
North Korea
Students from North Vietnam began going to North Korea to study as early as
the 1960s, even before the formal establishment of Korean-language education
in their country. The current Vietnamese ambassador to South Korea is a
graduate of Kim Il-sung University. The son of a former staff member in the
Vietnamese embassy in Pyongyang, who also attended Kim Il-sung University
between 1998 and 2002, gave an interview in 2004 with South Korean newspaper The
Chosun Ilbo about the experiences he had while living there.
South Korea
Vietnamese migration to South Korea began later, but quickly grew to a much
larger scale; their population consists mainly of migrant workers and women
introduced to local husbands through marriage agencies. In 1994, 20,493 labour
migrants went from Vietnam to South Korea on traineeship visas; by 1997, this
had risen by about 10% to 22,325. Migrants were mostly male and unskilled;
they were employed in small and medium-sized companies in labour-intensive
industries such as fishing and manufacturing. Spousal migration has a somewhat
longer history; during the Vietnam War, some of the more than 300,000 South
Korean soldiers and civilian support staff stationed in Vietnam married
Vietnamese women and brought them back to Korea; however, many of these
marriages ended in divorce. Spousal migration would not become a large-scale
phenomenon until the 1990s, when South Korean men, unable to attract wives
locally, began to turn to marriage agencies to seek brides in overseas
countries, including Vietnam. As of 2006, 5,000 Vietnamese brides immigrate to
South Korea every year. Korean men married to Vietnamese women typically meet
on marriage tours, which are sometimes subsidized by rural governments keen on
increasing birthrates in the Korean countryside.
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