The Korean Demilitarized Zone

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The strip of land running across the Korean peninsula, roughly four kilometres wide and around two hundred and fifty kilometres long, established by the armistice agreement signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953. It follows not the thirty-eighth parallel — the line along which the peninsula had been divided for occupation purposes in 1945 — but the front line as it stood when the fighting stopped, which crosses the parallel obliquely. That distinction is the compressed history of the war: three years of fighting, enormous casualties, and a final line only slightly different from the starting one. The armistice was a military agreement between commanders, not a peace treaty between states, so the war has never been formally concluded, and the arrangements made in 1953 as temporary have now lasted longer than the Cold War that produced them. The zone is also, incidentally, one of the least disturbed pieces of land in north-east Asia.