Daegu

Samsung began as a grocery store in Daegu. On March 1, 1938, Lee Byung-chul opened a trading company exporting dried fish and noodles to China from this inland basin city, naming it Samsung—'Three Stars.' By 1954, Lee had founded Cheil Industries, Korea's largest woollen mill, in Daegu's Chimsan-dong district, employing 4,500 workers. That textile mill is gone (closed 1997, now Samsung's C-Lab campus), but the founder effect it seeded—a city that thinks in fibres, looms, and supply chains—shaped Daegu's economic DNA for the next seven decades.

Textile production in the Daegu region dates to approximately 2000 BCE. The modern industry scaled during the 1950s as Kohinoor, Crescent, Nishat, and other mills clustered around the city's labour pool and transport links. Daegu and the surrounding Gyeongbuk region accounted for 94% of South Korea's trade surplus in 2006—a concentration of export manufacturing that functions like a colonial organism where individual firms share infrastructure, labour markets, and logistics to achieve collective output no single firm could manage.

The 2003 Daegu metro fire exposed what concentration costs. On February 18, an arsonist ignited gasoline inside a subway car at Jungangno Station. A second train pulled in and caught fire. The train operator removed the master key while fleeing, killing battery power and trapping 79 passengers in darkness. 198 people died, nearly 150 were injured. The disaster triggered a national overhaul: every subway car with flammable materials was retired by 2009. Daegu learned what every densely networked system eventually learns—high connectivity amplifies both efficiency and catastrophe, the way a tightly coupled ant colony transmits both food signals and pathogens through the same chemical channels.

Modern Daegu (2.4 million residents) has pivoted from commodity textiles to medical devices, auto parts, and fashion design, rebranding as 'Fashion City' to escape the commodity trap. The Daegu-Gyeongbuk Free Economic Zone (designated 2008) targets knowledge industries. But the city faces demographic headwinds: population has declined since 2003, talent flowing to Seoul the way nutrients drain from a source habitat toward a more productive sink. Whether Daegu can convert its manufacturing heritage into higher-value specialisation—as Samsung itself transformed from dried fish to semiconductors—is the city's defining question.