How the Korean Wave Began

One of the biggest cultural waves to sweep Asia in the past 30 years did not begin with a masterpiece.

It began with a financial crisis, and with cheap goods.

To see how, go back to a very hard year for all of Asia.

In 1997, a financial crisis swept across Asia. Currencies lost their value, businesses closed, and television stations all over East Asia fell on hard times.

The stations still had to fill their hours on air every day. But making programs cost money, and buying them from abroad cost even more. For years, the main imports in the region had been Japanese programs, and Japanese programs were expensive.

So the stations went looking for something cheaper.

And they found Korea.

The price gap between them was very wide. In 2000, a Korean television drama cost only about a quarter of a Japanese one, and about a tenth of one from Hong Kong.

One tenth.

For a station manager trying to balance the budget after the crisis, that was no longer a choice. It was the only answer.

Korean dramas began to flood the airwaves across Asia. This was not because anyone had decided they were better. It was because they fit the budget.

But if that were all, the story would have ended as soon as the economy recovered.

It did not end, because something had been prepared well before.

In 1993, four years before the crisis, South Korea had changed the direction of its policy. It began to treat culture not as entertainment on the side, but as a real industry. Culture could make money and could be exported, just like ships or cars.

Then, in 1999, a basic law on promoting the cultural industries was passed.

So when the chance came, the country already had the machinery in place to meet it.

This is the place to pause for a moment, because it is the heart of the whole story.

The opportunity of 1997 came to everyone. Television stations across Asia needed cheap programs, and any country in the region could have been the seller. But a seller needs goods on hand, people to make them, and a way to send them abroad.

Four years before the crisis, when no one saw it coming, Korea had started to build those things. It had not predicted the crisis. It had simply started early.

In that same year, 1999, the new trend got its name.

And the people who named it were not Korean.

Chinese journalists came up with the word. On November 19, 1999, the Beijing Youth Daily ran an article about how much Chinese audiences loved Korean television dramas and music. That article contained a new word: Hallyu.

In Vietnam, people usually call it the Korean wave. The name fits, because a wave asks no one for permission, and it does not stop at any border.

So the name all of Asia uses for Korea's own trend came from journalists next door, who could find no other word for what was happening.

One last figure shows how far this went.

In 1997, the year of the crisis, Korea exported about 8.3 million dollars' worth of television programs.

Ten years later, in 2007, that figure was 151 million dollars.

It had grown about 18 times over in 10 years.

There is something worth thinking about in this whole story, and it has nothing to do with film.

The crisis of 1997 was a disaster. No one wanted it, and it cost a great many people their jobs, their homes and their savings.

Yet in that terrible year, a door opened a crack, just when no one was watching. And that door could open only because someone had been getting ready for four years.

So today, on the streets of Seoul, among glowing billboards and shops that sell everything the rest of Asia wants to buy, one thing is worth remembering about this place.

Thirty years ago, this was a country reeling from a crisis, selling television stations some of the cheapest dramas on the market.