Ports in South Korea — Busan, Seoul and Incheon with Distances from China

Korea is China’s closest major ocean market: Busan and Incheon are the container gateways and Seoul the inland destination. This page gives the distances and indicative sailing times from China, plus terminal facts for all three, from our port records.

Distances and indicative sailing times

Our source records assume a service speed of about 10 knots to keep comparisons like-for-like; actual container services are faster, so treat these as floor values.

Port information: Busan

Busan lies on Korea’s south-eastern coast, facing the Korea Strait to the south-east, the Nakdong River to the west and Tsushima Island (Japan) across the water. It is South Korea’s largest port and one of the busiest container ports in the world, the country’s hub for sea, land and air transport and a financial and commercial centre that carries a decisive share of Korean foreign trade.

The port has a temperate monsoon climate, with mean temperatures of 29–31 °C in summer and 7–9 °C in winter and roughly 1,500 mm of rain a year, and it is a regular semi-diurnal tidal port. Busan never closes: working round the clock through the year, it averages four to five container ships worked per day.

Port information: Incheon

Incheon stands on the south bank of the Han River estuary on Korea’s north-western coast, on the eastern side of Ganghwa Bay, and is the import-export hub of northern South Korea, 40-odd kilometres from Seoul. Its hinterland generates 48.7 per cent of national GDP and takes in nearly 70 per cent of the country’s imports. The Incheon Free Economic Zone was launched in August 2003, and the port sits beside Incheon International Airport with the Gyeongin expressways, the West Coast expressway, the Seoul ring expressway, the Gyeongin rail line and the airport railroad knitting it directly into the capital-region market, plus electrified lines across the country. Incheon runs 39 scheduled services connecting more than 60 ports; as of 2011 its international passenger terminal operated ten passenger-cargo routes to Dalian, Dandong, Weihai, Qingdao and other Chinese ports, and a container link to Nampo.

Port information: Seoul

Seoul, formerly Hanseong, is the capital of South Korea, in the Han River basin in the north-west of the peninsula. Expressways tie it to Busan, Incheon and the other major cities: the Seoul–Incheon line was the country’s first modern expressway, and the Seoul–Busan route passes the industrial centres of Suwon, Cheonan, Daejeon, Gumi, Daegu and Gyeongju. With the opening of the Gyeongin waterway, ocean-going vessels can steam directly into the capital, giving this inland city a working waterfront.

Seoul is about 40 km inland, so ocean cargo normally discharges at Incheon or Busan and completes the journey by truck, rail or the Gyeongin waterway.