Tag: Pyeongtaek

Shouldn’t a Chinatown have Chinese that live and work in it?  This sounds more like a Chinese themed shopping district than a Chinatown:

South Korea will build a new Chinatown near Seoul to serve as an international shopping and tourism hub, the operator of a free economic zone said Wednesday.

 

The Chinatown, expected to be over 2.3 million square meters in size, will be built in Pyeongtaek, some 70 kilometers southeast of Seoul, according to the Yellow Sea Free Economic Zone (YSFEZ) authority.  The YSFEZ is one the country’s several free economic zones (FEZs) located near the capital area.   The project, proposed by a special purpose company (SPC) established with major investment from Chinese firm Legions Group, has been reviewed by the related bodies as of March and is waiting official approval from the authorities.

 

The company, capitalized at 50 billion won (US$43 million), is 50-percent owned by Legions, 20 percent by Chinese individuals and 20 percent by South Korean private investors.  The plan is to build hotels, recreation and convention centers, as well as large-scale shopping facilities with duty-free shops in the newly envisioned town, named China Castle. The company said it will also establish medical centers, an international school and apartments in the area.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Hopefully the spread of MERS is contained so the people in Pyeongtaek can get back to normal lives.  Fortunately the ROK Air Force servicemember who tested positive for MERS recently has recovered:

PYEONGTAEK, South Korea—A city best known by many for its nearby U.S. military base and surrounding rice paddies became ground zero as a deadly virus rarely seen outside the Middle East began to spread through South Korea.

At St. Mary’s Hospital in a newly developing industrial area of Pyeongtaek, about 35 miles south of Seoul, doctors puzzled for three days in mid-May over the flulike condition of a 68-year-old man, who hadn’t disclosed at that point that he had recently returned from the Middle East.

The man left St. Mary’s and was later admitted to a larger hospital in Seoul, where he was ultimately diagnosed with Middle East respiratory syndrome and was quarantined. But during that time in St. Mary’s, the man spread the MERS virus to more than 30 people.  (…………………………)

A South Korean Defense Ministry official said one Korean man stationed at the Osan Air Base near Pyeongtaek who tested positive for MERS would be released on Thursday. The air base is close to the main U.S. military base of Camp Humphreys for which Pyeongtaek is known.

St. Mary’s was the first hospital named by the government as being part of the MERS outbreak. All patients, including MERS sufferers, have been moved to other hospitals.  [Wall Street Journal via reader tip]

You can read more at the link, but it is going to be interesting to learn why MERS spread so widely in various hospitals as well as why so few people have died compared to outbreaks in the Middle East.

Korean city where MERS spread struggles: “Business was pretty bad before. Now it’s worse.” http://t.co/THMj9Y2M5Z pic.twitter.com/JNjiXTUh6m

— Alastair Gale (@AlastairGale) June 11, 2015

An underground water pipe measuring 1,000 milimeters in diameter bursts in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, on Jan. 31, 2015, flooding the area for hours. (Yonhap)