on the meaning of Gukto Jongju

When I first encountered the Korean term 국토종주/Gukto Jongju (it doesn't have to be capitalized... what you see is merely force of habit) back in 2017, I had thought it applied only to the Four Rivers path that stretches from Incheon in the northwest, just west of Seoul, to Busan in the southeast. Later on, I discovered that the label was being used for other long trails as well, and this led me into researching what the term actually means. Semantically, the four syllables can be divided into 2 + 2: gukto and jongju. Each of these syllabic pairs can in turn be subdivided into single units that are, as you may already have guessed, from Sino-Korean characters (basically, Chinese characters pronounced the Korean way, with some possible semantic changes thanks to the vicissitudes of history).

gukto = the country's land

jongju = an end-to-end path (lit. "vertical run")

The first syllabic pair subdivides into

guk = country, nation

to = earth, ground, land

...so you can see where I get "the country's land" from.

The second pair subdivides into

jong = vertical(?)

ju = run (verb or noun)

Traditionally, a jongju was a trail that led across/over mountain-range crests and connected the dots between mountain peaks. Walk the saddle ridge, go up to the peak, down into the next saddle, up to the next peak, and so on until you'd walked the range from end to end. So now you see where "end-to-end path" comes from.

I wrote the expression in Korean above, but in Chinese/Sino-Korean, it looks like this:

國土縱走

I'm writing this explanation here because, in the past, I've had a tendency to waste space defining and redefining the term every time I've whipped it out. Now, at least, here's a reference you can use to understand the term a bit better. It's not a term that's only for the Four Rivers path; it applies generically to quite a few long paths in Korea.

Every long path I've done has been a gukto jongju, in fact. As I said above, the term used to apply to a connect-the-dots concept of walking along the crest of a mountain range, hitting every peak, and going from one end of the range to the other, but nowadays, the semantic field of the term has loosened and expanded to include long or long-ish bike trails despite their relative flatness. The path I'll be following is the Nakdong River Gukto Jongju. The path itself is 385 km in length from Busan to the large and beautiful Andong Dam, but when you include the diversions for when I go off-path to motels (and walk back on-path the next morning), you need to add another 18 km, given the motels I've chosen to overnight at.

I hope this helps you to understand one of the most crucial terms I've learned while distance walking in Korea. Gukto Jongju. Very loosely, I might just translate this as a "national path," but that loses a lot of the nuance I've just explained. Happy walking!