Daejeon compared with Taipei City: area, population and density

Geography and shape

Daejeon is an inland city in central South Korea with no coastline and no islands, set in a basin surrounded by low mountains. It is known as the country’s science and research city, home to many national research institutes. Taipei City is likewise a hill-ringed basin, which makes this one of the more like-for-like terrain pairings among Korean cities on this site.

Population context

Daejeon has 1,440,729 residents on 539.83 km², about 2,669 per km². Taipei City has 2,439,507 on 271.7997 km², about 8,975 per km². Taipei City has about 1.69 times Daejeon’s population on about half its land, so its average density is about 3.4 times Daejeon’s.

Boundaries and definitions

Daejeon’s figures are resident registration population (주민등록인구) and official administrative area at 2025-12-31, from South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety; Taipei City uses household registration at year-end 2025. Both are city-level administrations whose boundaries include forested hills, so neither density describes a built-up neighbourhood. Neither figure includes the surrounding region; neighbouring Sejong is a separate city with its own page.

Daejeon: Daejeon Metropolitan City's full administrative territory, an inland city with no offshore islands. Population is resident registration population (주민등록인구) as at 2025-12-31, from this ministry's own annual administrative-area-and-population report — a different series from the Statistics Korea register-based census (등록센서스) that the South Korea and Seoul pages use, though the two series are usually close. Area is this same report's official administrative-area figure at 2025-12-31, not a figure computed from the map outline. This ministry's own administrative-area total for South Korea (100,517.62 km² at 2025-12-31) differs by about 0.06% from the 100,459.9 km² cadastral figure the South Korea and Seoul pages use, a small gap between two different official area series rather than an error.

Taipei City: Taipei City, the special municipality alone. Area and registered population come from the same Ministry of the Interior table at the same year-end 2025 reference date, so the density is like for like. The figure excludes New Taipei City: “Taipei” in everyday speech often means the two cities together (2,324.3664 km², 6,484,338 residents) or the wider metropolitan area, which has no single official boundary. Population is household registration, not resident presence.