Incheon compared with Taipei City: area, population and density

Geography and shape

Incheon Metropolitan City is built around South Korea’s main international airport and container port on the Yellow Sea, but its administrative territory also includes Ganghwa and Ongjin counties — a scatter of islands running from Ganghwa near the mainland out to Baengnyeong, close to the North Korean maritime border. Taipei City has no offshore territory at all. Comparing the two full administrations, rather than just Incheon’s urban core, is what produces nearly a fourfold area gap.

Population context

Incheon’s population is about 1.25 times Taipei City’s, spread across land about 3.94 times as large, giving an average density of about 2,854 per km² against Taipei City’s roughly 8,976 — Taipei runs a little over three times denser. Both are city-proper figures and exclude each city’s much larger surrounding metropolitan area; Incheon together with Seoul and Gyeonggi Province forms the Seoul Capital Area, home to roughly half of South Korea’s population.

Boundaries and definitions

Incheon’s figures are resident registration population (주민등록인구) and official administrative area, both at 2025-12-31, from the same Ministry of the Interior and Safety report already used for Daegu, Daejeon, Ulsan, Sejong and Busan — a different population series from the Statistics Korea register-based census the South Korea and Seoul pages use, though usually close. Taipei City uses household registration at 2025-12-31. Incheon’s outline is drawn from GADM 4.1, not OpenStreetMap or Natural Earth, both of which fail this site’s land-outline bar for Incheon — see docs/island-data-sources.md — and it does include Ganghwa, Yeongjong and the outer Ongjin islands.

Incheon: Incheon Metropolitan City's full administrative territory, including Ganghwa and Ongjin counties' many offshore islands, which the official area and population figures already count. Population is resident registration population (주민등록인구) as at 2025-12-31, from the same Ministry of the Interior and Safety annual report used for Daegu, Daejeon, Ulsan, Sejong and Busan — 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. 🔴 Both wired geometry sources fail this site's land-outline bar for Incheon, previously documented in docs/island-data-sources.md: OpenStreetMap's administrative relation encloses about 9,886 km² (+824%, a maritime jurisdiction boundary far out into the Yellow Sea) and Natural Earth's feature measures about 367 km² (−66%, omitting the Ganghwa and Yeongjong island groups). The outline instead uses GADM 4.1's Incheon polygon, which measures about 1,097 km² against the 1,069.56 km² official figure (+2.5%) — within the tolerance already accepted for Macao and Singapore on this site, and it does include Ganghwa, Yeongjong and the other island groups (its bounding box reaches Baengnyeong Island near the North Korean maritime border). GADM is licensed for non-commercial use only; Atlas is not commercialised. See docs/island-data-sources.md.

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.