The Hyundai Founder Who Put a Country on His Back

0:00On June 16th, 1998, an 82-year-old man climbed into the lead vehicle of a convoy of 50 trucks loaded with cattle.

0:10Behind him were 500 cows raised on a farm he'd reclaimed from the Yellow Sea.

0:14As the cows passed, Buddhist monks chanted, and women in traditional handbok dresses lined the road waving as the convoy rolled through the last village before the razor wire barrier separating North and South Korea.

0:29The man in the lead vehicle was Chung Joo-young, the founder of Hyundai.

0:34He was the first South Korean civilian to cross the border since the country was split in half.

0:40Four months later, he came back with 501 cows, 1,001 cows total, one for the cow that he had stolen from his father 65 years earlier, and 1,000 for interest.

0:52Chung was so determined to change his situation that as a teenager, he stole a cow so he could sell it to buy a train ticket out of the farming village where he was born in what is now North Korea.