SOUTH KOREA: Roh Moo-Hyun has come a long way from a ramshackle farming village in south-eastern Korea to win his country's presidency.
The former human rights lawyer spent his early career battling the previous residents of the presidential mansion, which he will move into next February.
Roh (56), was a fighting outsider from the time he led a student boycott in 1960 against mandatory essays praising Seoul's autocratic first president, to parliamentary hearings in 1988 in which he grilled army leaders over a 1980 massacre of protesters.
A self-educated lawyer from a family of peach and chicken farmers, Roh has, in speeches and writings, likened his quest for the presidency to that of Abraham Lincoln. He has vowed not to forget the country's have-nots and the activists he met when defending students and labour leaders being persecuted by Seoul's military regimes.
Roh portrays himself as peacemaker. He vows to heal labour-management strife and bridge the rivalry between his country's south-east and south-west, an ancient rift that sometimes seems only slightly less bitter than the enmity between South Korea and North Korea.
North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions and missile exports - both of which have cast a cloud over Roh because of his close association with incumbent President Kim Dae-jung - can only be solved by dialogue that helps Pyongyang feel secure, he has said.
Roh's opponent, Lee Hoi-chang, had branded Roh a dangerous radical, ignorant of foreign policy, and noted his previous association with calls for a withdrawal of US troops from South Korea.
In an early shift to the centre, Roh stated his support in May for the presence of US troops. In August, he told a visiting US diplomat he had "grown more realistic" about the US-South Korea alliance under Kim's tutelage.
He was born on August 6th, 1946, in Kimhae, near South Korea's second-largest city of Pusan. South Korean newspapers, which dug up his school records, quote a note from his first-grade teacher saying Roh had "talents in all subjects, especially presentation of his opinions".
Five years after that, as a sixth-grader, Roh won his first election as student council president. His nickname was "stone bean" because he was tiny but tough, classmates said.
He describes himself in an autobiography as a hot-and-cold student in secondary school, doing well when he studied. His grades plummeted after he skipped class to smoke and drink with friends. When he graduated from Pusan Commercial High School in 1966, he didn't have enough money to go to college. Instead he worked at low-paying odd jobs and began self-study, passing the state bar examination in 1975.
He spent the early 1980s defending student and labour activists. He won a seat in parliament in 1988, then lost it in 1992, returning to parliament in 1998. He is married to Kwon Yang-sook and they have a grown son and daughter. He lists his hobbies as mountain-climbing and bowling.