Marking the New Year through history

By Kyung Moon Hwang

In ancient times, civilizations around the world figured out the basics of the earth's relationship to the sun and the moon, and from this they learned to count the days, months, and years. But other factors also played a role, including political and religious power, and hence most methods of marking the New Year actually have not corresponded to scientific principles.

One of the exceptions is the Persian New Year (Nowruz), which comes on March 20, the date of the vernal equinox. This is when the sun's most direct rays cross the equator along the earth's northward tilt, and hence it technically marks the beginning of spring (or the fall, in the southern hemisphere).

Koreans traditionally recognized the vernal equinox as well, as the start of one of 24 seasonal periods (jeolgi). But this did not signal the New Year, which was set by a calendar that combined measurements of both the moon and the sun. What is normally called the Lunar New Year (Seollal), the country's most important holiday, is based on a complicated system that counts a year as having passed through 12 of the moon's 29- to 30-day cycles. But as with other traditional holidays based on the lunar calendar (such as Buddha's Birthday or the Chuseok harvest festival), the date differs slightly every year, because 12 moon cycles fall several days short of the 365.25 days that it takes for the earth to revolve once around the sun.

This is not a science column, so I will stop now with the astronomy. The point is that Koreans customarily have used multiple methods to mark the passage of time, and hence the New Year itself has an interesting history. In fact, more than a century after the formal adoption of the Gregorian, or "Western" calendar, there remain two distinct New Year's Days in Korea, with January 1 being in many ways less important.

The first "new" New Year, on January 1, 1896, came somewhat suddenly in the middle of the 11th month of the lunar year equivalent to 1895. This was decreed as part of the revolutionary changes implemented by the Gabo Reform, which began in the summer of 1894 and ironically ended soon after the inauguration of the new solar year of 1896.

The government's adoption of the Gregorian calendar would survive, however, as would the observance of a New Year from a civilization and religion that most Koreans at the time did not know. (Supposedly, after December 25, originally a pagan holiday in the Roman Empire, became adopted as Jesus' birthday long ago in Europe, January 1 was chosen for the New Year to commemorate the infant Jesus' circumcision.) But such were the pressures to integrate global standards in the era of Western imperialism.

However, Korean calendrical systems had long contained political elements. Official documents before the modern era, for example, were sometimes imprinted with the year of a particular king's reign (the "10th year of King so-and-so's reign," for example). Or more often, the name of a year was determined by the Chinese calendar, which in turn reflected the emperor and dynasty currently ruling China.

In 1894, in fact, the Gabo Reform put an end to this practice, which had signaled Korea's political and cultural subservience, by counting the years in reference to the Joseon Kingdom. That year, for example, was the 503rd year since the "Opening of the Country," or Gaeguk 503. The current North Korean system does something similar by counting the years since 1912, the year of Kim Il-sung's birth. The present new year, for example, is officially Juche 104.

The government's adoption of the Gregorian solar calendar in 1896 did not necessarily simplify things. It also did not lead to official use of the numbering system for that new calendar, which after all counted the years since the birth of a foreign religious figure.

As Koreans had done occasionally throughout their history, starting in the ancient Silla period, the official calendar marked an auspicious reign name for a certain monarch. For example, 1896 was proclaimed the opening year of the reign entitled, appropriately, the "spreading of the solar [calendar]," or Geonyang. In everyday life, however, years continued to be counted according to an ancient system, the sexagenary cycle of 60 years that remains in popular use even today.

Thereafter political changes would add further complications to the counting of the years. Even as the Christian dates became more commonly accepted in practice, the official renderings would change again in 1897, 1907, and 1910, when the Japanese system of referring to their own monarch's reign became enforced in Korea.

However, such methods were not abandoned following liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Until the early 1960s the numbering of years in South Korea referred to the legendary birth of Dangun, the mythical founder of Korea. For example, 1960 was the year Dangi 4293.

Many people today would consider this absurd and needlessly complicated. But many, if not most, people in the world today juggle more than one calendrical system simultaneously. Elements of Japanese society, including its government and right-wing nationalists, for example, stick to their emperor-based year names, long after having adopted January 1 as the New Year. Given this, that Koreans celebrate New Year's Day twice every year seems somewhat tame in comparison.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, "A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, "맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사" (21세기 북스, 2011).