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South Koreans will soon celebrate Hangeul Day, the holiday commemorating what is generally considered the nation's greatest cultural accomplishment and its most revered historical figure, King Sejong the Great. In fact, the monarch usually takes center stage for his role in inventing the sacred script as the epitome of the "sage king."
The construction of this legend is understandable; King Sejong was indeed a great man, and Korea is no different from most other nations today that mythologize their heralded leaders of the past. But to truly appreciate Sejong's historical importance, it seems wise to demystify him and his achievements a bit.
We can begin with the alphabet itself. Koreans have come to believe that hangeul is the most accomplished writing system ever devised, the consummate blend of art and science. It is indeed wonderfully precise and flexible, but its relative merits are difficult to assess. It perfectly captures the Korean language, to be sure, and it appears to do well in expressing a foreign language like Japanese.
For conveying other languages such as Chinese or English, however, hangeul seems not as well suited. This makes perfect sense, for King Sejong and his scholars were not interested in creating a universal alphabet, just one that would match well the Korean language. And they did.
What of the claim that the script (called Hunmin Jeongeum when it was promulgated in 1446) arose from only scientific principles, that it was autonomously created? This may be what the internal Korean documents suggest, but specialists who study these things have pointed out the following: In world history, alphabetical writing, like writing itself, tended to get easily transmitted because of its wondrous utility. And Korean elites of that era could not have been ignorant of other alphabetical scripts, such as the Mongol writing system, particularly during the period of Mongol domination in the 13th and 14th centuries.
To acknowledge that the king borrowed from other scripts in creating the Korean alphabet would not minimize his feat, but rather acknowledge his wisdom and learning. The same goes for his other achievements. Indeed, if we step away from the nation-centered perspective on King Sejong, we can gain a fuller understanding of his impact.
It is well known, for example, that King Sejong encouraged innovations in science and technology. Korean schoolchildren can recite the long list of impressive inventions that he fostered. They also know that the monarch developed the Hall of Worthies (Jiphyeonjeon) as a research center dedicated to scholarship and education.
What is less emphasized is that this agency's primary objective was to study and propagate Confucianism. While the Hall of Worthies promoted the newly invented alphabet, its greatest intellectual contributions came in compiling and publishing books on Confucianism.
As he stated in the famous preamble introducing the alphabet, one of King Sejong's motives indeed was to increase literacy, and perhaps even to declare Korea's cultural distinctiveness. But he also saw the script as a device to spread Confucian teachings more easily. The alphabet was quickly combined with the most advanced printing technologies, such as movable type, in order to publish not only vernacular literature, but also manuals on Confucian morality.
Such fervent advancement of Confucianism certainly cannot be considered an attachment to things "Chinese," but neither was it an assertion of Korean superiority or cultural autonomy. Moreover, while the alphabet became a valuable cultural device for the masses over the course of the Joseon Kingdom, it hardly gave rise to a thriving popular literary culture, at least compared to the impact of vernacular writing in other parts of the world.
In fact, for most of the Joseon era, learned Koreans tended to ignore this great potential of the alphabet. Many believed that using the alphabet tempted Koreans to do what other "barbarians" in East Asia did, namely, to steer away from Confucian values by using a non-Chinese writing system. Such powerful opposing voices arose immediately after the script's invention, and even King Sejong's lofty standing could not win them over.
What proved perhaps more durable in the Joseon era was King Sejong's instrumental role in securing the new territories of the new kingdom, which corresponded more or less to Hamgyong province. This area had not belonged to the preceding Goryeo Kingdom, and with the Mongol retreat from Goryeo beginning in the late 14th century, the Korean government began to claim more of it. It was sparsely populated, however, and most of the people living there were not Koreans.
King Sejong did more than any other monarch to implement a massive settlement of this land, almost exclusively with lower-status people, even criminals, from the southern provinces. Many of them were forced to move there, and this helped to establish the northern provinces in general as a kind of backwater, at least from the perspective of the central elites, who discriminated against the north in a variety of ways.
Such were some of the less-than-heroic, albeit unintended, consequences of King Sejong's actions. This does not diminish him but instead tries to view him more realistically, which may actually heighten one's impression of him.
In fact, it is astounding that he managed to do all this despite having been the son and father of murderous monarchs (Kings Taejong and Sejo, respectively) who usurped the throne. Now that was truly a great accomplishment!
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).
