The evolution of Taegeukgi

I recently walked around the National Museum of Korea, taking in the various sights, the objects, the stories, the pagodas, the lakes and everything else. It's a remarkable building, and one that I love spending time in. I'm also glad that Korea now has enough confidence to convey and share its history so passionately with people.

At one point, I found myself standing beneath the Korean flag. This was in the section on the Korean Empire. There I was, looking at it … but it was different from normal. It wasn't the Sam-taegeuk, which features blue, red and yellow. Yet at the same time, it wasn't the regular Taegeuk we see on the flag today, with the red and blue divided into distinct halves. On this one, the red and blue swirls melted into each other. They didn't stay on their own side. Instead, they invaded. They flooded. They blended into each other, creating a very fluid and flexible image.

I gazed at this flag for a long time. And as I did, I was faced with a question in my mind: Why is that flag like that? And why is it not like the flag that we see today? Now, of course, I could probably come up with some suggestions. I might have even read some things about it that have been stored away in the back of my brain somewhere. But as I imagined myself being asked by a lecture hall full of students about this particular flag, I realized: I don't know the answer. And it was that realization that I found so beautiful. It was a reminder that, despite everything else, I wanted, I needed, to know more, to learn more.

A simple thought

We tend to use the word “knowledge” as if it were a single coin, yet it bears two very distinct faces.

The first is the knowledge of acquaintance: what we gain through direct, unmediated experience. It is the feel of a place underfoot, the salt in the air, the unique sounds and speeds of a foreign street. This knowledge is deeply personal, phenomenological and entirely our own. Two persons can explore the same alleyways of Seoul and walk away with entirely different universes locked in their minds.

Then there is the second type: the cold, hard currency of data and historical fact. This is the realm of figures, foundational dates, treaties signed and broken, the fixed anatomy of an epoch. It does not shift with individual moods or changing light (generally).

To claim a deep familiarity with Korea today is to know both sides of the coin. On one hand, I carry over two decades of lived experience: watching a society transform with breathtaking speed from the country I first arrived in to the hypermodern metropolis of the present. On the other, I carry the academic machinery: a master's degree, a doctorate, countless volumes read, dates committed to memory and more lectures and documents than I can remember.

Which is the superior form of knowledge? Neither. They are interdependent. But together, they unlock a popular Korean maxim: "Aneun mankeum boinda" or "You see as much as you know."

Consider what happens when an uninitiated traveler wanders into an art gallery. They stand before a canvas worth millions, a seemingly chaotic splash of paint and they feel only bafflement. To them, it is merely canvas and pigment. Then, the context. They learn of the artist's tormented life, the tempests of the era, the symbolism and suddenly, the object transforms. The painting itself has not changed, but the observer's eye has.

And this doesn't only happen in galleries. It happens in museums. It happens when we walk down the streets we've walked down a hundred times. It happens when someone tells us the story behind an object we've never really noticed before. The more you know, the more you see. And that realization sparks a glorious, self-reinforcing loop: knowledge breeds sight, sight breeds curiosity, and curiosity demands yet more knowledge, ad infinitum. To quiet that curiosity, I opened the books and traced the thread of that swirling red and blue.

The flag

I have learned about the South Korean flag is that it wasn't only flown in Seoul. Kim Il-sung also used it in the mid-40s in Pyongyang before Moscow told him to change it. I know that the four trigrams in the corners represent heaven, earth, fire and water. The symbol in the middle — the Taeguk, after which the flag gets its name — is an interpretation of the ancient Yin-Yang, symbolizing the harmonious nature of the universe, a concept found all over Asia. Its Taoist origins have spread far and wide. The symbol appears throughout Korean history, with the earliest depictions on the Korean Peninsula dating back to the 6th century during the Baekje period. It also appears today on the flags of Mongolia and Tibet.

The Taegeukgi was first used by Yi Eung-jun at a ceremony between Korea and the U.S. in 1882. It was created specifically because while all modern nations had flags, particularly useful for imperialists in the age of colonization, Joseon only had flags for the military and the king, but not one for the nation itself. Thus, the Taegeukgi was born. And like the one I saw in the museum, the red and blue spiraled into each other rather than remaining distinct.

With the fall of the Korean Empire in August 1910, the use of the Taegeukgi was banned by Japanese colonial rulers. Furthermore, the flag lacked a fixed design beyond the basic concepts of a swirling central Taeguk and the trigrams on the diagonals. This meant that the designs of the flags flown during the March 1st Movement, those used by the Righteous Armies and those used by the Provisional Government were all different. And because blue paint was difficult to obtain, some Koreans used the Japanese flag, painting over half the red circle with black paint, and then added the four trigrams.

With the establishment of the South Korean government in 1948, it was decided that rather than create a new national flag, as was carried out in the North, the Taegeukgi would be retained as a symbol of unity, history and collective struggle against the Japanese. It now just needed a finalized design, because some drew the red and blue divided vertically while others drew it divided across the middle. The colors have also been debated, particularly regarding how dark the blue should be. As recently as 1997, a lighter shade of blue was officially declared; however, older, darker versions can still be seen on national holidays.

The duty of the traveler

I guess putting all of this together, I still find myself faced with things in Korea and asking: Could I explain this to a roomful of a hundred people? Do I really know what this is? What is going on here?

And I want to know. I want to be able to tell these stories. Not to claim them for my own, not to be able to take possession of them, not to be able to put a particular ideological slant on them. But I want to be able to convey meaning, share information, make other people able to see the things that I see. Because in that sense, I am changing their world. I'm allowing them to see more. Removing their blinkers. And this is not in a "red pill, black pill" ideological way. It's simply the experience I get when students tell me during the semester that because of the lectures they take, they now see the world a little bit differently. And what they're really trying to tell me is that because they have changed, the world they see has changed.

And I wish we could all do that. We're sometimes stuck in the world that we see, and we think things are inevitable, that they must be a certain way. But we can try to know more. Be better informed about the past, with a deeper understanding of philosophy, of humanity, of history, of sociology. We need to know as much as we can. That's our duty. Because if we continually find ourselves gazing into our phones, looking at reels, it's not only our attention that diminishes. It's not only our empathy. But it's also the world. And perhaps that is why we should keep learning. Not simply because knowledge makes us more clever, better educated or more informed. But because it makes the world larger and the possibilities greater. There are things all around us that we cannot yet see. We just haven't learned how to look at them.