Gwanghwamun Square

On the straight road that leads to the old palace of Seoul, two statues stand 250 meters apart.

The one in front is an admiral, Yi Sun-sin. He stands upright, a sword in his hand, his face turned to the south.

The one behind is a king. He does not stand. He sits. He holds no weapon at all. He holds a book.

Only two people. On the whole square that runs along that road, there is no statue of a third person.

And that is the thing most worth thinking about here.

Suppose a country could choose only two people to set in that place.

Most countries choose along one of a few familiar lines. The founder of the nation. The winner of the greatest battle. The ruler who held power longest. A figure from the legend of how the country began.

South Korea chose differently.

One man who defended the country. One man who taught it to write.

Choosing a general is easy to understand. Every country does it. But choosing a man for the alphabet he created, and then placing him on a level with the general, on the very road into the palace, is far rarer. It says that this nation wants to remember not only the times it stood firm, but also the day ordinary people were given the means to say what they thought.

But the story does not stop at who was chosen. There is also the matter of who stands in front.

The one in front is the admiral. His statue was raised on April 27, 1968.

The statue of King Sejong did not arrive until 2009. It is made of bronze. It stands 6.2 meters tall and weighs 20 tons.

Between those two statues lie 41 years.

That is a very long stretch in the life of a country, and South Korea in 1968 was far from South Korea in 2009. When the admiral's statue went up, the country was still poor, not long out of war, and what it perhaps needed most was an image of steadiness. By the time the king's statue went up, it was a very different country.

So the order of the two statues was not an arrangement planned from the start. It is the trace of two different moments and two different needs, laid one over the other along the same line of road.

The 250 meters between them are worth walking too. It is a walk of about three minutes. You go from the sword to the book, through the middle of a modern capital, asking yourself on the way whom your own country would choose if it raised two statues like these.

And the day chosen to unveil the king's statue was not a random one.

It was October 9. Hangeul Day. The day the whole country celebrates the alphabet that this same king created.

So they chose not only the person and the place. They chose the day as well, so that anyone who came later could still read the intention of the people who set the statue there.

The square itself has a story worth hearing.

It opened on August 1, 2009, after 15 months of renovation. Before that, this place was mostly road for cars.

Then, from late 2020 to August 2022, the city rebuilt it once more. This time it did something few big cities dare to do. It took road space away from cars. Sejong Avenue, which runs past here, lost several of its lanes, and the space for people on foot became more than twice as wide. The square reopened on August 6, 2022.

In the middle of a capital full of cars, the road surface was handed back to people walking.

So on this square, the thing worth looking at is not only the two statues.

The open space around them matters even more. It is room for people to walk slowly, sit down, stand still, take photos and bring children out to play. Open space like that in the very heart of a capital is very costly, and Seoul decided to pay that price.

And there is something here that almost every visitor misses.

Right beneath the statues lies a basement level. Inside is a small exhibition hall for the two figures, one part for the admiral and one for the king.

Most visitors take a few photos with the two statues and move on. They never learn that under the spot where they just stood, there is a whole exhibition space.

A staircase near the foot of the statues leads down to it. Up above are two great figures of metal, to be seen from a distance. Down below is the place to understand why those two were set up above.