King Sejong the Great

Here is a real problem, much harder than it looks.

In Korea in the 15th century, a farmer finds that his neighbor has pushed into his rice field and taken over the bank along its edge. He wants to write a petition. But the only writing in use at the time is Chinese characters. It takes years of study to write even one decent sentence in them. And years of study mean money, a teacher, and time away from the fields.

So the question was how a man like that could say what he wanted to say.

Every dynasty had the same familiar answer: he does not need to. Someone who can write will write it for him, and anyone who wants to write can go and study. That was the most convenient answer, and it left everything exactly as it was.

King Sejong gave a different answer.

Sejong was born in 1397. He took the throne in 1418 and reigned until his death in 1450. He was a king who loved learning and loved things that could be measured. In 1420 he reestablished the Jiphyeonjeon, the Hall of Worthies. It was an institution that brought together the ablest scholars to read, research and write books.

Then he put them to real work. In 1429 a book on farming methods was completed. It drew on the experience of the country's own farmers rather than copying from abroad. In 1433 a collection of medical books was compiled, built on native medicinal ingredients. In 1441 a device for measuring rainfall appeared. The next year it was sent out to every region, so that farmers from one end of the country to the other could measure rain by the same standard. In 1444 the court produced a calendar of its own, calculated from the sky as seen from its own capital.

All of these projects share one thing. None of them made the king any grander. The farming book was for the people who plowed the fields. The medical books were for the sick. The rain gauge was for the people who grew rice.

And so was the alphabet.

In the 12th lunar month of 1443, a new alphabet was presented to the court. It had 28 letters. Seventeen were consonants and eleven were vowels. Just 28 symbols, put together, were enough to write down every word a Korean speaker said.

A few years later, around October 1446, a text explaining the alphabet was published. Its name was Hunminjeongeum, which means the correct sounds for teaching the people.

In the preface, the king stated his reason plainly. In essence, he wrote that the speech of his country differed from that of China. Because of this, many of the common people had something they wished to say, yet in the end could not express it. He felt for them, and so he made this alphabet.

At first the words sound gentle. But they are a very unusual thing for a king of that age to write. He did not say the alphabet would make the dynasty more imposing. Nor did he say it would make ruling easier. He said he felt for the people who had something to say and could not say it.

Not everyone at court liked the idea. Even in the Hall of Worthies, the very place that gathered the most learned men, there were objections. One of those who objected was the scholar Choe Malli. The objectors worried that with a script of their own this easy to learn, people would neglect Chinese characters and the long-established study of books.

Sejong went ahead anyway.

Now think about the result. Once the alphabet existed, the farmer from the start of the story could write down, by himself, what he wanted to say. A mother whose child had gone far away could write her own letters. A shopkeeper could keep his own accounts. There was no need to ask anyone, no need to pay anyone, and no need to wait for someone who could write to pass through the village.

Today that alphabet is called Hangul. South Koreans set aside a whole day of the year for it: October 9, Hangul Day.

To understand why, it is enough to remember that this alphabet was not born of a victory or a conquest. It was born because a man sitting in the highest place took the trouble to think about the people standing in the lowest.

Every evening in Seoul, when the shop signs on both sides of the street light up, they are crowded with circles and squares, with horizontal and vertical strokes. That is the very alphabet born in the winter of 1443. Now it runs all over the city, on restaurant signs, on subway tickets, on boxes of snacks in the supermarket, and on the petition of anyone who has something to say. It is not a king's own script. It is the script a king made to give away.