Sejong the Great
The king who gave Korean its alphabet and had to argue with his own officials to do it. Sejong ruled Joseon from 1418 to 1450 and is the only Korean monarch commonly called the Great. The achievement he is remembered for is Hangul, announced in 1443 and promulgated in 1446, an alphabet designed rather than inherited: the consonant shapes are schematic pictures of the mouth making the sound, and the preface says a wise man can learn it in a morning and a fool in ten days. The point was literacy. Korean had been written with Chinese characters, which fitted the language badly and took years to learn, so writing belonged to the class with years to spare. Senior scholars objected on exactly those grounds - that a script anyone could learn would erode the distinction between the educated and everyone else, and that departing from Chinese letters was a barbarism. Sejong overrode them, and Hangul was still being dismissed as women's writing four centuries later. He ran the Hall of Worthies as a research institute, and the reign produced a rain gauge distributed to every district, water clocks, armillary spheres and a corrected calendar computed for Seoul's longitude rather than Beijing's. He promoted Jang Yeong-sil, born to a slave mother, to build much of it. Agricultural handbooks were compiled from farmers' own practice and published in the vernacular. His armies pushed the northern frontier to the Yalu and the Tumen, which is still where the border runs. The suppression of Buddhism belongs to this reign too: monastic orders were amalgamated and their land taken, consolidating a Confucian state. He was diabetic and nearly blind by the end, and dictated much of his later work.
- Lived: 1397 CE – 1450 CE
- Nationality: Korean
- Roles: ruler, monarch
