[Column by Koo Bon-young] Adding a Hangul plaque at Gwanghwamun is the spirit of the times

The controversy over the plaque at Gwanghwamun Gate is about to heat up. That is because the government has brought the idea of adding a Hangul plaque into public debate. In January, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Choi Hwi-young reported the proposal to President Lee Jae-myung. Since then, support and opposition have clashed sharply in public forums, including expert roundtables and the ministry’s website bulletin board. When one tries to alter the nameplate of a national cultural symbol, some turbulence is only natural. As poet Kim Chun-soo wrote while calling out to a single flower, “Before I called his name / he was nothing but / a mere gesture,” giving the act a deeper meaning....
Gwanghwamun Gate is the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace, the royal palace of the Joseon dynasty. It is a cultural heritage site that has repeatedly been destroyed and rebuilt, crossing not only 500 years of Joseon history but also the joys and sorrows of modern and contemporary Korean history. Over the past half century alone, the plaque has been changed and reinstalled three times. Former President Park Chung-hee installed a handwritten Hangul plaque in 1968, when Gwanghwamun was relocated and reconstructed after Japanese colonial forces damaged it and the wooden gate tower and plaque were burned during the Korean War. That decision was also in step with the then-rising policy of exclusive use of Hangul.
However, the Roh Moo-hyun administration pushed to remove that Hangul plaque. The stated rationale was to restore the original form, but the move also clearly carried the character of erasing traces of Park Chung-hee. In the end, a Chinese-character plaque written by Im Tae-young, the Training Commander who oversaw the 1865 reconstruction of Gyeongbokgung Palace and Gwanghwamun during the reign of Gojong of Korea, was installed in 2010. That plaque, known for Im Tae-young’s handwriting, later faced criticism over cracks in the wood and historical verification errors. The lettering was preserved, but the color scheme was changed, and it was replaced with the current plaque in 2023.
Even during that process, the controversy never subsided. One side insisted that the principle of cultural heritage should be original-form restoration, while the other argued that a Hangul plaque should be used to reinforce the identity of Korean culture. The Lee Jae-myung administration’s move to open public discussion on adding a Hangul plaque is, in a sense, a compromise. As Minister Choi said, “If we add a Hangul plaque, we can preserve the spirit of protecting the original form of the heritage while also embracing the spirit of the times embodied by Hangul.”
Still, debate over the dual-plaque proposal remains intense. At a March 31 forum hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, experts were sharply divided. Lee Geon-beom, head of Hangul Culture Solidarity, argued that installing a Hangul plaque is an important act that culturally expresses the nation’s identity. Opponents, however, said it would “distort history and deny the actions of our ancestors.” In particular, Professor Lee Kang-min of Korea National University of Arts interpreted the addition of a Hangul plaque to a Chinese-character plaque as nothing more than a phonetic notation.
It does not seem easy to narrow these differences in perspective. The principle that cultural heritage should be preserved in its original form is valid, but so is the argument that a Hangul plaque on a national symbolic space would embody the spirit of the times. One can only hope that the public discussion will bear fruit as a model of deliberative democracy.
That said, I would like to support the dual-plaque plan from several perspectives. First, it is worth asking whether the 1865 Im Tae-young inscription should be fixed as the standard for restoring the Gwanghwamun plaque. Gyeongbokgung Palace itself was built during the reign of Sejong the Great, and the name Gwanghwamun was also given in Sejong’s time. Gyeongbokgung was completely destroyed during the Japanese invasions of Korea and left in ruins for more than 270 years before being rebuilt in 1865 by Heungseon Daewongun. For that reason, it is unclear what the true original form of the Gwanghwamun plaque actually is.
In that context, the plaque at the Forbidden City in China offers a useful reference. The Qing dynasty, founded by the Manchus, destroyed the Ming dynasty, a Han Chinese dynasty, but continued to use the palace complex. Instead, the plaque on the hall where the emperor stayed displayed both the Chinese characters for Qianqing Gate and Manchu script, preserving its identity. That plaque still bears witness to Chinese cultural history during the transition from Ming to Qing.
Preserving traces of the past is important. But beyond simply freezing relics in place, cultural heritage can gain even greater vitality when reinterpreted in line with the spirit of the times. As the saying goes, “History is a dialogue between the past and the present” by E. H. Carr. The Louvre Pyramid in the square of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, is proof of that. When it was built in 1981, criticism that it was “destroying culture” was fierce, but it is now also regarded as a modern reinterpretation of cultural heritage.
Gwanghwamun Square is now more than a legacy of the past; it is a symbol of South Korea as a cultural powerhouse. A BTS performance there in March left that impression on people around the world. In that sense, the dual plaque would seem to reveal the roots of a cultural identity that has long been hidden. If the Chinese-character plaque is left in place and a new plaque in the Hunminjeongeum typeface is installed beneath it, the case for doing so would be even stronger than in the examples of the Louvre Pyramid or Qianqing Gate in the Forbidden City. The original Gwanghwamun plaque from Sejong the Great’s era may be gone, but Hunminjeongeum, the cultural heritage he created, would be “revived” at the birthplace of the Korean Wave.
kby777@fnnews.com Koo Bon-young, editorial adviser Reporter