Statue of King Sejong (Gwanghwamun)
The statue of King Sejong was dedicated on 9 October 2009, in a ceremony attended by attended by President Lee Myung-bak and other Korean government official, on a Hangul Day in celebration of the 563rd anniversary of the invention of the Korean alphabet by King Sejong, two months after the Gwanghwamun Plaza opening. The golden statue is 6.2 meters high (another source gives the statue height as 9.5 meters and yet another, 6.7 meters) and weights 20 tons. The king has one hand raised and another placed on a book. Sides of the statue display all of the hangul alphabet characters. In front of the statue there are small models of a celestial globe, a rain gauge, and a sundial, the invention of which is also traditionally attributed to King Sejong in Korea. While King Sejong is best remembered for his invention of hangul, he is also considered to have been involved in promotion of agriculture, literature, science and technology, as well as Confucian philosophy, in Korea.
Origin of Hangul
Although the "Hunmin jeong-eum haerye" (hereafter "Haerye)" explains the design of the consonantal letters in terms of articulatory phonetics, it also states that Sejong adapted them from the enigmatic 古篆字 ""Gǔ" Seal Script". The identity of this script has long been puzzling. The primary meaning of the character 古 "gǔ" is "old", so 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" has traditionally been interpreted as "Old Seal Script", frustrating philologists, because the Korean alphabet bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 "zhuānzì" seal scripts. However, Gari Ledyard, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University, notes that the character 古 "gǔ" also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 "Měnggǔ" "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 "gǔ)" than the 蒙古 "Měng-gǔ"". Ledyard deduces from palace records that 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 "měnggǔ zhuānzì" "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ’Phags-pa alphabet of the Mongolian-origin Chinese Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire. There were ’Phags-pa manuscripts in the Korean palace library from the Yuan Dynasty government, including some in the seal-script form, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of the political situation in the contemporary (ethnically Chinese) Ming Dynasty. The topic of the recent Mongol domination of China, which had ended just 75 years earlier, was politically sensitive, and both the Chinese and Korean literati regarded the Mongols as barbarians with nothing to contribute to a civilized society.