King Sejong of Joseon published a new alphabet on October 9, 1446, and gave the Korean language a script of its own. The document was called Hunminjeongeum, the correct sounds for the instruction of the people, and it came with a second volume explaining how the letters worked and why they were shaped as they were. There were 28 letters. The consonant shapes were drawn from the mouth and throat: the tongue against the soft palate, the tongue behind the teeth, the lips, the open throat. The vowels were built from three marks, for heaven, earth and man.
The reason given in the preface was practical. Korean is not related to Chinese, and writing it in Chinese characters meant that a farmer who wanted to record a debt or a woman who wanted to write a letter had to learn several thousand signs in a language that was not hers first, which almost nobody outside the examination schools ever did. Sejong wrote that the common people could not put what was on their minds into writing because the writing was not theirs, and that he was troubled by it. The alphabet was meant to be learned in a morning.
The scholars of the Hall of Worthies had worked on it for years and were not all pleased. Choe Man-ri wrote a memorial arguing that to abandon Chinese characters was to turn the country into barbarians, since the classics could not then be read. It was a serious position at the time. It won. For four centuries the alphabet was used by women, by Buddhist monks, and by readers and writers of vernacular fiction and private letters, while every official document stayed in Chinese.
Recognition came in the 1890s. The Gabo reforms of 1894 allowed it in government documents, and the Dongnip Sinmun, which started in 1896, was printed entirely in it. Both states on the peninsula made it the standard script afterwards, though they now spell some things differently, and Chinese characters are rare in the South and absent from the North. The date is a public holiday in South Korea, and it falls on October 9.