The fourth king of Korea's Joseon dynasty, who presided over its golden age and gave his people an alphabet. A Confucian sage-king and tireless patron of science, he gathered scholars into a royal research institute and sponsored advances in astronomy, agriculture, and medicine. His greatest legacy was Hangul, a simple writing system promulgated so that ordinary Koreans could read and write their own language, championed against the resistance of his own scholar-elite.
Most kings are remembered for the wars they won. Sejong is remembered for a gift he made to people who could not read. In 1443 his court completed a new way of writing Korean, formally explained and promulgated three years later — an alphabet so simple that, in the famous claim, a wise man could learn it in a single morning and a slow learner in ten days. Before it, writing in Korea meant mastering thousands of Chinese characters, years of study that only the male elite could afford. The scholar-officials who held that learning resisted the new script, fearing the loss of what set them apart. Sejong gave it to the farmers and the women anyway. Five hundred years later, that alphabet is the script of a nation, and the king who championed it is the most honored figure in Korean history.