Who Made the First Taegukgi?
Ask who made the Taegukgi and the usual answer is Park Yeong-hyo. He is certainly the person the record supports best. But there is a story from a few months earlier, and that part remains unresolved.
What flew at the treaty signing?
South Korea's Ministry of the Interior and Safety traces the creation of the flag directly to the signing of the Korea-US treaty on 22 May 1882. In the same text it says no exact record survives of what the flag at that ceremony looked like.[1] Several claims have moved into that gap.
- The "Ensign". A flag printed in the US Navy's Flags of Maritime Nations, found in 2004, is claimed to be the prototype of the flag used at the signing. The ministry reports this as a claim, not as fact.[1]
- Lee Eung-jun. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture's entry on the flag says Lee Eung-jun made a four-trigram flag that was used at the signing. The entry is marked as the writer's view.[2]
- The Shufeldt papers. Press reports say Professor Lee Tae-jin found a drawing in a June 1882 report in the Shufeldt Papers at the Library of Congress in 2017, and that the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History showed photographs of it for the treaty's 140th anniversary in 2022.[3] Whether it shows the flag actually raised at the signing is unsettled.[1]
There is also a claim that the Chinese official Ma Jianzhong proposed the design, but the same encyclopedia entry rejects it because his proposal came after the signing.[2]
September 1882: the firm record
Park Yeong-hyo's part is well documented. According to his own record, the Sahwagiryak, he made a flag with four trigrams instead of eight aboard ship on the way to Japan in September 1882, used it from the 25th and reported it home on 3 October.[1]
Whether he invented it or adapted something older depends on who you read. Even within one encyclopedia, the entry on Park says he changed the trigram positions on Lee's design[4], while the entry on the Sahwagiryak says Park first devised the flag on the ship.[5]
A national flag with no fixed form
On 6 March 1883, King Gojong proclaimed the taegeuk and four-trigram design as the national flag. No construction rule came with it, so the shapes of the taegeuk and trigrams varied from flag to flag.[1]
The oldest Taegukgi surviving in Korea is the Denny flag of about 1890. It belonged to the American adviser O. N. Denny, was donated in 1981, and is held by the National Museum of Korea.[6]
The road to a standard
One attempt to unify the design came from outside the country. The Korean Provisional Government in exile issued a unified style on 29 June 1942, but few people knew of it.[1]
After the Republic was founded, a flag committee was set up in January 1949, and the construction rules were fixed on 15 October of that year.[1] The law came much later. The Act on the Flag of the Republic of Korea dates from 26 January 2007, and its enforcement decree from 27 July 2007.[7] The Act names the flag Taegukgi and defines it as a taegeuk circle at the center with four trigrams at the corners, on a white field.[8]
Where that leaves us
| When | What | How firm |
|---|---|---|
| May 1882 | Korea-US treaty signed | Treaty certain; the flag's appearance unknown |
| Sept 1882 | Park Yeong-hyo uses a four-trigram flag | Recorded; whether he invented it is disputed |
| March 1883 | Gojong proclaims the national flag | Certain |
| Oct 1949 | Construction rules fixed | Certain |
| Jan 2007 | Flag Act enacted | Certain |
No single name can honestly go down as the flag's first maker. Park is the person whose use of it is best documented, and an answer for the months before him will have to wait for more documents.
Sources
Read next
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- We Counted the Pixels in 193 National Flags
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This page was drafted with AI (Claude). Its facts were checked against the sources listed below, and the site owner read it before publication. Found a mistake? Please write to us and include a source: Contact