Hangul Day 2026: Hangeul Museum shut, shows run elsewhere

Hangul Day 2026 is Friday 9 October, and it is a public holiday. The National Hangeul Museum is closed. Its Hangul Day exhibitions are running in other buildings, and the main one is free, in central Seoul, and open until 18:00.

Hangul Day 2026 in Seoul: what is open, and where

The National Hangeul Museum’s own home page lists where its exhibitions are running now, and none of them are in the museum. The table below takes three of the four on that list (the fourth is a touring show in Gimhae, until 1 November), plus the Hangul Week events the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is running around Gwanghwamun.

The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History stops letting people in 30 minutes before it closes, so the last entry on Hangul Day is at 17:30.

Is the National Hangeul Museum open on Hangul Day?

The National Hangeul Museum is closed on Hangul Day 2026, as it is every other day this year. Its Korean home page carries a notice headed 새단장을 위해 휴관합니다, closed for a makeover: an expansion that adds education space covers the whole building, so the museum has shut until the work is done.

The work has already had one setback. On 1 February 2025, while the museum was closed for the expansion, a fire broke out on its third and fourth floors and injured one firefighter. The collection had mostly been moved out by then. In September 2025 the museum announced that it would reopen in October 2028, according to Yonhap as cited by Wikipedia.

The English home page does carry the closure notice. The same page still prints the opening hours, 10:00 to 18:00, and to 21:00 on Saturdays, for a building nobody can enter. Read the notice, not the hours.

What to do on Hangul Day: the 100th anniversary exhibition

The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History in Jongno District has the exhibition built for this year’s anniversary, and it is free. The National Hangeul Museum, the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, the Hangeul Society (한글학회) and the King Sejong Memorial Society (세종대왕기념사업회) put it together. The title, 일구이륙 무한이륙, reads the year 1926 aloud one digit at a time.

The exhibition is in three parts:

• How Hangul Day came to be a national day and a public holiday.
• Where 가갸, an old name for Hangul, came from, and how the Korean Language Society of the colonial period (조선어학회) protected the language under Japanese rule.
• A room using AI to imagine what Hangul will look like in 100 years. You type a word you want to leave to future generations and it shows what that word might look like in 100 years.

The objects include a replica of the manuscript of 말모이 (Malmoi), the first Korean dictionary, written by the students of the linguist Ju Si-gyeong. Next to it is the manuscript of the 조선말 큰사전 (Great Dictionary of the Korean Language). It was seized during Japanese rule and found at Seoul Station just after liberation. Syllable tables held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France are on show too.

For visitors who are blind or deaf, the museum provides braille guides and sign-language video.

Is Hangul Day a public holiday?

Hangul Day is a public holiday in South Korea, on 9 October every year, so in 2026 it joins Saturday and Sunday in a long weekend. Its status has moved more than once. Korea dropped it from the holiday calendar in 1990, made it a national day of celebration again in 2005, and restored it as a full public holiday in 2013.

North Korea marks its own version on a different date and under a different name, Chosun-gul Day, on 15 January.

Is everything closed on Hangul Day?

Museums whose only closing days are New Year’s Day, Seollal and Chuseok stay open on Hangul Day: the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History lists exactly those three. Government offices follow the public holiday calendar, so treat them as shut.

Pharmacies and clinics are the gap a short trip runs into. Korea publishes a list of the ones that open on each public holiday, and where that list lives and how to read it is its own page. If it is serious, the number is 119, and the other emergency numbers that answer in English are on one page.

When was Hangul Day first celebrated?

Hangul Day was first observed in 1926, under the name 가갸날 (Gagya Day), and that is the 100 in this year’s anniversary: 2026 is the centenary of the day itself, not of the alphabet.

The alphabet is older than the day. King Sejong and his scholars devised it in 1443 and proclaimed it in 1446, under the name Hunminjeongeum, and Hangul Day commemorates the proclamation.

How is Hangul Day celebrated in 2026?

Hangul Day 2026 sits inside Hangul Week, which the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism runs through 17 October. The stage programme in Gwanghwamun Square (musicals, live music and exhibitions of stationery, furniture and everyday things redesigned around Hangul) ran on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before the holiday, and the Thursday evening added 100 lanterns to mark the 100th anniversary.

Two events are still to come:

• The media facade. A projection drawn from the 24 letters of Hangul plays on the walls of Gwanghwamun from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., nightly until 11 October.
• A forum on 12 October at the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan, on Hangul and the Korean language as K-culture spreads and AI advances.

What is not checked here

The National Hangeul Museum’s closure, its list of exhibitions elsewhere and the hours of the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History are read off their own home pages on 9 October 2026. The exhibition contents come from Insight’s report, and the Hangul Week events from the Korea JoongAng Daily. The ministry’s own press release on Hangul Week is a PDF attachment and was not read here, so treat the event times as the newspaper’s reading of it.

The October 2028 reopening comes from Yonhap as cited by Wikipedia, and the museum’s own pages read here give no date, so treat it as announced rather than fixed. Whether palaces or other museums change their hours or admission for Hangul Day was not checked.

If an event time changes or the museum names a reopening date, tell me and this page will say so with a date.