The History of the Taegukgi: From Philosophical Symbol to National Identity

In May 1882, Yi Eung-jun, a royal interpreter of Joseon, picked up a brush over a white cloth aboard the USS Swatara. The signing ceremony for the Joseon–United States Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce, and Navigation was only days away, and Admiral Shufeldt, the American representative, had requested that Joseon display an official national flag. While Joseon had royal banners, the concept of a national flag representing the entire country did not exist. What Yi Eung-jun devised on the spot was a flag bearing the taeguk symbol and the trigrams of the I Ching.^[1]

Just months later, this flag became Joseon’s official national flag. More than 130 years on, it still flies in the same form.

It is rare for a national flag to endure so long unchanged. More remarkably, the Taegukgi is not simply old — it was a symbol of resistance during 35 years of lost sovereignty, waved in the squares where independence was proclaimed, and after the division of the peninsula, became the line separating one system from another. Here is the story woven into this flag.

A Nation Without a Flag

For 500 years, Joseon maintained its dynasty without a national flag in the modern sense. This was not a deficiency — it reflected a fundamentally different way of understanding the world.

The pre-modern East Asian international order was maintained through a tributary system centered on China. Within that system, the very premise that nations met as equals did not hold. As a result, the concept of “national symbols” — flags, anthems, diplomatic protocols — required when nations face one another as equals never developed.^[2]

This order began to crack with the Treaty of Ganghwa in 1876. When Japan concluded the first modern-style treaty with Joseon and raised the Rising Sun flag at the ceremony, Joseon had no flag to raise in return. As diplomatic negotiations with the great powers continued, the question of a national flag became an increasingly urgent practical matter.^[3]

In the early 1880s, Ma Jianzhong, a diplomatic adviser to the powerful Qing official Li Hongzhang, proposed a flag design to Joseon: a white background bearing a taeguk symbol surrounded by eight trigrams. However, before this proposal could be implemented, Yi Eung-jun had already independently created a flag for the Joseon–US treaty signing ceremony. Which of the two came first remains debated, but recent scholarship strongly supports the likelihood that Yi Eung-jun’s flag preceded Ma Jianzhong’s proposal.^[4]

In September of the same year, Bak Yeong-hyo, who had been dispatched to Japan as an envoy to resolve the aftermath of the Imo Mutiny, refined the flag aboard the steamer Meiji Maru. The British captain James, who was aboard at the time, suggested that eight trigrams were too complex and proposed reducing them to four. Bak Yeong-hyo accepted the suggestion, fixing the current arrangement of four trigrams — geon, gon, gam, and ri.^[5]

On January 27, 1883, King Gojong officially proclaimed this flag as Joseon’s national flag. The Taegukgi was thus born at the intersection of diplomatic necessity and philosophical imagination.

The Taeguk and the Trigrams: What They Contain

The design of the Taegukgi did not emerge by chance. It compresses thousands of years of philosophical tradition.

The concept of taeguk (太極) in East Asian thought refers to the origin of the cosmos — the state before all things came into being, when yin and yang had not yet separated. The red-and-blue circular symbol at the center of the flag represents this balance of yin and yang. The red section represents yang, the blue represents yin. The interlocking rotation of the two expresses not opposition, but mutual dependence.^[6]

The origins of the taeguk symbol are more complex than commonly assumed. It is often said to derive from the “Taijitu shuo” (Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate) formulated in the eleventh century by Zhou Dunyi, a scholar of China’s Song dynasty — yet similar symbols had been used on the Korean peninsula far earlier. A taeguk form is carved on a stone monument of a temple built in 628 CE (the fiftieth year of King Jinpyeong of Silla), and the same symbol appears on a twelfth-century Goryeo stone sarcophagus. When Joseon incorporated this shape into its national flag, it was not importing a foreign concept but formally elevating a symbol already long familiar at the national level.^[7]

The trigrams at the four corners are drawn from the I Ching (周易), a Chinese classic compiled centuries before the common era that explains the principles of cosmic change through a system of 64 symbols. Four of these appear in the Taegukgi.

The upper-left trigram, geon (☰), symbolizes heaven. Composed of three unbroken lines, it represents justice. The lower-right, gon (☷), symbolizes earth — three broken lines representing vitality and abundance. The upper-right, gam (☵), symbolizes water, with a solid line flanked by broken lines on either side, representing wisdom. The lower-left, ri (☲), symbolizes fire — a broken line flanked by solid lines — representing brightness.^[8]

Various interpretations exist for why these four trigrams were chosen. The most common explanation is that they represent the four most fundamental elements in the I Ching: heaven, earth, water, and fire. They also correspond to the four cardinal directions and the four seasons. In a single flag, space, time, and the principles of nature are all contained.

The white background symbolizes purity and peace. It connects naturally to the tradition of white clothing — baegui (白衣) — worn by the people of Joseon. Given that Koreans were known as the “people of white clothing,” the white background carries meaning beyond mere background color.^[9]

The Politics of Flag Design: Who Chose This, and Why

The process by which the Taegukgi design was finalized reflects the complex international dynamics of East Asia at the time.

Most notable was Qing China’s involvement. Ma Jianzhong’s proposal of the taeguk-and-trigrams design was not mere goodwill. Some scholars interpret it as an attempt to signal indirectly, through flag design, that Joseon remained within the Qing sphere of influence. Ma notably proposed that “the eight trigrams represent Joseon’s eight provinces” — a framing that emphasized Joseon’s geographic particularity rather than its independent national identity.^[10]

By contrast, Bak Yeong-hyo’s reduction from eight trigrams to four — even if prompted by the British captain’s advice — resulted in a choice that moved away from Qing’s proposal. The four trigrams of geon, gon, gam, and ri carry far more universal symbolism than the full eight. Rather than pointing to Joseon’s geographic boundaries, they point to cosmic principles.

It is also worth noting that this design drew on a symbolic vocabulary familiar throughout the East Asian cultural sphere. Just as European nations expressed themselves through crosses or tricolor stripes, Joseon expressed itself in the language of East Asian philosophy. Making its first appearance on the Western diplomatic stage, it did not adopt Western visual conventions but put forward its own.

There is also evidence that King Gojong played more than a merely passive role in this process. Japanese newspapers in 1882 reported Gojong as the person who proposed the Taegukgi design, and later scholars have raised the possibility that Bak Yeong-hyo received specific design instructions from Gojong before departing.^[11] Bak’s record, the Sahwa giyak (使和記略), contains relevant context suggesting as much.

Lost Sovereignty and a Flag of Resistance

On August 22, 1910, the Korean Empire was forcibly annexed by Japan. From that moment, the Taegukgi became illegal.

Japan banned the manufacture and possession of the Taegukgi. Displaying it in public was punishable. This prohibition had an unintended effect: the Taegukgi ceased to be merely a decorative emblem for state occasions and became something worth risking one’s life for.

On March 1, 1919, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud at Tapgol Park in Seoul. In the days that followed, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country, waving the Taegukgi. The movement known as the March 1st Movement was not simply a political act — the very act of carrying a banned flag was itself a declaration of resistance.^[12]

The Taegukgi flags used in the March 1st Movement varied widely in form. With no standardized method of production, flags drawn by hand, printed, or sewn by needle filled the streets in diverse forms. Examining the flags from that period held in the Independence Hall of Korea today, one finds slight variations in the position of the trigrams and the details of the taeguk symbol. Yet no one asked which was the authentic Taegukgi.

The Korean Provisional Government, established in Shanghai in April 1919, also adopted the Taegukgi as its national flag. In 1942, the Provisional Government promulgated the “Unified National Flag Regulations” to standardize its form, but under Japanese suppression, these guidelines could not be widely disseminated within Korea.^[13]

During this period, the Taegukgi’s role went beyond being a mere symbol. As independence movement activists operated overseas, the flag became a physical medium of communication and identification. Korean Liberation Army flags from this period are covered in signatures — the flag as a tangible bond between people.

A History of Standardization: The Same Flag, Many Faces

After liberation in 1945, the Taegukgi regained its status as the official national flag. But there was a problem: the many flags produced over the years without a single standard were far too varied. The shade of the taeguk colors, the size and placement of the four trigrams, and the proportions of the white background all differed from one to the next.

As the South Korean government prepared to be established in July 1948, President Syngman Rhee ordered the flag to be unified. A “National Flag Rectification Committee” was formed, and on October 15, 1949, the current specifications for the Taegukgi were fixed by a Ministry of Education notification. The size of the taeguk — set at half the flag’s width — along with the placement, size, and colors of the four trigrams were all defined in precise figures.^[14]

In the same period, North Korea chose a different path. In July 1948, the North Korean People’s Committee abolished the Taegukgi and adopted a new flag featuring a red star and blue stripes. North Korea’s rationale was clear: the I Ching, on which the Taegukgi was based, was an unscientific superstition, and a flag created without standardization was unsuitable for a new democratic state.^[15]

Yet beneath this rationale lay another implication. Abolishing the Taegukgi was not simply a matter of discarding superstition — it was also a choice to yield to the South the line of historical legitimacy running from the Joseon dynasty through the Provisional Government.

Even in the South, standardization was long incomplete. An official color code was not assigned until 1997, and it was revised again in 2011. Today, the red of the Taegukgi is specified as Pantone 186C and the blue as Pantone 294C. It took that long for a flag first drawn on a boat 130 years earlier to find its place in a modern color specification system.^[16]

The Modern Taegukgi: One Flag, Many Meanings

In modern Korea, the Taegukgi carries meaning far beyond a simple national symbol. Among crowds draped in red at World Cup stadiums, at large-scale rallies in Gwanghwamun Square, and inside glass display cases in independence movement memorial halls, the Taegukgi appears each time alongside different emotions.

Notably, the Taegukgi occupies a singular position even within the geopolitical tensions surrounding the Korean peninsula. At the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships, North and South Korea formed a joint team under the name “Korea” and carried a unification flag depicting the Korean peninsula in place of their respective national flags. The same joint team competed at the FIFA World Youth Championship held in Portugal that year. Rather than the Taegukgi or North Korea’s flag, an entirely new banner was created.^[17]

Outside the Korean peninsula, the Taegukgi carries yet another layer of meaning. Scholar Brian Reynolds Myers has analyzed the South Korean flag as functioning not as a symbol of a particular political system but of a broader category — “the Korean people.” For tens of millions of people of Korean descent living both inside and outside the peninsula, the Taegukgi is a marker of identity rather than nationality.^[18]

This analysis reveals an intriguing paradox. A flag bearing philosophically universal principles — yin and yang, heaven, earth, water, and fire — has, in actual use, become an emblem of a very particular collective identity. A flag inscribed with the principles of the cosmos is read as the symbol of a specific people.

The Language Joseon Chose

The year 1882, when the Taegukgi was created, was a moment of choice for Joseon. The need to create a national flag was clear — but what form it would take was an open question.

Even under Qing pressure, even amid Japan’s demands for open ports, Joseon’s choice was neither the tricolors of Western nations nor the dragon motifs of East Asian dynasties — but philosophical symbols. Heaven and earth, water and fire, the balance of yin and yang: not any particular power or dynasty, but the principles of the cosmos.

Whether that choice was the product of diplomatic necessity, a genuine expression of philosophical conviction, or some mixture of both, the flag endured the turbulence of the decades that followed. It survived being banned. It held together through division. Its specifications changed, but its essential form did not.

Few countries have placed the principles of the cosmos in their national flag. And perhaps the reason those principles have not changed through the upheavals of the age is the strongest argument the Taegukgi has ever made.