Hall of Worthies
Before Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was created, Koreans used Chinese characters to record their words. Since Chinese language and Korean language share few similarities, borrowing Chinese characters proved to be inefficient to reflect the spoken language. In addition, the Ming Dynasty had just come to power in China at the time when King Sejong was inventing Hangul, which changed the pronunciation of Chinese characters making it harder for Koreans to learn the new standard pronunciation to record their words. The illiteracy level also stayed high since reading and learning Chinese characters were restricted to the ordinary people and were generally used in official documents by the ruling class. The ruling class took advantage of this and learning the Chinese characters became a symbol of power and privilege. In order to make written language more accessible for common people, King Sejong started creating Hangul secretly, since the ruling class would be appalled by the news. Although it is widely assumed that King Sejong ordered the Hall of Worthies to invent Hangul, contemporary records such as the "Veritable Records of King Sejong" and Jeong Inji's preface to the "Hunminjeongeum Haerye" emphasize that he invented it himself.