National Museum of World Writing Systems Guide

At a glance

• 🆓Free

  Admission is free apart from charged special exhibitions. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, last entry 17:30.

• 📕The Gutenberg Bible is here

  Part 2 of the permanent gallery displays a leaf of the 42-line Bible, Germany, c. 1454, alongside Pliny's Natural History of 1476.

• 🚇536 m from Central Park station

  Exit 3, past the Tri-bowl, over the GCG bridge. The operator gives it as about eight minutes.

• 🅿️The car park is the only till

  600 won for the first 30 minutes, 6,000 a day — but free if you are out within 20 minutes of driving in.

The museum closes every Monday, on 1 January and on Seollal and Chuseok themselves. The clause worth reading is the next one: when a public holiday falls on a Monday the museum opens that Monday and closes the following weekday instead.

The Incheon Urban History Museum, 300 m away across the same park, keeps a Monday rule that looks identical and is not. It also closes Mondays, and a Monday that is a public holiday also opens — but its operator publishes no replacement closure. So on the Tuesday after a Monday holiday, one of these two free museums is shut and the other is not, and it is the national one that is shut.

Both stop admitting 30 minutes before closing. The Urban History Museum runs 09:00–18:00, an hour earlier than this one, which is the other reason to take them in that order.

The permanent exhibition is called Civilization and Writing: A Great Journey, occupies 2,064 m², and is built as an argument rather than a collection.

• Prologue, "A Great Invention" — speech disappears the moment it leaves the mouth. Writing is the invention that let humans escape that.
• Part 1, "Writing Systems to Build a Road" — nine scripts side by side: cuneiform, Egyptian, Maya, Latin, Aramaic, Indic and South-East Asian, Chinese characters, Hangeul, and Hunmaengjeongeum, Korean braille. The museum's own framing is that roughly 400 writing systems have been used in history and about 30 survive in use.
• Part 2, "Writing Systems to Create Culture" — printing, translation, records, media, typefaces. This is where the Gutenberg leaf sits, with the Goryeo Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra volume 534 printed after 1239, Pliny's Natural History of 1476, an 18th-century Indian narayam stylus and a French penner of about 1740.
• Epilogue, "Writing of Tomorrow" — the digital argument, ending on the observation that humanity went from pictures to writing and is going back to pictures.

Named objects in Part 1 include a Sumerian round-boat clay tablet of 2000–1600 BC, a Greek black-figure amphora of 540–530 BC, a Roman marble cinerary urn, an Egyptian canopic jar, an Arabic Qur'an of 1300–1330, a Nepalese Pancharaksha palm-leaf sutra of 1397 and a Manchu dictionary of 1771.

The museum states that it applied universal design as a standard to the permanent gallery, and the specifics are unusually concrete:

• Some objects are shown open, without a case, so they can be touched.
• In the Hunmaengjeongeum section of Part 1, a braille panel and a raised-Hangeul panel are placed side by side.
• Tactile tables carry models of an object's shape and its script, with braille, audio guidance and digital pads.
• The Hunmaengjeongeum section also carries a sign-language video.

Pushchairs and wheelchairs are lent at the level 1 desk against an ID or credit card, indoors only, with pushchairs limited to children under 24 months.

The prohibitions are ordinary except for one: no bicycles, kickboards, skateboards or wheeled shoes anywhere in the museum, which is a rule written by a building that opens straight onto a park path. Also no smoking anywhere, no food brought in, no pets except assistance dogs, no flash, no tripods, and phones off or silent in the galleries.

An adventure of Writing with Kkaebi is a booked, ticketed-by-reservation experience, not a room you wander into. The museum states it suits ages 5 to 7, that every child must be with a guardian, and that a party is four people including the guardian, or 10 to 30 including a leader for a group.

You reserve online, confirm at the level 1 entrance and are given an ID card with an avatar that you carry round six zones: a secret-code gate, Egyptian hieroglyph blocks, a make-the-letter-with-your-body dance, a jungle where touching the scenery turns it into script, an Arabic-writing playground, and a map-and-magnifier "script laboratory".

Parking runs 09:30 to 19:00 — wider than the museum's own hours — with 72 outdoor spaces (2 accessible) and 79 underground (4 accessible, 8 with EV charging).

The charge is 600 won for the first 30 minutes, 300 for every 15 after it, capped at 6,000 a day. It is free if you leave within 20 minutes of arriving, the machines are unmanned and card-only, and you must be out within 20 minutes of paying or the meter restarts.

The discounts are where this stops being routine:

Read the second and fourth rows together. Admission to this museum is free for everybody, so the car park is the only place where being a disabled visitor or a family of four is worth anything — and it is worth 80% and 50% respectively. If you are driving, the concession you are entitled to is a parking concession.

Nearby

• 

  Songdo Central Park

  The museum stands inside it. Free, no closing time, and 1.8 km of seawater canal to walk off an afternoon indoors.

• Incheon Urban History Museum

  300 m south-west. Free, opens an hour earlier, and closes on a different set of days.

Frequently asked questions