Imagine a writing system so effective it could end illiteracy in days, and a ruling class that rejected it precisely because it worked too well. This episode tells the biography of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, from King Sejong's frustration with Chinese characters in the 1400s through centuries of elite contempt and outright bans to its status today as a UNESCO-recognized marvel of linguistic design.

The conversation explains why Chinese hanja was a poor fit for spoken Korean, how the 1446 Hunminjeongeum laid out a script whose consonant shapes mimic the position of the tongue, lips and throat, and how letters snap together into syllable blocks sized to sit beside Chinese characters. It follows the script underground after King Yeonsangun's 1504 ban, where women and Buddhist monks kept it alive and popular novels like Hong Gildong jeon flou ...