As described in the Republic of Korea’s official Korea.net summary of Hangul’s invention and historical adoption, the senior Confucian scholar Choe Manri presented a formal memorial to Sejong in 1444 — within months of the original announcement — objecting to the new script on the grounds that it would diminish Korea’s status as a culturally Chinese country, that learning a script different from Chinese was an act of cultural barbarism, and that promoting widespread literacy among the lower classes would destabilise the social hierarchy that depended on the yangban’s exclusive control of written knowledge.
Discussion