The Seoul Lantern Festival is a festival held every winter in Seoul in South Korea. It includes lanterns, outdoor light installations, Christmas market, experience programs.
This event used to take place about two weeks in November at Cheonggyecheon stream, but since 2022 it started to take place more than a month in December at yes the Gwanghwamun Plaza. 1
History
The Seoul Lantern Festival started in 2009. The Seoul Lantern Festival started in 2009. In its earlier years, the festival was generally held in November along Cheonggyecheon Stream. In recent editions, it has taken place during the winter holiday season, with the 2025 festival running from 12 December 2025 to 4 January 2026. 1
Program
Seoul Lantern Festival offers different concepts of festival every year. 1
2009
The first Seoul Lantern Festival celebrated the 'Visit Korea Year 2010 to 2012' for 5 days. The festival had four themes that were related to 'ryu' Korean. 1
Theme 1: Gyoryu zone (Exchange zone)
Theme 2: Wonryu zone (Headwaters zone)
Theme 3: Hanryu zone (Korean wave zone)
Theme 4: Ilryu zone (First-class zone) 1
2010
The second Seoul Lantern Festival drew 2.3 million visitors, including about 370,000 foreign tourists. The festival's paper lanterns were from 24 countries including Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand and Malaysia. The festival was originally planned for 10 days, but public pressure, largely from the foreign tourists, convinced the organisers to extend the festival by seven additional days. 1
Theme: Seoul, the forest of the glimmer of hope. 1
2011
The main theme of the 2011 festival was 'The History of Seoul by Lanterns' (alternately, '...Told with Light'; literally 'An Old Story of Seoul with Lantern'). Lantern art was used to tell the history of Korea from the Joseon Dynasty through modern times, with special attention to the stories told for Children. 1
Theme 1: History of Korea
Theme 2: Memory of the childhood
Theme 3: Characters for children 1
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Seoul Lantern Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. 1
Seoul Lantern Festival is Annual festival in South Korea, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. 2
The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. 2