About
Colors Korea covers Korean traditional culture for travelers — hanok stays, craft workshops, palaces and hanbok, festivals and performances, and the crafts you can take home.
Why the name
Korean tradition is not quiet. Dancheong eaves stack primary colors on top of each other. Saekdong sleeves are bright stripes. Minhwa folk paintings are witty and loud. Mother-of-pearl shifts color as you move past it.
The five traditional colors — obangsaek — are blue, red, yellow, white and black, each tied to a direction. You will find them running across the top of every page here.
Researched from Korean sources
Most English-language guides to Korea are written from other English-language guides. This one starts from Korean-language material: government notices, the Korea Tourism Organization’s open data service, venue and operator sites, county announcements, and Korean review platforms.
That is not a stylistic preference. Prices, opening hours, closures and transit rules change in Korean first, and English coverage lags by months. A palace admission that dropped to free in May 2023, a station that was renamed in February 2023, a train line that opened in December 2024 — each was still described the old way in English long after the Korean notice went up.
What the labels mean
Every page carries a last verified date, and 41 of them say when they were last checked against source. Where a page is based on a personal visit it says visited; five say so today. The rest are desk research and are labeled that way rather than dressed up.
The festival calendar makes the same distinction with dates. Of the 48 festivals on it, 43 carry dates the Korea Tourism Organization has published and are marked confirmed; the remaining five show the previous year’s window and are marked usual timing, because a guess printed in the same style as a fact is how a calendar quietly becomes wrong.
What happens when we do not know
This is the part most travel sites leave out, so it is worth stating plainly.
We have timed the train and bus connections for six regions ourselves. For every other festival the page gives the distance and bearing from Seoul — which comes out of coordinates and cannot be wrong — and then says outright that we have not checked the connection, rather than printing a plausible number.
Two performance prices on this site are blank. Neither venue publishes one anywhere we could find, and the entries say so.
One entry contradicts its own source. The tourism data lists Silla Ogi at Gyochon Village as a permanent performance; Gyeongju Cultural Foundation’s own schedule has it running four Saturdays in April and May and not again all year. The page carries the foundation’s version and explains the discrepancy, so nobody walks to Gyochon in October expecting a show.
Who writes this
Plainly: these pages are drafted with AI, and directed, checked and published by a person.
The research and drafting — reading Korean government notices, pulling the tourism authority’s open data, writing the pages and building the site itself — are done with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic. What gets published, what gets cut, which claims need a second source, and what a page is ultimately for are decided by one person, not a team and not the model.
That division earns its keep in both directions. The AI is the reason a small site can read Korean sources at all, and the reason the festival pages exist. It is also confidently wrong sometimes. A recent example: a draft put the bus from Gyeongju Station to the National Museum at 36 minutes, which was a route requiring a transfer. The editor checked it against the map and the correct answer was the 38-minute direct bus — a small error, wrong in a way that would have sent someone through an unnecessary change.
That is why the labels on this site exist, and why pages say when a thing has not been checked rather than filling the gap with something plausible. Fluent text is easy to produce. Verified text is the part that takes work.
Corrections
Found something wrong or out of date? Tell us — corrections are handled before anything else, and a link to the Korean original gets it fixed fastest.