Your guide to a culture-filled Chuseok in Seoul and beyond

Seoul's cultural venues spent late September preparing for a packed Chuseok week, and the programming that resulted is worth building a trip around even now that the holiday has passed into the calendar. Chuseok 2025 fell on Oct. 6, and the government stitched it together with National Foundation Day on Oct. 3 and Hangeul Day on Oct. 9 into a stretch of nearly a week, giving museums, palaces and performance halls a rare multi-day window to run programs that normally would not survive a single closed Monday.

The four grand palaces, Jongmyo Shrine and the Joseon royal tombs offered free admission throughout the holiday period, including on days they would ordinarily close to the public. Gyeongbokgung, at 161 Sajik-ro, Jongno-gu, paired that free entry with its Hanbok Royal Banquet program, where costumed interpreters demonstrated traditional sewing, embroidery and gold-leaf techniques on hanbok fabric, alongside a newly added Hanbok Storytelling session for visitors curious about the garments beyond the photo backdrop. One caveat worth noting for anyone retracing these programs: Changdeokgung's Secret Garden, a separately ticketed section of that palace, stayed paid even while the rest of the grounds waived entry, and the broader free-admission-for-hanbok-wearers policy at the palaces is a standing year-round perk rather than a holiday special, so the two should not be confused when planning a visit.

At Namsangol Hanok Village, 28 Toegye-ro 34-gil, Jung-gu, the Chuseok Festival Playground turned the hanok courtyards into a hands-on folk fair, with traditional games, craft-making stations and seasonal performances running free of charge across the holiday stretch. The format leaned into exactly the kind of family activity the holiday is nominally about: tuho arrow-pitching, yut dice games and simple craft tables that let visitors sit down rather than just watch, a contrast to the more passive museum-gallery experience the palaces offer.

The most ambitious of the lineup sat outside Seoul. The Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, at 38 Munhwajeondang-ro, Dong-gu, staged "Boreumdal Asia," a children's festival built around augmented-reality play, puppet shows and circus performances that ran as an evening draw for the center's outdoor plaza as well as its indoor halls. For travelers mapping a Chuseok itinerary beyond the capital, it was the rare regional-city program with the production scale to anchor a night out rather than a daytime detour.

Back in Seoul, the National Museum of Korea, at 137 Seobinggo-ro, Yongsan-gu, hosted the Foundation for Korea Traditional Performing Arts' Art Spot Series, a free festival mixing traditional court and folk music with contemporary stagings, scheduled across the museum's open holiday days. The museum and the Foundation coordinated the series specifically around the free-admission window, giving visitors who came for the collections a reason to stay into the evening for a performance as well.

All of this programming ran against a backdrop the Korea Herald itself tracked in a separate report: a record exodus of travelers choosing to spend the holiday abroad rather than at these free domestic offerings, with Incheon International Airport bracing for roughly 2.45 million passengers over the holiday corridor and outbound searches up 92.4 percent year on year, according to the Korea Herald. That tension, between a government-subsidized culture calendar at home and a record share of Koreans opting for Tokyo, Fukuoka or Da Nang instead, is part of why officials leaned so heavily on free admission and marquee programming this year rather than ticketed draws.

Most of the programs above cost nothing beyond transportation, with booking handled through the Korea Tourism Organization's Corners of Korea platform, which aggregated the full holiday lineup including the Namsangol and Asia Culture Center schedules, as the Korea Herald later detailed in its roundup of holiday travel picks. Details above were checked against that roundup and the Korea Herald's original Chuseok guide as of Oct. 2, 2025. For a visitor retracing this itinerary outside the holiday window itself, the free palace admission and the Gyeongbokgung hanbok demonstrations are the two pieces of programming most likely to still be running, since the Namsangol playground and the Gwangju children's festival were built specifically around the Chuseok dates and will not recur until the next holiday rotation.