Culture · Essay
Chuseok: the whole country goes home, and half of it is on the road
Korea's harvest holiday empties the cities. Families travel for hours to reach a hometown, set a table for the dead in a fixed arrangement, then climb a hill to cut the grass on a grave. On charye, beolcho, and what happens when the hometown is gone.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-04-23 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
For a few days each autumn the expressways out of Seoul stop working properly. A drive that takes three hours takes eight. Something close to two-thirds of the population of South Korea is travelling at once, most of them toward a hometown, and the traffic reports become a national spectator sport.
They are going to set a table and cut some grass.
The rite performed at Chuseok is charye, a form of jesa, the Korean ancestral memorial rite. Charye is the version kept on holidays rather than on a death anniversary, and it is done in the morning, at home.
The table is arranged rather than laid. There are conventions with names, and families argue about them: red fruit to the east and white to the west, fish to the east and meat to the west, the head of the fish pointing east, rice and soup at the north end where the dead sit, and no peaches, because peaches drive spirits away. Three or four generations of ancestors are addressed, their names written on a paper tablet or a card set at the head of the table.
The family bows. The food is offered, then the family eats it. That last part matters and is easy to miss: the meal is not left for the dead, it is shared with them and then eaten by everyone, which is why charye produces an enormous amount of cooking.
Most of that cooking has traditionally been done by the women who married into the family, in the kitchen of a mother-in-law they see twice a year. Korean media covers "myeongjeol syndrome", holiday stress, as a public-health story every autumn, and the complaint is specific and long-standing rather than a modern invention.
The second rite is beolcho, and it is the one that gets left out of most descriptions.
Korean graves are grassed mounds, and a mound left alone for a year is covered in weeds and often damaged by wild boar. So before Chuseok, or on the day, the family walks out to the burial ground and cuts the grass. Strimmers, sickles, a lot of standing about. The formal visit that follows, seongmyo, is short: a bow, a little liquor poured on the ground, a word or two.
This is the same instinct as Qingming in China, and the same in its logic. The grave is a thing that requires upkeep, the upkeep falls due once a year, and the family shows up with tools.
Injuries during beolcho are common enough that the Korean fire service issues an annual warning about strimmers and wasps' nests. Remembrance in practice is not solemn. It is a job.
Chuseok falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which means a full moon, and the holiday is a harvest festival before it is anything else. The name Hangawi means roughly the great middle of autumn.
The food is songpyeon: rice-flour dough folded into half-moons around sesame, chestnut or sweetened bean, and steamed on a bed of pine needles that leaves the smell in them. Families make them together, and there is a saying that whoever shapes a beautiful songpyeon will have a beautiful daughter, which is the kind of thing said to children who are making a mess of it.
The half-moon shape is usually explained as a moon that is still growing, and therefore as a wish, which fits a harvest that is being counted rather than a year that is ending.
There are older communal forms too. Ganggangsullae, a circle dance performed by women under the full moon, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Wrestling matches, archery, a great deal of rice wine.
The strain on Chuseok is a demographic one, and it is easy to state.
Korea urbanised faster than almost any country in history. Within two generations the population moved from villages to Seoul and a handful of other cities, and the hometown that Chuseok sends everyone back to is, for a growing number of families, a place nobody actually lives any more. The grandparents who anchored it are dying. The graves are three hours from anyone who might cut the grass.
So the observance is changing in ways that are easy to document. Cremation overtook burial and is now the substantial majority, which means charnel houses and columbaria rather than grassed mounds, which means no beolcho. Some families keep the rite and skip the travel. Some travel and skip the rite. Younger Koreans increasingly use the holiday for a trip abroad, and the airports are as congested as the roads.
Christian families, roughly a third of the country, are divided on charye. Catholic teaching in Korea has permitted it as a filial custom since the 1930s; a number of Protestant churches treat it as ancestor worship and substitute a memorial service. Both positions are held sincerely and the argument runs through families rather than between them.
Strip out the travel, the mound and the mother-in-law's kitchen, and what remains of Chuseok is quite small and quite hard.
It is a date. It is a list of names, three or four generations deep, that somebody has to know in order to write the tablet. And it is a family in the same room being reminded who they came from.
The list is the fragile part. The mound can be replaced by a columbarium and the cooking can be bought in, but nobody has worked out how to replace an aunt who knows which great-grandparents belong on the table. When the paper tablet stops being written, the rite has nothing to name.
That is not a Korean problem. It is the same gap the jiapu filled in China and the griot filled in Mali, and most families outside those traditions never had a solution at all.
The table
The hill
Songpyeon, and the moon