Four black trigrams appear on South Korea’s national flag. They surround the central red-and-blue taegeuk, creating the design known as the Taegeukgi.
Each trigram is made from solid and broken bars, and the four groups are named geon, gon, gam, and ri. In traditional Korean cosmology, they represent complementary forces and natural elements: heaven, earth, water, and fire. Their arrangement expresses balance and harmony around the central taegeuk.
The flag’s central symbol is not a simple yin-yang emblem. The taegeuk uses red and blue halves to represent opposing but interdependent cosmic forces, often described through ideas such as positive and negative energy. Together, the taegeuk and trigrams reflect concepts drawn from East Asian philosophy.
The flag was first used in the late 19th century and was formally adopted by the Republic of Korea in 1949. The trigrams are easy to miscount because each group contains several bars, but the question asks for the number of groups, not the number of individual bars.