TaeKwonDo is barely seventy years old under that name — and thousands of years old in everything but the name. The history of TaeKwonDo runs from combat scenes painted on the walls of Korean royal tombs, through a colonial occupation that nearly erased Korean martial arts entirely, to a gold medal podium at the Sydney Olympics.
Most students learn a compressed version at belt testing: ancient Korea, General Choi, the Olympics. The real sequence is more interesting — and more contested. Here’s how a set of rival post-war schools in Seoul became the most widely practiced martial art on earth, and where our lineage in Gallatin, TN sits inside it.
Before the Name: Korea’s Ancient Fighting Arts
Korea’s unarmed combat tradition predates TaeKwonDo by roughly two millennia. Murals in Goguryeo-era royal tombs — dated between the first and fifth centuries AD — depict pairs of figures squared off in what appear to be wrestling and striking stances. Not proof of a formal curriculum, but evidence that hand-to-hand combat was part of Korean life long before any modern school existed.
Two named arts carry that thread forward. Subak was the broad term for bare-handed fighting on the peninsula. Taekkyeon — a fluid, kick-heavy folk art built on rhythmic footwork — survived into the modern era as a village game, and in 2011 became the first martial art ever inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The most detailed surviving record is the Muye Dobo Tongji, an illustrated military manual published in 1790 — still the primary source for what Korean martial training looked like before the twentieth century. Our Korean martial arts terminology glossary covers the language that carried forward into the dojang.
Occupation, Survival, and the Nine Kwans
Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and held it until 1945. Korean cultural practice was suppressed throughout, martial arts included, and traditional transmission lines thinned badly. The men who would go on to build TaeKwonDo learned where they could: karate while studying in Japan, Chinese systems in Manchuria, judo in the few schools permitted to operate.
When the occupation ended in 1945, those men came home and opened schools. Each school was a kwan. Chung Do Kwan and Song Moo Kwan opened first, around 1944. Chun Sang Sup founded what became our own lineage on May 3, 1946 — the Chosun Yun Moo Kwan Kong Soo Do Bu, housed in a former judo hall. Choi Hong Hi established Oh Do Kwan in 1954 within the South Korean military. Together with the schools that followed, they are remembered as the nine kwans.
The Korean War interrupted everything. Chun Sang Sup disappeared in 1950, early in the fighting, and was never seen again. His senior students Yoon Gwae Byung and Lee Chong Woo kept the school running, and Lee proposed a new name for it: Jidokwan — the school of wisdom. That story is worth reading in full, because it’s the branch GMA descends from — our post on what Jidokwon means traces the lineage.
April 11, 1955: Where the History of TaeKwonDo Gets Its Name
Nine schools teaching overlapping material under nine different names was not a martial art — it was a rivalry. Unification meetings ran through the mid-1950s, and the date most often cited as the naming of the art is April 11, 1955, when kwan leaders and other influential figures met and Choi Hong Hi put forward the name Taekwon-Do.
The tidy version ends there. What followed was messier: several kwans initially adopted Tae Soo Do instead, and TaeKwonDo wasn’t settled across the schools until roughly 1957, when Choi pressed the case again. He went on to lead the Korea Taekwondo Association, the body chartered with pulling the nine kwans into one national art. Anyone who tells you the naming was unanimous is smoothing over a decade of argument.
The name itself is precise: Tae (foot), Kwon (fist), Do (way). That Do does real work — it marks the art as a path of self-cultivation rather than a fighting method alone, which is why the tenets are taught alongside the kicks. Our guide to what TaeKwonDo actually is covers how that philosophy shows up in a modern class.
Kukkiwon, World Taekwondo, and the Split That Shaped the Art
Two institutions built in the early 1970s turned a Korean national art into a global one. The Kukkiwon opened in Seoul in 1972 as the central dojang — the body that standardized curriculum and issued the Dan certifications recognized worldwide. The World Taekwondo Federation followed on May 28, 1973, founded at the Kukkiwon with 35 representatives from around the world; that same month the first World Championships drew 200 competitors from 17 countries. It shortened its name to World Taekwondo in 2017.
Running alongside that is the split every serious student eventually meets. Choi Hong Hi founded the International Taekwon-Do Federation in 1966, and as politics pulled him from the South Korean establishment, the art divided into two lineages that persist today — different forms (Chang Hon patterns versus Kukkiwon poomsae), different sparring rules, different certifying bodies. Neither is a counterfeit. They’re two branches off the same 1955 trunk, and knowing which one a school teaches tells you a great deal about its TaeKwonDo program.
The Road to Olympic Gold
TaeKwonDo’s Olympic climb took twelve years. It appeared as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Seoul Games — a home-soil showcase — and again at Barcelona in 1992. At the Sydney 2000 Games it became a full medal sport, contested at every Summer Olympics since.
Olympic inclusion changed the art as much as it spread it. Competition rules reward fast, scoring kicks to the trunk and head, and electronic scoring pushed the sport further toward speed and point efficiency — which is why traditional schools are deliberate about keeping self-defense application, forms, and one-step sparring in the curriculum rather than training purely for the ruleset.
The scale is hard to overstate: TaeKwonDo is now practiced by more than 80 million people across over 200 countries. The rank structure that spread with it stayed remarkably consistent, which is why our belt ranking guide reads familiar to students trained almost anywhere.
Where GMA Fits in TaeKwonDo History
Global Martial Arts USA traces its TaeKwonDo lineage through the Jidokwan — one of the original kwans that sat at the table in 1955. That isn’t a marketing line; it’s a specific claim about where the curriculum came from and who certified the people teaching it. “Which kwan?” is one of the most useful questions a prospective student can ask.
Our founder, KwanJangNim K.O. Spillmann, holds a 9th Degree TaeKwonDo Black Belt — a rank requiring roughly fifty years of training — alongside an IBJJF Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt. He has taught in Gallatin, TN for more than fifty years, and GMA has been voted the top school in Sumner County. To go deeper into the grappling side of that background, train at our dedicated BJJ program at GMA Team; the Korean self-defense curriculum continues in our HapKiDo program.
In practice that history means the rank takes what it takes. The path to a black belt here runs 3.5 to 4 years because the curriculum inherited from the kwans is genuinely demanding. Seventy years of institutional history is only worth something if the standard behind the belt survives it — more on our story and credentials.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented TaeKwonDo?
No single person invented it. TaeKwonDo was assembled in the 1950s from nine Korean schools — the kwans — that opened after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945. General Choi Hong Hi is the figure most associated with the art: he proposed the name at the April 11, 1955 meeting, founded Oh Do Kwan, and later established the International Taekwon-Do Federation. But the curriculum came from all nine kwans, and men like Chun Sang Sup and Lee Chong Woo shaped it as much as Choi did.
How old is TaeKwonDo?
The name dates to 1955, making TaeKwonDo about seventy years old as a unified art. Its component traditions are far older: Korean unarmed combat appears in Goguryeo tomb murals dated between the first and fifth centuries AD, the folk kicking art Taekkyeon survived for centuries as a village practice, and the 1790 manual Muye Dobo Tongji documented Korean fighting methods in detail.
When did TaeKwonDo become an Olympic sport?
TaeKwonDo became a full Olympic medal sport at the Sydney 2000 Games. Before that it appeared twice as a demonstration sport — at Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992. It has been contested at every Summer Olympics since 2000, governed internationally by World Taekwondo, which was founded at the Kukkiwon in Seoul on May 28, 1973.