The story of how Korean letters reached a small Indonesian island begins with Lee Ki-nam and her father. During the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, teaching Hangul was at times a punishable act. Lee's father, a linguist, was dismissed from his teaching position for secretly instructing students in the Korean script. That act of defiance shaped his daughter's life. After retiring from her career, Lee Ki-nam turned to missionary and charitable work, and she developed a specific ambition: to bring Hangul to ethnic groups whose languages lacked established writing systems. She saw in Hangul not just a Korean treasure but a phonetic technology -- its characters are designed to represent the shapes the mouth makes when producing sounds, making it unusually adaptable to foreign languages.

In July 2008, Lee led a delegation to Baubau to propose the idea. She offered to build a $500,000 Korean cultural center and establish economic ties between Baubau and South Korea. The city accepted. Two local teachers traveled to Seoul for six months of Hangul training at Seoul National University. One quit partway through. The other returned to Baubau in July 2009 and began teaching Hangul to fifty third-graders. The experiment attracted international attention. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Korean media all covered the story of an Indonesian tribe adopting Korean letters. It was irresistible: a 15th-century alphabet crossing oceans to rescue a 21st-century language. But the reality on the ground proved more complicated than the headlines suggested.

By 2011, tensions had surfaced between the city of Baubau, the Hunminjeongeum Society that had championed the project, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government. The King Sejong Institute, established in Baubau in 2011 to teach Hangul to local residents, abandoned its offices after just one year of operation. The program shrank but did not die. In two of the approximately 75 Cia-Cia-speaking subdistricts, Hangul instruction continued privately in schools. Students learned to write their own language in Korean characters while also picking up basic Korean. Then came a quiet revival: in January 2020, scholars announced the first Cia-Cia dictionary written in Hangul. Published in December 2021, it renewed interest in the project. The King Sejong Institute reopened in Baubau in 2022, and in December 2023 Agence France-Presse published fresh interviews documenting the ongoing effort.

Hangul works for Cia-Cia in ways that Latin script does not. The language uses only open syllables -- each syllable ends in a vowel, following a simple consonant-vowel pattern. Hangul's modular design, where consonant and vowel symbols combine into syllable blocks, maps cleanly onto this structure. Prenasalized consonants, which Latin script can only approximate with clumsy digraphs, get their own distinct characters. As of 2025, Cia-Cia's use of Hangul remains limited to schools and local signage in the two subdistricts that originally adopted the program. It has not become the official script of the language. But in those classrooms, children write their mother tongue in characters designed six centuries ago by a Korean king who believed that every person deserved the power of literacy. Lee Ki-nam's father would have understood the impulse perfectly.