Culture News

National Museum of Korea draws 6.5 million visitors in 2025, close to the Louvre and Vatican

The National Museum of Korea in Seoul welcomed 6,507,483 visitors in 2025, about 1.7 times the 3,788,785 of 2024, the museum said on Friday, January 2. The Asia Business Daily calls it the highest total since the museum opened in 1945. Attendance passed 6 million on December 11 and added another 500,000 in about 20 days. Together with its 13 affiliated museums around the country, the national museum network counted 14,773,111 visitors.

Kyunghyang Shinmun set the figure against The Art Newspaper's 2024 global attendance survey, in which only the Louvre (8,737,050) and the Vatican Museums (6,825,436) drew more, and headlined the result “World No. 3”. It added two details: foreign visitors topped 200,000 for the first time, and sales of the museum's “Myuz” merchandise passed 40 billion won, helped by the popularity of the Netflix animated film K-pop Demon Hunters.

“In 2026, we will strive to be a museum that meets the public trust with higher-quality exhibitions and services.” — Yoo Hong-jun, director, via Kyunghyang Shinmun

In April the South China Morning Post, carrying a Kyodo feature, looked at why. It reported that about 97% of visitors are South Korean citizens and described a strategy that treats people as active “users” of the building, its data and its open spaces rather than passive “visitors”. The 2025 total is more than four times the figure for 2005, when the museum moved to its current site in Yongsan.

How each outlet framed it

• The Asia Business Daily — the record itself and the network-wide total.
• Kyunghyang Shinmun — the world ranking, foreign visitors and merchandise.
• South China Morning Post (Kyodo) — a mostly domestic audience and the museum's strategy.

Where the numbers differ: Both Korean papers give 6,507,483, but The Asia Business Daily counts it “as of January 2” and Kyunghyang “as of December 31”. The “top three” claim compares the museum's 2025 total with other museums' 2024 numbers, so it is an approximation, not an official ranking.