Beolcho and Seongmyo: Korean Grave Visits Explained

On the weekends before Chuseok, the expressways out of Seoul jam up with cars carrying strimmers in the boot. The drivers are going to cut grass on hillsides they may visit only once a year, around graves of people some of them never met.

It is one of the most practical Korean rituals, and one of the most hazardous. It is also changing quickly, because most Koreans are now cremated rather than buried.

This is Part 5, the last part of our Korean rites of passage series. Part 4 covered the rites held at home. This part goes outside, to the graves.

What is beolcho, and why before Chuseok?

벌초 (beolcho) means “cutting grass”. The National Folk Museum’s Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture defines it as clearing the weeds that have grown on and around an ancestor’s grave before Chuseok, typically from late in the seventh lunar month until the holiday. In some regions it is called 금초 (geumcho).

The timing is botanical. By the end of summer the grass stops growing, so a grave cut in late August or September stays tidy until spring. And it had to be done before Chuseok, when the family would come to bow.

In Jeju the custom became a clan event. The encyclopedia describes 모둠벌초 (modum beolcho), when relatives within the eighth degree of kinship (roughly out to third cousins) gather on a fixed day from the first day of the eighth lunar month to clear their shared graves together, followed by a larger gathering for the clan’s older graves.

Today many families pay for it instead. The encyclopedia dates the rise of grave-cutting services to the early 1990s, when power trimmers spread; they are now widely advertised every August, and plenty of city families hire someone and just visit on the day.

How dangerous is beolcho?

More than it sounds. Grave clearing sends people onto overgrown hillsides with power trimmers at exactly the time when wasp and hornet colonies are at their biggest, and snakes are still active.

Those are National Fire Agency figures published ahead of Chuseok in September 2026. Snakes are the other seasonal risk: Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency emergency-room data for 2021–2025, reported by Money Today, show about a quarter of snakebite cases happening in September.

Korea’s emergency number and what happens after you call it are explained in our Seoul emergency guide.

What happens during seongmyo?

성묘 (seongmyo) is visiting the grave to pay respects. The Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture describes it as a combination of tending the grave and bowing to the ancestor, and notes that it became a nationwide Chuseok custom only from the late 1980s, as Koreans moved to cities and began combining the grave visit with the holiday trip home. Earlier, some regions visited graves mainly on 한식 (Hansik), a spring day in early April, and repaired the turf then.

A typical Chuseok grave visit today is short:

• Tidy the grave, pull any remaining weeds, and set out a small offering on the stone table in front: a cup of wine, fruit, dried fish, sometimes songpyeon.
• Pour wine, and bow twice as a family.
• Some families also make a small offering beside the grave to the spirit of the land (후토신, hutosin), a step that goes back to the classical graveside rite.
• Eat some of the food together before leaving.

In 2022 Sungkyunkwan, the national Confucian body, said it does not matter whether the grave visit comes before or after the charye at home, as reported by the Hankook Ilbo.

Grave visits are holding up better than ancestral rites at home. In a Korea Research poll of 1,000 adults taken on 4 to 7 September 2026, 67% said visiting ancestral graves was necessary, although only 45% planned to go this Chuseok.

How has cremation changed grave visits?

Almost completely. For most of Korean history the dead were buried in a grass-covered mound on a hillside chosen with care. Today nine in ten are cremated.

⚱️ Cremation rate in Korea

The 1993, 2005 and 2024 figures are from the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, a government research institute, as reported by the Herald Economy in August 2026; the 2016 and 2021 figures are from Ministry of Health and Welfare releases. The same report counted only 62 crematoria nationwide, just seven of them in the Seoul metropolitan area.

What replaced the hillside mound:

🌳 Where Korean ashes go now

That means “seongmyo” increasingly takes place indoors. On Chuseok morning, the big public columbaria around Seoul are as crowded as any hillside, and some run holiday shuttle buses or restrict food offerings indoors, so check before you go. Families also use online memorial services. The beolcho weekend traffic, however, has not gone away, because millions of older graves still need cutting.

Can visitors see a Korean cemetery?

Yes, and the most meaningful one is in the middle of Seoul.

Seoul National Cemetery (국립서울현충원) in Dongjak-gu is where Korea buries those who died for the country. It began as the Armed Forces Cemetery, whose management office opened in 1955 on the site in Dongjak-dong; it became a national cemetery in 1965, opened to independence activists and police as well as soldiers, and took its current name after a 2005 law. According to the Digital Dongjak Culture Encyclopedia, it covers about 1.44 million square metres and holds some 179,000 people, including the graves of four former presidents: Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung. Veterans of other countries who fought in the Korean War have their own section too.

It is also one of Seoul’s quietest green spaces, and it is busiest on 6 June, Memorial Day, and around Chuseok, when families visit.

🕊️ Seoul National Cemetery visitor information (official site, 2026)

📍 Open in Naver Map

For more on how Korea remembers its war dead, the War Memorial of Korea in Yongsan is the museum counterpart.

What if you’re invited to a family grave visit?

Take it as a real gesture of inclusion. Wear comfortable, modest clothes and shoes you can climb a muddy slope in, bring water, and let the family lead. When they bow, you can bow too, or stand quietly. Don’t step on the grave mound itself. And if you are driving, plan around the traffic: Chuseok and Seollal grave trips turn the roads out of Seoul into car parks on the first day of the holiday and the roads back in on the last. Our Chuseok travel guide explains what to book ahead.

Related reading

• Korean funeral etiquette: why the doors stay open for three days
• Seoul Chuseok 2026 travel guide
• War Memorial of Korea guide
• When a pet dies in Korea