South Korea celebrated National Foundation Day with a ceremony at the Sejong Center in central Seoul on Friday.

About one-thousand-200 dignitaries, including government leaders, party officials, religious figures, diplomats and civic representatives, attended the event to celebrate the emergence of the earliest Korean nation four-thousand-357 years ago.

Themed “Our Light, Further and Wider,” it featured performances, a video presentation, congratulatory speeches, songs, and a three-cheers finale led by a nurse honored for saving a patient in flight, a gold medalist in the International Olympiad in Informatics, and a civic leader.

Local governments, overseas missions and traditional ritual sites also held parallel events, drawing some 38-thousand participants nationwide.

Officials said the program aimed to highlight the spirit of benefiting humanity as a universal value.