Roof-end Tile with a Smiling Face
Seventh century
A round clay face smiles at you from a case: narrow eyes, a small nose, full cheeks and a wide, gentle grin, with a chip missing from the lower right where the tile broke. It is only about the size of a hand. This was a roof-end tile, the disc that closed the end of a row of round tiles along the eaves of a Silla temple, and hundreds of such discs would have looked down from every roof in the city. Most are decorated with lotus flowers. This one, alone among all the tiles ever found in Gyeongju, has a human face, and it has become the smile of Silla, printed on everything from tourist brochures to the city's manhole covers.
The face was not stamped from a mould like most tile ornament but modelled by hand, which is why it feels so alive. The eyes are slits pressed into the clay, the cheeks are pushed up by the smile, and the whole expression is one of quiet amusement rather than the fierce grimace of the demon faces that guard other Korean roofs. Look at the surface, greyish and slightly rough, the colour of tiles fired without glaze in a smoky kiln. It probably came from the site of Yeongmyosa, a seventh century temple whose roof tiles were of unusually fine quality.
The tile was bought from an antique shop in Gyeongju in 1934 by a Japanese doctor named Tanaka Toshinobu, who took it home to Japan when the colonial period ended. In 1972 he returned it to the museum as a gift, after the director wrote to him asking for it back, and the story of its return is told beside the case. It was designated a Treasure in 2018. Of all the gold in the museum, this little clay face is the object visitors most often say they remember.
Did You Know? The tile's smile is so famous in Korea that the city of Gyeongju uses it as an emblem, and you will see it on signs and souvenirs all over town.
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