Permanent Exhibition Hall 1: the history of Korean life
Prehistory to the present
The first hall is the museum's overview, and the place to get your bearings before the more thematic galleries. Its long-standing theme, the History of Korean People, takes you from the stone tools and comb-pattern pottery of prehistoric settlements through the gold crowns and armour of the Three Kingdoms, the celadon and Buddhist objects of Goryeo, and the Confucian scholar culture of Joseon, up to the everyday goods of the twentieth century. The hall has been reworked several times, most recently with displays that ask where the roots of today's Korean culture lie, so the labels you see may present the story under a new title.
Rather than treating objects as art, the displays set them in context. Life-size figures wear reconstructed costume, so that you can compare the silk hanbok of a Silla queen with the plain hemp of a farmer, and models show how a thatched house, a kiln or a village market actually worked. Look for the mannequin of a Silla king in a gold crown with jade comma-shaped pendants, one of the most photographed figures in the museum, and for the printing blocks, metal type and hangul texts that explain how Korea became a culture of the written word.
The museum descends from a Folk Museum founded in November 1945, in the first weeks after liberation, and its collection now numbers well over a hundred thousand objects, most of them humble things that other museums ignored: kitchen tools, farming implements, children's clothes, talismans. That is the spirit of this hall. Nothing here is precious in the market sense, but together the objects explain how ordinary Koreans lived, which is what the museum was created to record.
Did You Know? The museum was founded in November 1945, only three months after Korea's liberation from Japanese rule, before it had a permanent building of its own.
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