Permanent Exhibition Hall 3: Korean Life Passages
Mainly Joseon and twentieth century objects
The third hall follows one person from cradle to grave, and beyond, as a Joseon family of the scholar class would have understood it. It opens with birth: the straw rope hung across the gate to announce a baby and keep strangers away, the first birthday table at which the child chooses an object that foretells its future. Then come the schoolroom with its Thousand Character Classic, the coming of age ceremony in which a young man ties up his hair under a horsehair hat, the state examinations that decided a family's fortunes, and the wedding. Later sections show the sixtieth birthday feast, the funeral with its painted bier, and the ancestral rites in which descendants set out food for the dead.
The wedding display is the centre of the hall. A bride stands in a red and green embroidered robe called a hwarot, with a small black crown, her cheeks marked with red dots; the groom wears the blue court robe that a commoner was allowed to borrow for one day. Look at the wooden ducks exchanged as a pledge of fidelity, the painted screens and the long tables of ceremonial food. Nearby, the funeral bier is a startling object, a wooden palanquin covered in bright paper flowers and carved figures, meant to carry the dead joyfully to the grave.
The hall makes clear how deeply Confucian ritual shaped Korean society: every stage of life was marked by a ceremony that fixed a person's duties to family and ancestors. Much of it survives in altered form, from the first birthday photograph to the Chuseok rites at the family grave. Notice the ancestral tablets in their small shrine; for centuries the household's most important possession was not a thing of value but these names.
Did You Know? At the first birthday table a baby is still offered objects such as thread, money or a pencil, and whatever it grabs first is taken to predict its future.
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