Busan exhibition features Korea's UNESCO Memory of the World documentary heritage

Visitors examine a volume of the Annals of King Seongjong during the opening of a special exhibition celebrating the 48th UNESCO World Heritage Committee session at the Busan Museum in Busan, July 6. Yonhap

To celebrate hosting UNESCO’s 48th World Heritage Committee session, Korea opened a rare, sweeping exhibition on Monday, bringing together all 20 of its Memory of the World documentary heritage collections for the first time.

The 10-day exhibition, titled "Records of Korea, Memories of the World," is running at the BEXCO convention center in the southern port city of Busan through July 29. Managed by the National Archives of Korea, the curation gathers over 100 artifacts that collectively trace the peninsula’s history from medieval royal records to 20th-century democratic struggles.

Korea ranks fifth globally and first in Asia for the most inscriptions on the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The exhibition organizes these complex cultural records in a four-part narrative space designed to showcase how a single nation meticulously preserved both its institutional triumphs and its deepest historical traumas.

The exhibition’s opening sections focus on the structural backbone of Korean administrative history. On display are original volumes of the Joseon Wangjo Sillok, known in English as the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, which comprehensively logged 472 years of state affairs, including draft manuscripts that still bear the corrections of royal historians. Alongside them sits the 1759 Royal Protocol, or Uigwe, detailing the wedding of King Yeongjo, complete with a 50-page illustrated guide to the court procession featuring 1,299 individuals and 379 horses.

The exhibition then transitions to look at breakthrough in early Korean printing, spotlighting the Hunminjeongeum Haerye — the 1446 woodblock manuscript explaining the creation and phonetic principles of the Korean alphabet — and the Jikji, recognized as the world's oldest extant book printed with movable metal type.

Crucially, the exhibition does not shy away from the darker chapters of Korea's modern path to democracy.

The third zone features legal and civil records from the modern period, including the 1895 trial documents and death sentence of the peasant revolutionary leader Jeon Bong-jun. Visitors can also view the original 1948 military court registries detailing the summary sentences of 2,530 civilians during the Jeju April 3 Incident, alongside civilian audio recordings and photographs from the 1960 and 1980 pro-democracy uprisings.

"Records transcend the history of a single nation; they are the shared heritage of humanity," Lee Yong-chul, president of the National Archives, said. "We hope this exhibition illustrates how Korea's collective wisdom, struggles and community resilience endure as memories that the modern world can deeply relate to."

This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.