The National Museum of Korea: Home to The Largest Collection of Movable Type in the World

The National Museum of Korea is holding the first-ever exhibition presenting a complete picture of the Joseon Dynasty movable type housed in its collection. Most of the more than 820,000 pieces of movable type were used by the royal court and in government offices at some point from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. It is an extremely rare case for such a large volume of movable type originating within a single dynasty to have survived. Notably, in terms of both quantity and quality, over 500,000 of the pieces of metal movable type in the museum collection have no parallel anywhere in the world.

Movable type represents the ambitions of the rulers of the Joseon Dynasty as they sought to govern the nation through Confucian principles. Chests for storing movable type pieces allow a glimpse into Joseon typesetters’ unique system for classifying and storing movable type pieces.

Why was movable type produced?

In contrast to woodblock printing that was by nature restricted to only the inscribed content, movable type, once produced, could rapidly print a range of documents by simply recombining type pieces as needed.

How many times was movable type produced?

During the Joseon dynasty, both metal and wooden movable type sets were respectively produced at least thirty times. Production of metal movable type was mostly a project of the state, and wooden movable type was also produced by the state on a number of occasions. The quantity of wooden movable type produced by the citizenry is difficult to determine.

How many pieces of movable type were produced at a time?

Due to the quantity of type pieces required to print several kinds of books in logographic Chinese characters with a given set, at least tens of thousands of pieces were produced for each set of movable type. Additionally, pieces of type that might appear multiple times on a single page were produced in the tens or even hundreds.

- Gabinja type : Archetypical Joseon movable type invented by King Sejong
- Jeongnija type : Movable type invented and refined by King Jeongjo
- Sillokja type : Movable type produced to print royal annals
- Hanjuja, Gyoseogwan Inseocheja, and Jeonsaja types : Movable type serving a greater scope of users
- Movable type in Hangeul : Movable type produced for the education of crown princes and common citizens
- Wooden movable type : The most widely-used movable type

Chests for storing movable type

Metal movable type produce by the state represented royal authority and therefore demanded meticulous maintenance and management. A set of movable type was generally stored in a collection of seven chests, and the amount stored in each chest was recorded in a movable type ledger known as a jabo(字譜). These catalogs classified movable type in Chinese characters in a manner distinct from the system found in classic dictionaries of Chinese characters(字典). For more convenient use and storage of movable type, certain radicals of the Chinese characters were integrated with other radicals, and characters were classified by shape rather than by the number of strokes.