A Korean studies collection where tradition and the present coexist
A brief history of Hyundam Mun’go

Hyundam Mun’go was established by Adan (雅丹), Mrs. Kang Tae-young, as a result of her special interest and love for Korea’s ancient, modern, and contemporary literary materials. In 1985, Mrs. Kang began collecting foundational materials of traditional Korean culture and, in 1989, began acquiring manuscripts and paraphernalia from well-known Korean literary artists.

In 2021, Hyundam Mun’go was reborn as a not-for-profit organization, establishing a museum and research institute for the study of Korea. Before it becoming a non-profit, Hyundam Mun’go focused its efforts on the acquisition and organization, as well as preservation of Korean textual materials. After its establishment as a non-profit, Hyundam Mun’go expanded its mission to include the exhibition of Korean cultural materials, the publication of bibliographies describing the collection, and the promotion of research and rediscovery efforts to become a distinguished research center for the study of Korea’s cultural heritage.

CEO Greetings

I would like to welcome those of you who have sought out Hyundam Mun’go Digital Archive.

This is the first time that Hyundam Mun’go’s materials have been presented to the world as a digital archive. In the past, the collection’s rare materials were made available to the word so that the individual and unique beauty of each of its treasures could be felt. As reflections on the alternate values and meanings of a faded past, we wish to share how our past is connected to our present and the ways that our present can change.

Hyundam Mun’go is a home for letters and imagination. Here are kept the material forms of what is left of previous eras. Beautiful forms of language that have been forgotten and traces of reasons that are no longer extant are preserved. The intellectual inheritance bequeathed to our present cannot be possessed by one person or group. Rather, by looking, feeling, and thinking about it together, that inheritance will become richer and more beautiful.

I believe the value of Hyundam Mun’go digital archive is to be found in sharing and openness, communication and connection, freedom and the public good. In this place, anyone who wishes must be able to look, read, and think freely about the archive’s rare materials. We hope that you can admire the effort of those that crafted the language and letters. We hope that, like an archeologist of the mind, you can discover the grounds of great distant eras and feel renewed. We hope that, together, while experiencing the spirit of tradition and culture gathered by our people through the millennia, you can find inspiration for living in the present we share. When viewed in the light of the past, we can imagine our present differently and hope that you are able to dream new dreams. Thank you.

Hyundam Mun’go Collection

As of January 2022, Hyundam Collection contains a total of 89,150 items.

The collection of premodern Korean textual materials consists primarily of Chosŏn Dynasty texts composed in literary Chinese. These include 56 texts that are considered especially rare, as well as a total of thirty-three registered cultural assets: three texts registered as South Korean “national treasures” and twenty-eight registered as South Korean “treasures,” as well as two registered as “cultural assets” in Seoul. Epistolary documents, deeds of (land) sale, family registers, instructional primers, and government documents from before Korea’s modern period contained in Hyundam collection are an invaluable window on every-day life and the socio-economic history of premodern Korea. In addition, facsimiles suggesting East Asian traditional culture more broadly cannot be overlooked.

Hyundam Mun’go also contains a rich collection of materials published between Korea’s enlightenment period and the 1960s— including rare monographs, newspapers and journals, as well as scrap books of various kinds—that reveals Korea’s intellectual and cultural inheritance from the end of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950). Hyundam Mun’go’s collection of journals from this period is considered among the best in South Korea in terms of both the quantity and the quality of the gathered materials.

Hyundam Mun’go also houses memorabilia donated by some of Korea’s most renown literary artists. These include manuscripts, letters, stationary, in addition to books and journals, contributed by Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, O Yŏng-su and Paek Ch’ŏl. As literary testimonies to their age, these materials suggest the haunted creative worlds and distinctive lived experiences of these authors.