Cheongju Early Printing Museum & Heungdeoksa Site

Character

A broken bronze Buddhist gong identified Heungdeoksa in 1985. Its inscription named ‘Heungdeoksa Temple of Seowon Prefecture,’ allowing archaeologists to match an anonymous excavation with the temple named in Jikji’s 1377 colophon

The confirmation did not end at the excavation trench. Some soil had already been removed to a housing-development site before the temple was identified. Archaeologists followed it there and searched with a metal detector, recovering a bronze bowl inscribed with Heungdeoksa’s name and a date corresponding to 1150. The second inscription reaffirmed that the site was the lost temple

The experience

The museum is part of a small printing-history precinct rather than a single gallery building. Its main hall is joined by the Modern and Contemporary Printing Exhibition Hall, a Metal Movable Type Training Center and the adjacent Heungdeoksa archaeological site. The first permanent gallery concentrates on Jikji and Goryeo metal-type printing; a second broadens the story into Korean woodblock and traditional printing history

One large installation reconstructs all 78 type pages of Jikji using a traditional lost-wax casting process. The 78 plates are modern reconstructions. The exact casting method used for the 1377 type remains debated: bibliographic research based on the printed letterforms has questioned lost-wax casting and proposed other methods, including sand moulding

The archaeological site changes the scale again. Excavation identified the inner gate, pagoda, main hall and lecture-hall sequence, and the present grounds include reconstructed temple elements based on those findings. The museum explains movable type indoors; outside, the site supplies the geography named at the end of the book

History

Jikji’s own colophon supplied the first clue. It records that the work was printed with movable metal type at Heungdeoksa outside Cheongju Magistracy in July 1377. The text survived, while the temple largely disappeared from documentary memory; researchers could not establish its precise location from surviving records

The 1985 excavation added a much longer material chronology to the name recovered from the gong. A roof tile dated to 849 indicates that a temple stood here by the late Unified Silla period. The bronze bowl dated 1150 places Heungdeoksa here more than two centuries before Jikji was printed. Excavated foundations then supplied the temple’s physical order, from inner gate and pagoda to main hall and lecture hall

Metal was unusually visible among the excavated objects: 93 metalcraft pieces in 23 groups were recorded, including the gong, bowl, bells, ritual implements and fittings. They show a monastery comfortable with sophisticated bronze work. Direct evidence of type casting remains absent: Cheongju’s own Jikji research notes that no artifact directly associated with producing metal type was found at Heungdeoksa

The housing project triggered the emergency excavation that recovered the evidence later used to protect the remains. Heungdeoksa became Historic Site No. 315 after the excavation, and the Cheongju Early Printing Museum opened beside it in 1992. When Jikji entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2001, Cheongju already had a museum built around the archaeological evidence that located its printer’s temple

Before you go

The surviving metal-type volume of Jikji remains at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. In Cheongju, the museum-site visit centers on the evidence that anchors its production to this place — the colophon, excavated inscriptions, temple layout and reconstructed printing process