Oegyujanggak Uigwe

For investitures, weddings, banquets, the painting of royal portraits, funerals and ancestral rites, a temporary superintendency (dogam) was set up to run the event, and afterwards its record was compiled as an uigwe: official documents, together with banchado paintings of the whole procession and doseol drawings of the objects used. Each uigwe was made in several copies; the one for the king to read had a silk cover and the finest paper, and the others went to the state archives. In 1782 King Jeongjo had the Outer Gyujanggak built on Ganghwa Island to keep the royal copies, and in 1866 French troops attacking the island took them. Park Byeong-seon, working at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, found them in 1975; in 2011 the 297 volumes came back to Korea on a renewable five-year loan and are now at the National Museum of Korea, 29 of them the only copy in existence. The museum's Oegyujanggak Uigwe room changes its display every three months.

Find a banchado: how are the people, palanquins and banners lined up row by row? Then look at the covers, and the silk on the royal copies.

Who was this book made to be read by?