Uigwe: The Royal Protocols of Joseon
Also called: Uigwe, Royal Protocols of the Joseon Dynasty
Illustrated records of royal weddings, funerals, investitures and building works, in text and pictures; Memory of the World since 2007.
조선 왕조 책례도감(冊禮都監) (담당자:김창집(金昌集)) · Public domain · Source
For every major event the Joseon court set up a temporary office (dogam), and when it was over compiled a uigwe recording the preparations, procedures, participants, materials and costs. Procession paintings (banchado) and drawings of objects and buildings let the event be reconstructed almost visually. None survive from before the Imjin War; the earliest is the record of Queen Uiin’s funeral of 1601.
Copies for the king’s own reading were made on fine paper with silk covers and kept in the Oegyujanggak, the outer royal library Jeongjo built on Ganghwa Island in 1782. French troops looted them during the French Campaign of 1866; Park Byeong-seon found them in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and they came back in 2011. The Hwaseong seongyeok uigwe, with its drawings of the crane geojunggi, guided the restoration of Hwaseong Fortress after the Korean War.
