All themes

From Goguryeo's wars with Sui and Tang to Silla's unification — eighty years of East Asian war on the peninsula

From the Japanese invasion to the Battle of Noryang — the righteous armies, Yi Sun-sin at sea, and Ming intervention

Wartime mobilization and exploitation, independence armies, from the Cairo Declaration to liberation

From the literati purges to in-law government — how Sarim factions moved from coexistence and checks to purges and one-faction rule, then through Tangpyeong to the dominance of a few clans

From nogeup to the end of office land — how the rights granted to officials shrank, and gave way to modern land ownership

From land tax, tribute and labour to cash taxes in the Gabo Reform — burdens shifting from people and households to land

From Geonwon Jungbo to the 1905 currency reform — how coins took hold in an economy of rice and cloth, and how monetary sovereignty was lost

From the noble councils of the Three Kingdoms to the State Council, the Border Defense Council and the Gabo cabinet — how central government shifted between aristocratic consensus and royal power

From the five regions of the Three Kingdoms through nine provinces, the five circuits and two frontiers and the eight provinces to the thirteen — how directly the centre came to rule the regions

From the Nine Oath Banners to the Two Armies and Six Guards, the Five Commands and garrison system, the Five Army Camps and the Board of Marshals — armies rebuilt at every crisis

From the Taehak and Gukhak to the Gukjagam and Seonggyungwan, modern schools and the colonial education ordinances — state schools that trained officials and the private schools that filled the gaps

From the Seogi, Guksa and Sinjip to the Joseon sanggosa — history-writing as royal display, Confucian record, assertion of independence and nationalist scholarship

From “march north” to the Panmunjom Declaration — inter-Korean relations from confrontation to dialogue, through joint statements and agreements to summits (up to 2018)

From Baekje stone pagodas copying timber ones and Silla pagodas copying brick ones, to Unified Silla three-story pagodas and stupas, Goryeo multi-sided pagodas and Yuan-influenced marble towers

From a Goguryeo gilt-bronze Buddha in Northern Wei style and "the smile of Baekje" to the Seokguram Buddha, Balhae’s twin Buddhas, early Goryeo iron Buddhas and colossal regional stone figures

From dolmens to the tomb of King Gongmin — stone-mound, stone-mound wooden-chamber, stone-chamber and brick tombs, and how burial changed by kingdom and age

From Geungnakjeon at Bongjeongsa to Seokjojeon at Deoksugung — Goryeo bracket styles, Joseon palaces, walls and multi-storey temple halls, and the Western buildings of the Korean Empire

From Goguryeo tomb murals to Jang Seung-eop — daily life and guardian deities, Goryeo Buddhist painting, early Joseon landscapes, true-view landscapes and genre painting, literati and folk painting

From comb-pattern pottery to blue-and-white porcelain — earthenware, Goryeo plain and inlaid celadon, buncheong, white porcelain and blue-and-white

From the Seven-Branched Sword to mother-of-pearl lacquer — Three Kingdoms crowns, censers and daggers, the great bell of Unified Silla, Goryeo silver inlay and najeon

From the Dharani Sutra to the May 18 archives — woodblock and metal-type printing, and the records inscribed on the Memory of the World

From Cheomseongdae to the Daedong yeojido — instruments and maps that measured the sky, kept time, gauged rain and charted the land

From the dolmens to Namhansanseong on the World Heritage List, from Jongmyo ritual music to ssireum on the Intangible Heritage lists — where each came from and when it was inscribed

From Wanggeom-seong of Gojoseon to the inter-Korean summits — capital of Goguryeo, Western Capital of Goryeo, the great city on the Taedong

From Wang Geon, lord of Songak, to the Kaesong Industrial Complex — Gaegyeong, Goryeo’s capital for five centuries, and home of the Song merchants

From Hanseong Baekje to the June Democratic Struggle — the Han River land every kingdom fought for, and Joseon’s capital for five centuries

From dolmens to the Treaty of Ganghwa — Goryeo’s refuge capital and the stage of Korea’s opening, the island the kingdom fell back on in every crisis

From Jeongjo’s new city of Hwaseong to the tragedy of Jeam-ri — where a king’s filial devotion and reform politics were built into stone walls

From Ungjin, Baekje’s second capital, to Ugeumchi — the town on the Geum River that became the heart of Chungcheong

From the Songguk-ri village to Sabi, Baekje’s last capital — the Geum River town where Baekje culture bloomed and fell

From the Heungsu child of Durubong Cave to the Jikji — Silla’s secondary capital Seowon, where the oldest surviving metal-type book was printed

From the Goguryeo stele to Tangeumdae — Jungwon, the middle of the Namhan River route that the Three Kingdoms fought over

Silla’s capital for a thousand years — tombs, pagodas, temples and bells from every age of Silla, and the birthplace of Donghak

From Guya of Byeonhan to Geumgwan Gaya — centre of the early Gaya league, built on iron and sea routes

From the Battle of Gochang that helped found Goryeo to Yi Hwang’s Dosan Seowon — home of Goryeo wooden halls and Yeongnam Confucianism

Dalgubeol, where King Sinmun tried to move his capital — where the National Debt Repayment Movement and the 2·28 student protest began

Port of the Japan House and of the 1876 opening — Korea’s gateway to Japan, and wartime capital in the Korean War

Centre of western Gyeongsang — site of the sieges of Jinju, the 1862 peasant uprising and the butchers’ equality movement

From Wansanju, capital of Later Baekje, to the ancestral seat of the Joseon royal house — where the Annals were saved and the Donghak army took the fortress

Mujinju, where Gyeon Hwon first rose — city of the 1929 student independence movement and the May 18 Democratic Uprising

From Tamna to Jeju — the Sambyeolcho’s last stand, Yuan horse ranches, castaways and exiles, and the island of April 3

From Isabu’s conquest of Usan-guk to Imperial Decree No. 41 — two East Sea islands recorded as Korean throughout

From the first civilizations in the great river valleys to the first empires of the Near East, India and China — comparing their writing, law, religion and rule

From the Aegean civilisation to the fall of the Western Roman Empire — the classical civilisation built by the democracy of the polis and the Roman republic and empire

From the Hundred Schools of the Warring States to the unified empires of Qin and Han, and from the Buddha to the Maurya and Kushan empires — the millennium that shaped East and South Asian civilisation

From the Yellow Turban Rebellion to the Jin reunification — a century of Wei, Shu and Wu, the age of Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Quan

From the divided Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Gupta age through the Sui and Tang empires to the founding of the Song — the age when an East Asian world sharing law codes, Buddhism, Confucianism and Chinese characters took shape, and Korea and Japan built their states on its model

From the fall of Rome in the West to Canossa — the feudal West built by the Franks and the papacy, Byzantium as heir of Rome, and a church divided east and west

From the revelation to Muhammad to the Seljuk entry into Baghdad — 450 years in which a new faith from Arabia built a civilisation stretching from Iberia to Central Asia and reached as far as Silla by sea

The age when the civil-minded Song bought peace from Liao, Western Xia and Jin while the lower Yangtze boomed and Neo-Confucianism took shape, and the Ming, having driven out the Yuan, rebuilt the East Asian order through imperial autocracy, the sea ban and tribute — as Japan passed through the Kamakura and Muromachi warrior governments into the Warring States era, and Korea from Goryeo to Joseon

From the Ghaznavid raids on India to the Mughal Empire and Suleiman I — five centuries in which Turkic-led Islamic empires took western Asia and India, while Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas raised civilisations of their own

From Canossa to the eve of the Reformation — papal power at its height and in decline, towns and parliaments, royal power growing through the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, and the Renaissance and printing

From the Council of Clermont to the fall of Acre — two centuries of war between Latin Europe and the Islamic world over the Holy Land

From the rise of Genghis Khan to the Yuan conquest of the Song — eighty years in which the Mongols swept Eurasia from Goryeo to Hungary

From Ceuta to the Manila galleons — two centuries in which European ships crossed the oceans and bound the world together by sea

The age when the Ming, shaken by northern raiders, southern pirates and the silver economy, fell to Li Zicheng’s rebels, and the Manchu Qing reached its greatest extent and prosperity under Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — as Japan was unified out of the Warring States into the Edo shogunate’s bakuhan order and closed country, and Joseon, after two great wars, met its neighbours through embassies to Edo and the Northern Learning

Three centuries in which the Ottomans of Suleiman I, the Mughals of Akbar and the Safavids of Abbas I flourished and then faltered, while across the Atlantic the slave trade and colonies transformed the Americas, leading to American independence

From Luther’s Ninety-five Theses to Catherine the Great — the wars of religion of a divided Christendom ended at Westphalia, and absolute monarchs armed with divine right, standing armies, bureaucracies and mercantilism, followed by the enlightened despots of eastern Europe, contended for the balance of power among sovereign states

The Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton, parliamentary government in England won through the Puritan and Glorious Revolutions, and the Enlightenment that sought to remake society by reason — the groundwork of the civic revolutions and the Industrial Revolution

From the Declaration of Independence to the German Empire — a century in which liberalism and nationalism toppled the old order in Europe and the Americas and built nation-states

From the Opium War to the Boxer Protocol — sixty years in which China, Japan and Korea, forced open by Western gunboats, each tried to reform and went separate ways

From the Tanzimat to Sarajevo — seventy-five years in which the powers carved up West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and the peoples there answered with reform and resistance

From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations

The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle

From the Hussein–McMahon correspondence to the founding of Israel — three decades in which India, West Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, swept up in the tide of self-determination after the First World War, pressed toward independence and modernization

From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again

From the invasion of Poland to the surrender of Japan — the largest war in human history, across Europe, Asia and the Pacific

From Yalta to the dissolution of the Soviet Union — half a century in which two blocs led by the US and the USSR divided the world