A paper game board that folds shut — free at the Folk Museum's Paju site

The National Folk Museum of Korea is showing The Hidden Story of a Paper Yut Board Revealed through Conservation Science in the Open Conservation Lab on the ground floor of its Paju site. It opened on 15 September 2026 and runs until 22 August 2027, and admission is free. Six objects are on display — the paper yut board (Minsok 5900), the coral yut sticks found with it (Minsok 5899) and a coloured-thread case (Minsok 24882) among them. It is a small room, but it is built around one clear idea: how a single object is read.

What was new: it was not a flat board at all

This is where the exhibition starts. The board had been stored and displayed open for as long as the museum had it, so it was taken to be a flat playing surface. Conservation work turned up two clues. One was a set of fold lines in the paper. The other was staining transferred onto the reverse — marks where the pattern and grime of the front had pressed through while the sheet sat folded for a long time.

Working from those marks, conservators reconstructed the folding sequence digitally, and found that the sheet could be folded over on itself into the shape of a ttakji, the folded paper tile children flick at each other. The pocket that forms inside, the museum says, is comparable in size to the small coral yut sticks that came with the board. Open it and you have a game board; fold it and you have a carrying case. It is worth being precise about the method: the original was never folded to test this — the reconstruction was virtual.

Why is the track a circle?

Yut is Korea's best-known board game, still played over the lunar new year, and on a modern board the track the pieces travel is a square. Paintings and texts from before the twentieth century, though, show boards with a circular track, and this is one of them. Look closely and every station is painted differently: roundels bearing the characters for long life and good fortune, the three-part taegeuk, flowers and birds. It was a game and a wish for luck on the same sheet of paper.

What the protein and the green pigment tell you

Analysis of the materials produced two results. First, the paper surface — now browned and stiff — was found to carry protein. That much is measurement; the rest is interpretation. Soybean liquid was traditionally brushed onto paper to toughen it and make it shed water, so the museum's reading is that this board may have been finished with a protein-based coating of that kind to survive repeated use. It has not been established that soybean liquid specifically was used.

Second, pigment analysis found emerald green, a synthetic pigment developed in Europe, in the green areas. Given when that pigment reached Korea, the board can be placed after the middle of the nineteenth century. One pigment sets the earliest possible date — though again this is an estimate, not a fixed year of manufacture.

Not only the game board: thread cases and thimble boxes

The room also shows other folk objects made with the same tile-fold. Cases for needles and thread, and boxes for thimbles, were built by folding one sheet over itself from several directions. The uses differ; the principle does not — fold the paper to make a space inside, unfold it when you need what is in there. A separate case shows a roll-box technique, where the same starting sheet opens into a three-dimensional container instead, so you can see how far a small change in the folding takes the result.

What the room looks like, and what you can do in it

The Open Conservation Lab exists so that visitors can look in on conservation work as it happens. For this exhibition it holds reconstructions of each folding structure alongside video of the sequence, so you can follow a flat sheet turning into a three-dimensional object step by step. It is not a large show, but it knows exactly what it is about — and because the argument is made in objects and diagrams, very little of it depends on reading Korean.

The leaflet is the hands-on activity. Fold the board printed on it along the marked lines and you end up with a pocket-sized yut board of your own — the structure found in the object, repeated with your hands, which is why the argument sticks. The museum does not publish how many leaflets are available or on what terms, so if the activity is the reason you are going, call ahead.

Visiting the Paju site

The Paju site opened in July 2021 as the first national museum in the north of Gyeonggi Province, and it is built as an open storage facility: fifteen stores holding more than 1.1 million objects and archive items, some of which you can walk into and some of which you look into through glass. It deserves more than the twenty minutes this one room takes.

Getting there, and what to expect on the day

Paju is an hour to ninety minutes from central Seoul and the trip is easiest as a half day combined with Heyri Art Village, which the museum sits inside. The simplest route is the red express bus 2200 or 2200-1 from Hongik University Station; on the GTX-A high-speed line, take it to Unjeong Jungang and change to local bus 037. Buses are paid with a T-money card or a contactless card, and no advance booking exists to be blocked by a foreign phone number — you walk in. Inside, the admission desk is used to visitors with no Korean and admission is free in any case, so there is no transaction to get through. The wall text in this room is mostly Korean with the title and some captions in English; the folding is shown as diagrams and video, and the take-home leaflet is a diagram too. There is no English audio guide for the Open Conservation Lab and no English docent tour, so come for the objects rather than the reading. The wider open-storage galleries have more English signage than this room does.