Gyeryongsan special exhibition at Gongju National Museum — free until 1 March 2027

Gongju National Museum is marking its 80th year with "Gyeryongsan, Korea's Sacred Mountain", organised jointly with the Gyeryongsan National Park Office. It is unusual for a museum and a national park to build an exhibition around one mountain together, and the timing ties in with the local campaign to have Gyeryongsan inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The exhibition runs until 1 March 2027 and admission is free.

Why was Gyeryongsan called a sacred mountain?

The museum frames the exhibition around one question: what, concretely, did it mean for Gyeryongsan to be holy? There is more than one answer. The state held rites to the mountain; major Buddhist temples took root on its slopes; in the late Joseon period prophetic books such as the Jeonggamnok named the land below it as the site of a future capital; and in folk religion it was a centre of mountain-spirit and shamanic worship. The galleries take these four layers one at a time and show, through objects, how they came to sit on the same mountain.

How is the exhibition laid out?

What objects are on show?

Highlights named in press coverage include woodblocks for the Worin seokbo (a 15th-century Buddhist text in Hangeul), a portrait of the writer Kim Si-seup, old maps such as that of Yeonsan county, temple treasures, and iron-painted buncheong stoneware fired at the Hakbong-ri kilns at the foot of the mountain. Those kilns are known for bold brush decoration in iron pigment over white slip, often simply called "Gyeryongsan buncheong". The two pieces below are the same type of ware from another museum's collection, not exhibits in this show.

Gyeryongsan in old maps and photo albums

Gyeryongsan appears often in Joseon-era county maps and in early modern tourist material. Set the ridges and rivers of an old map beside a 20th-century photo album guiding visitors to Gapsa Temple, and you can see a mountain of worship turning into a mountain people travel to. The images below are reference material for the theme, not exhibits.

What do the mountain-spirit paintings and the Jeonggamnok tell us?

Two keys unlock Gyeryongsan's religious history: the mountain spirit and prophecy. A sansindo (mountain-spirit painting) shows the mountain's guardian as an old man with a tiger, and hung in temple shrines and village shrines alike. The Jeonggamnok foretold that when the dynasty fell a new capital would rise below Gyeryongsan, and from the late Joseon period into the 20th century it drew many people to settle in the Sindoan valley. The two pieces below illustrate these themes from other collections; there is no confirmation that they, or the same editions, are in this exhibition.

Before you go

• Opening hours are 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, the same at weekends and on public holidays.
• When a Monday is a substitute public holiday the museum opens that day and closes on the Tuesday.
• Both the special exhibition and the permanent galleries are free, and individual visitors do not book.
• The museum is close to the Songsan-ri tombs (the tomb of King Muryeong and the royal tombs), which make a good pairing.

Getting there, and what works without Korean

Gongju has no main-line railway in town. From Seoul, intercity and express buses run to Gongju bus terminal; KTX trains stop at Gongju Station, which is well outside the city, so allow for a bus or taxi from there. The museum is at 34 Gwangwangdanji-gil, a short taxi ride from the terminal. There is nothing to book and no ticket to buy, so the Korean-only booking systems that trip up visitors elsewhere do not apply here. The museum has an English website, but we could not confirm how much of this exhibition's wall text is translated, and the curator talks are in Korean. The maps, ceramics, paintings and the landscape film in Part 3 carry the story on their own.