Jeseoksa Revealed at Iksan National Museum — free, 10 Nov–9 Feb

Jeseoksa Revealed, opening on 10 November at the museum beside the Mireuksa temple site, is the first exhibition to take on Iksan's other great Baekje temple, Jeseoksa. It was a royal temple built near the palace under King Mu (r. 600–641), and it is one of very few Baekje temple sites whose founding and destruction can both be placed from written sources. The museum says it brings objects that stayed in Iksan together with a record that survived in Japan, and the gallery includes a media-art installation. The list of objects has not been published before opening, so this article concentrates on the story worth knowing before you go.

What kind of temple was Jeseoksa?

King Mu built Jeseoksa close to his palace at Wanggungpyeong (today's Wanggung-ri, Iksan), and it is said to have enshrined Indra (Jeseokcheon), a guardian deity of Buddhism. A roof-tile fragment stamped with the name Jeseoksa (帝釋寺) was found near what is thought to be the pagoda site and confirmed the temple's name. The site was designated a Historic Site on 12 May 1998 and covers 25,432 square metres at 247-1 Wanggung-ri, Wanggung-myeon, Iksan.

How was the temple laid out?

Jeseoksa follows the classic Baekje plan of one pagoda and one main hall: middle gate, wooden pagoda, main hall and lecture hall in a single line, and the Korea Heritage Service describes it as the largest of that type. It is also the first Baekje site to yield a concave eaves-end tile. According to the museum, the exhibition's first section reconstructs the temple from the pagoda's foundation stone, wall fragments and tiles.

How do we know about the fire of 639?

The exhibition is built on records and excavation supporting each other. The Gwanseeum eungheomgi, a collection of miracle tales kept at Shōren-in in Kyoto, says that in the 40th year of King Mu's reign (639) lightning burned the whole temple, but the Diamond Sutra engraved on bronze plates and the relics placed beneath the pagoda survived and were enshrined again once the temple was rebuilt. The museum presents this book as the key object of the third section.

The ground has its own evidence. In a dump north of the temple site, excavators found heaps of clay Buddhist and guardian figures along with burnt roof tiles, and the e-museum catalogue entries date the discarded figures to the clean-up after the fire of 639.

What do the clay figures from the dump look like?

The best-known clay figures from the dump belong to Jeonju National Museum. The museum says its second section compares heavenly beings, monks and demons from Jeseoksa with clay sculpture in Japan, but whether the pieces below are on show cannot be confirmed until the object list is published. They are shown here because they explain the temple.

How does it relate to the Wanggung-ri pagoda treasures?

The Korea Heritage Service points to similarities between the Jeseoksa finds and the reliquary treasures recovered from the five-storey stone pagoda at Wanggung-ri when it was dismantled for repair in 1965. The gold Diamond Sutra plates from that pagoda (a National Treasure, 19 sheets) recall the bronze-plate sutra in the Jeseoksa record. The plates belong to the National Museum of Korea, and whether they are in this exhibition has not been confirmed.

The Iksan components of the Baekje Historic Areas World Heritage Site (inscribed 2015) are the Wanggung-ri site and the Mireuksa temple site; Jeseoksa is not one of them. The three places are 10 to 20 minutes apart by car, though, so after the exhibition you can see the Wanggung-ri palace site and the empty Jeseoksa field the story comes from.

Visiting details

• Admission — free (from the museum's archived website).
• Hours — weekdays 09:00–18:00 (last entry 17:30), Saturdays and Sundays 09:00–19:00. Closed on 1 January, Lunar New Year's Day, Chuseok Day and every Monday (if a Monday is a public holiday it opens and closes the next weekday instead).
• Website maintenance — the national museums' websites have been down for maintenance since 26 October 2026, so the exhibition page will not load. Dates are confirmed on the National Museum of Korea's list of affiliated-museum exhibitions and the museum's official blog.
• Getting there — 362 Mireuksaji-ro, Geumma-myeon, Iksan. From Iksan Station, take city bus 41 or 60 to the Mireuksaji stop.
• Contact — Iksan National Museum +82-63-830-0900

Jeseoksa Revealed is the story of a 1,400-year-old written record and the clay figures that confirm it. Once the object list is published after opening, check what has actually come to Iksan.

Getting to Iksan, and what to expect in the gallery

Iksan Station is on the Honam high-speed line: KTX trains from Yongsan and SRT trains from Suseo in Seoul take roughly an hour to an hour and a half, and both can be booked in English on the operators' sites with a foreign card. From the station, city bus 41 or 60 runs to the Mireuksaji stop at the museum; a taxi takes about 30 minutes. The museum is free and walk-in. The exhibition's English title appears on the official poster, and the museum has kept English, Japanese and Chinese leaflets, but neither the panels nor an English audio guide for this show has been announced; expect the long texts to be in Korean, with the objects and the media-art room making the case on their own. Allow time for the Mireuksa site next door — it is a World Heritage site, free, and has the oldest surviving stone pagoda in Korea.