Cheongju Early Printing Museum

In 1377 the monks of Heungdeoksa temple at Cheongju printed a Buddhist anthology usually called Jikji using movable metal type - seventy-eight years before Gutenberg. One volume survives. It is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, taken to Paris by a French diplomat in the nineteenth century, and its return has been a long-running and unresolved Korean request; UNESCO registered it on the Memory of the World list in 2001 and named a prize after it. The temple site was found by accident during construction in 1985, and the museum was built beside it. Its subject is the whole Korean printing tradition - woodblock, clay, wooden and metal type, the casting process reconstructed, and a working demonstration area where type is set and pulled. Entry is free. The book itself is not here, which is the first thing to know and the reason some visitors leave disappointed.

What you actually see

• The Heungdeoksa site - the excavated temple ground next door.
• The type-casting reconstruction - how metal type was actually made.
• The printing demonstrations - setting and pulling a page.
• The Korean printing sweep - woodblock through to metal type.

When to go

Any season. Closed Mondays. Free, and rarely crowded on weekdays.

Honest expectations

The Jikji volume is in Paris, not here - what you see is a facsimile. The museum is modest in scale and English labelling is uneven. It is a subject museum: interesting if the history grips you, thin if not.

Nearby

Sangdangsanseong fortress and central Cheongju are a short ride.