Royal Asiatic Society - Korea Branch

Yesterday evening I went to a lecture organized by the Royal Asiatic Society - Korea Branch. The RASKB is an organization which was founded in 1900 and serves the purpose to enhance the understanding of all aspects of Korean life, culture, language and history. They organize tours, publish books and a journal and have a lecture series. You can attend everything even if you are not a member but members of the RASKB get a small discount. Attending the lecture series is for free if you are a member but even as a non-member you pay only 5000 won (~ 3 €).
The venue of the lecture series is Somerset Palace Seoul which is probably the most high-brow hotel I've ever set foot in. I nearly didn't dare to go inside ;)
The topic of yesterday's talk was "The fruits of vandalism: Early Korean printing in its East Asian context" and was given by Dr. Peter Kornicki, a professor of East Asian Studies at Cambridge University. Movable letter type printing was actually developed by Koreans more than 100 years before Gutenberg did so. The talk was really interesting and also included many information on some East Asian writing systems such as Korean and Chinese of course but also about the Tangut and Khitan script.

The lectures are 1-2 times a month and I think I will try to go there as often as possible!

I was also able to buy a book there which I wanted to possess for some time already: "Hamel's journal and a description of the Kingdom of Korea 1653-1666" by Hendrik Hamel (translated by Br. Jean-Paul Buys, of Taizé). Long story short: in the 17th century some Dutch guys stranded in the so-called Hermit Kingdom (Korea) and because of the circumstances had to stay there for a long time. Korea was not really open for foreigners so that's why it was called the Hermit Kingdom (just in case you were wondering ;) One of the Dutch shipwreck survivors wrote a journal about this time and it is really interesting. Unfortunately this book is really hard to obtain in Germany. You could buy it used on amazon for more than 150 €, or you could buy it here in Korea for 12000 won (less than 8 €). The RASKB published a lot of other books as well and I think I will have to buy some more :)