Dynastic History|Gyeongju National Museum — The Bell That Argues for a King

King Gyeongdeok ordered a bell cast for his father, Seongdeok, and never heard it: he died in 765, and the casting was completed in 771 under his son, Hyegong. The bell is a document as much as an instrument. Around it runs a long inscription — a prose preface and a verse, counted at 630 characters and 200 by one scholarly reckoning and at about 1,037 in the museum's own telling — composed by a Hallim official whose name has worn to the point that readings differ, Kim Pil-o or Kim Pil-gye. The text sets out Seongdeok's virtue and asks that the sound carry his merit outward and hold the kingdom quiet: a claim to legitimacy addressed to everyone within earshot of it. The bell stands 3.33 m, measures 2.27 m across the lip, and was weighed by the museum in 1997 at 18.9 tonnes.

It hung first at Bongdeoksa, then at Yeongmyosa, then in a pavilion at Bonghwangdae. In August 1915 it was moved to the museum then housed in a Joseon-period guest house in Dongbu-dong, and it moved again in 1975, when that institution's successor opened at Inwang-dong. It hangs there today, in the museum grounds.

A folk story travels with it: that a child was given to the molten metal, and that the bell calls 에밀레 for its mother. No written record of the tale survives from before the colonial period, and the oldest known printed telling is in Homer Hulbert's The Passing of Korea of 1906. Scholars have read it instead as a memory of what a bell on this scale cost the people who were made to pay for it.

📸 Cover: the worn inscription on the bell's surface — Josep Panadero, 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.