Korea Now: Seoul Events, K-pop & Local Guide | NowHitz · 33

A small wooden box seems an unlikely piece of bedding. This headrest at the National Museum of Korea supported the head during short rests and naps.

Catalogued to Korea’s Japanese colonial period, it measures 21 cm across. Its zelkova panels meet in 45-degree mitre joints.

Inside is a drawer: lifting the side panel reveals a storage compartment. The photo shows the headrest closed, but the museum record describes the hidden space. The place for the head was also a place for belongings.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records other examples. A Joseon-period bamboo headrest has a compartment for medicinal herbs beneath its top. A wonangchim is a long pillow shared by a married couple. Pillow-end panels bear characters wishing for longevity and good fortune.

Storage, material, a length meant for two and decoration at the ends: each reflects a choice beyond comfort. Together, the four file photos show how a familiar household object recorded what people kept, shared and hoped for.

October sessions

The National Gugak Center lists tours on October 10, 17, 24 and 31 at 2 p.m. The timetable shows 14:00–14:40, while the program description gives a length of about 30 minutes.

A free museum program

The tour is a Gugak Museum program, not a ticketed performance, and it is free. Payment, seating and deadline rules for performance bookings on the same page do not apply.

How to register

Registration is through the official form linked in the program details, which asks for the preferred date, time and other information. Session conditions may change.

A ball of dough is pressed flat on a hot griddle. The edges spread thin, the surface turns golden and the sugar inside melts. Hotteok is a Korean street snack of wheat dough wrapped around a sweet filling.

By the 1920s, hotteok was already a popular food among ordinary Koreans. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture notes that newspapers of the time published essays and short stories about hotteok and hotteok shops. A food bought as a meal or snack had entered both daily life and writing.

These records do not establish when today’s sugar-filled hotteok was first made.

Hotteok kept changing on Korea’s streets. Cooks fried it on oiled griddles, added cinnamon to the sweet filling, mixed glutinous rice into the dough or filled it with vegetables. The same name can describe very different textures.

Busan’s ssiat hotteok, or seed hotteok, is one example. Seeds and nuts add crunch and a nutty note to the sweetness. The Korea Tourism Organization describes it as a Busan street-food specialty made with pumpkin seeds, peanuts, almonds and walnuts, among other ingredients.

Part of hotteok’s appeal is the variety within a familiar taste. Dough thickness and fillings differ, and cities and shops add their own touches. A single pancake on a winter street carries the daily lives of those who make it and those who eat it.

Neolithic grinding stones

Grinding food with stone predates the round hand mill. The National Museum of Korea displays grinding stones and slabs from Neolithic sites including Amsa-dong in Seoul and Gadeokdo in Busan. A long stone was pushed back and forth across a slab, mainly, archaeologists believe, to process gathered plant foods.

These are not rotary maetdol. They do show that breaking down hard food was part of daily work long ago.

How a maetdol works

A maetdol grinds grain between an upper and a lower stone. Ingredients go into a hole in the upper stone, which is turned by a handle, and the ground material comes out the side.

Small mills called pulmae also ground rice for fabric starch or ingredients for pine-nut and sesame porridge. Wooden mills were used in mountainous Gangwon, and Jeju had large mills turned by four people. Size, material and use varied.

Making tofu

In traditional tofu-making, soaked beans were ground in a maetdol, then boiled and strained to obtain soy milk. A coagulant set the curds, which were pressed to drain the water.

One hand turned the handle while the other fed beans in with a spoon, and the ground beans collected in a basin below.

The Hoeamsa Temple Site mills

The same principle served larger kitchens. At Hoeamsa Temple Site in Yangju, each of two mills has a collecting basin and lower stone carved from a single block of granite. Large water tanks excavated nearby suggest the area was used for cooking.

The Korea Heritage Service tentatively dates the mills to early Joseon, when the temple flourished. Their large stone basins show the grinding method used on a scale fit for feeding many people.

“KoK” at Pentaport

The video is titled “[LIVE] 혁오(HYUKOH) - KoK @pentaport 2026.” It shows the band’s full performance of the song, posted on HYUKOH’s official channel.

Release details

The video was published on October 5, 2026, and its title identifies the Pentaport 2026 stage. The exact performance date is not given in the video information.

What it held

Bandaji held clothing, books and rolled documents, as well as vessels for ancestral rites. Not every chest held all of these; its role depended on who used it and in which room.

Households that could not afford larger storage furniture used a bandaji instead, and it was an important part of a bride’s furnishings. Bedding placed on top made use of the space above the chest as well.

Regional styles

Wood, metal fittings, proportions and construction varied by region. Ganghwa, Pyongyang, Pakchon, Miryang and Jeju name regional traditions, while “sungsungi” refers to pierced metal ornament. The names overlap and do not form a list of separate types.

Ganghwa chests stored clothing, textiles and ritual vessels; some had shelves or small drawers, and their fittings include gourd, bat and taeguk shapes. Pyongyang chests are described as large and tall with abundant metal fittings, used for clothes with thick bedding on top; some have three small drawers inside the upper part. Pakchon chests are known for elaborately pierced ironwork, so even these two northern traditions differ.

Miryang chests are relatively low and wide. Gyeongsang-region furniture often shows more wood grain, but Miryang examples can carry comparatively plentiful iron fittings, including chrysanthemum-shaped nailheads and crescent-shaped handles, and records describe them holding clothes in the main room with bedding on top. Jeju chests stored books, writing materials and brass or ritual vessels. Researchers note similarities between some Jeju fittings and those of Jangheung and Haenam on the southwestern mainland.

Working metalwork

The metal fittings were functional as well as decorative. Hinges let the upper panel open, corner pieces reinforced joints and plates around the lock protected the wood from wear. Floral and geometric shapes gave each chest its own look.

The photos show four different museum objects: a Ganghwa bandaji (Seoul Museum of History, Seoul History 021990), a Jeju-gwe chest (National Museum of Korea, Geonhui 4556), a Jeolla bandaji (Geonhui 4539) and a Pyeongan-do sungsungi bandaji (Geonhui 4630). The name Jeju-gwe follows the museum catalog.

The furniture, fittings and patterns are unaltered; only the photo backgrounds have been standardized to light ivory. Individual examples should not be taken as representative of whole regional traditions.

King Jeongjo and chaekgeori

Chaekgeori, which became popular in the late Joseon period, depicts books together with ceramics, writing tools, flowers and fruit. Incheon Metropolitan City Museum traces the genre to paintings of Qing Chinese display cabinets and notes that King Jeongjo, who prized books, set chaekgeori as a subject in court-painter examinations.

Collecting and aspiration

Elite versions included imported objects, reflecting a taste for collecting alongside learning. As chaekgeori spread more widely, the paintings also came to express wishes for prosperity and peace.

Works at the National Museum of Korea

The National Museum of Korea’s Hongsan 465 is an eight-panel chaekgeori screen. Books, vases and vessels are spread across its panels, so the full screen and a single panel show different arrangements.

Sinsu 11431 is a separate work that gathers stacked books, a flowering tree and other objects in one composition. The final photo is a museum-supplied detail of one panel of Hongsan 465. The museum catalog does not give a production date for that screen.