Open the app — Joseon Palace Maps
What do you do when a hall name like Huijeongdang or Bihyeonhap turns up in the Annals or a royal protocol?
You recognize the name, but where in the palace it stood refuses to come into focus.
Unrolling the Donggwoldo and scanning it by eye is no small task — one small cell among thousands of tiny inscriptions.
This site works the other way round.
Type the name and it is marked on the painting.
So far 2,503 locations have been placed.
How to Use
Choosing a map
The first screen shows five maps as cards.
| Map | What it depicts | Placed |
|---|---|---|
| Suseonjeondo | A map of Seoul, attributed to Kim Jeong-ho; the 1864 Wansan re-cut | 462 |
| Donggwoldo | Changdeokgung and Changgyeonggung, painted 1828–1830 | 587 |
| Bukgweldohyeong | Gyeongbokgung and its rear garden, around 1907 | 551 |
| Seogweldoan | Gyeonghuigung; an unfinished draft from before 1829 | 223 |
| Sukcheonjeadolo | Han Pil-gyo (1807–1878) painted every office he served in | 680 |
If you don’t know which painting holds what you are after, search from the first screen.
The table there covers all five at once, and each result names its map, so you can go straight in from the hit.
Search, click, confirm
Inside a map, the name table is on the left and the painting on the right.
- Type a name into the search box at the upper left.
- Click the row you were looking for.
- A marker appears on the painting at the right.
Marker colour carries the category, so clusters are visible at a glance.
| Colour | Category |
|---|---|
| pink | building |
| blue | gate |
| green | place name |
| purple | unidentified |
| orange | other (wells, ponds, bridges, dismount steles…) |
When a search comes up empty
A few tricks help.
- Type in Hangul. Hanja works too, but sources differ in which characters they use, and Hangul catches more.
- Type only part of the name. The same spot is often written
비현합in one source and비현각in another; typing just비현brings up both. - Search the neighbours. If the place itself never appears, find a building that stood next to it and press [전체 선택] (select all) to sweep the surroundings. It is often right there under a different name.
[전체 선택] drops markers for everything on that map at once — a good way to see just how densely the halls were packed.
[전체 해제] clears them again when it gets too busy.
Getting around with the minimap
These paintings are large, and once you zoom in it is easy to lose track of where you are.
Hence the minimap in the corner.
- The outlined rectangle is the area you are currently viewing.
- Click or drag on the minimap to move the view there.
Good to Know
How this data was made
Every location was placed by hand, by someone pointing at the painting.
Each map credits its contributors, and the work is still going on.
So there are gaps — particularly where the inscription is faint or smudged.
The 76 entries filed as 미상 (unidentified) are places whose name could be read but whose nature could not be determined.
If something is wrong
Spot a wrong name or position? Use [오류 신고] on the page.
Just say which map and which name; it will be checked and corrected.
Helping fill in the data
You are welcome to add missing entries yourself.
Mark the spot on the painting and submit the name, its hanja and a category.
The rules and the procedure are set out in the data entry notes.
About the images
The maps were obtained online.
Sources are credited where they were clear, and there are cases where they were not.
If any material needs a rights discussion, please get in touch and it will be sorted out.
Goes well with
- To look up what a hall name means or how it was used, try the Korean Studies Web Dictionary.
- To convert an era name from your source into a Western year, see the East Asian Chronology.
- If typing hanja slows down your transcription, use the Unicode Hanja IME.
Open the app — Joseon Palace Maps