Full Dress Worn by King Yeongjo

The dopo (a long, full-length outer robe) of King Yeongjo was discovered in 1979 inside the statue of Avalokiteshvara in Wontongjeon Hall at Pagyesa Temple, while the statue was being regilded. According to a votive text, written on a scroll in Chinese characters found together with the dopo, in the ninth month of the 16th year of King Yeongjo's reign (Qianlong 5, 1740), after the main hall of Pagyesa had been repaired and King Yeongjo had donated one thousand Buddhist paintings, the temple was made a place of prayer for the royal family, and the king's blue gauze upper garment was enshrined within the statue with a prayer for its transmission for ten thousand generations. The dopo was worn during the Joseon dynasty as outerwear by the king and by scholar-officials, and records and surviving examples of it appear from the 16th century onward. In form it has a straight collar and wide sleeves, with the distinctive feature of a doubled back panel: the existing back panel hangs down from the shoulder, and the front gusset is attached inside it, so that the back panel appears split into two layers. Eighteenth-century genre paintings that show people wearing the dopo depict this same divided back panel. King Yeongjo's dopo is a single-layered, unlined garment of plain, patternless gauze, and its present colour has a pale greenish tint. The sleeves are wide and rounded, and the collar combines the shapes of the rectangular collar and the rounded collar into a form known as a half-rounded collar. Whereas the dopo of ordinary people had a plain straight collar, this half-rounded form shows that the style of dopo worn by commoners differed from that worn by the royal family. King Yeongjo's dopo is the oldest surviving dopo among handed-down garments, and it is important material carrying a documented record of having been worn by a king; its form and colour remain relatively intact, giving it great value for the study of the history of costume.

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Where it is

Region

Dong-gu, Daegu

Designation

National Folklore Heritage · 국가민속문화유산