Printed at a Korean Buddhist temple in 1377, the Jikji is the world's oldest surviving book made with movable metal type — predating Gutenberg's Bible by some 78 years, though today only its second volume survives, held at the National Library of France in Paris

In July 1377, in a temple on the edge of Cheongju in what is now central South Korea, a group of Buddhist followers finished printing a book using individually cast metal letters.

The temple was Heungdeok-sa. The monk whose teachings filled the pages, Baegun Gyeonghan, had been dead for three years. What his followers produced that summer is now recognised as the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type anywhere in the world, finished roughly 78 years before Johannes Gutenberg printed his Bible in Mainz.

The full title is a mouthful: an anthology of the Zen teachings of great Buddhist priests, known for short as the Jikji. A note on its final page records the basic facts plainly. In one English translation, it reads: “This work was printed in movable metal type at Heungdeoksa Temple outside Cheongju Magistracy in the 7th jeongsa month of the 7th year of Emperor Zhaozong of Northern Yuan China.” Different translations word the date differently, but the substance holds across them: the book was printed at Heungdeok-sa in Cheongju in the seventh month of 1377.

A monk, a temple, and a nun who paid for it

The Jikji was not primarily a technological manifesto. It was a religious teaching text.

Baegun put it together as a teaching anthology, a distillation of Seon, the Korean Buddhist tradition the West knows more commonly by its Japanese name, Zen. He died in 1374, before the metal-type edition existed. His followers Seokcan and Daldam carried out the 1377 printing, and a Buddhist nun named Myodeok helped fund the work.

The book that now sits behind glass as a record-holder began as a community effort to preserve a teacher’s words. For Seokcan, Daldam and Myodeok, movable metal type was not an abstract milestone in the history of technology. It was a way of carrying Baegun’s teachings forward to other monks and students. They would have understood themselves to be doing a good deed for their community.

Why Korea got there before Gutenberg

The obvious question is how a temple workshop in 14th-century Korea was casting metal type a lifetime before Europe.

The short answer is that Korea had been working on it for a long time. Metal type was not invented at Heungdeok-sa in 1377. The temple was using a technology the Goryeo Dynasty had already developed.

The exact wording matters here. The Bibliothèque nationale de France puts it this way: “Jikji is the oldest known book in the world printed with movable metal type. It was printed in 1377 in what is now the city of Cheongju (Republic of Korea), 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.”

That phrase, “oldest known,” is important. The Jikji is the oldest example that has actually survived and can be securely documented, not necessarily the first metal-type book ever made.

That difference is more than nitpicking. A 2022 paper in the journal Heritage argues that another Korean work, The Song of Enlightenment with Commentaries by Nammyeong Cheon, was very likely printed with metal type in 1239, some 138 years earlier. If that argument holds, it would point to an older use of the technology.

The long road to Paris

The metal-type Jikji originally ran to two volumes. Only the second survives, and even that copy is missing its first page. The surviving volume measures 24.6 by 17.0 centimetres, small enough to hold in two hands.

How it reached France is a story of diplomacy and the antiquities market. The volume was bought in Korea by Victor Collin de Plancy, a French diplomat posted to Seoul. After that, the trail is documented down to the franc. The BnF records that the Jikji “remained his property until 1911, when it was sold to the collector Henri Vever, who bequeathed it to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1950. The book entered the collections in 1952.”

The 1911 sale, at the Hôtel Drouot auction house, went for 180 francs, a modest sum for what would become a national treasure of another country.

For decades, the volume sat in the library’s holdings without its importance being widely recognised. That changed in 1972, when it was brought to international attention during the International Year of the Book. It was then recognised in the West as the oldest existing book printed with movable metal type. 

What UNESCO settled, and what it didn’t

On 4 September 2001, UNESCO added the Jikji to its Memory of the World Register. The library describes the consensus carefully. According to the BnF, the book “is considered by the international community, including UNESCO, to be the oldest known document printed using this process.”

That is a statement about what survives and what scholars can verify. It is not a claim that nothing older was ever printed.