Votre panier est vide
Korea’s sword story begins long before polished guard fittings and courtly rituals. In the peninsula’s Bronze and early Iron Ages, metal blades coexisted with older tools, and by the turn of the first millennium BCE into the first centuries CE, ironworking had spread widely. The earliest sword form that gives Korea a distinctive material signature is the hwandudaedo, or ring‑pommel sword—a weapon as much about rank and identity as cutting power. Excavations across the peninsula show these blades appearing in the Proto–Three Kingdoms phase and flourishing during the Three Kingdoms period (Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla). Early examples seem restricted to rulers and high elites, then become more common in the fourth and fifth centuries before tapering off in the sixth, a pattern visible in both museum collections and burial finds.
What made the ring‑pommel sword special was not just its looped finial but how that loop became a canvas for meanings. Some hilts carry openwork trefoils, others phoenixes or dragons wrought in precious metal—signals of rank and political identity. The National Museum of Korea notes excavated sets with dragon and phoenix motifs from Silla and Gaya tombs, and the Cultural Heritage Administration describes a Silla example with gold hilt and twin dragons in relief, the very opulence that linked sword and status. Accession notes from Tokyo National Museum and Korean regional displays echo this iconography, pointing especially to the celebrated sword of King Muryeong of Baekje as a high point in the style’s evolution. In short, the ring was not decoration; it was a badge.
Technologically, this first golden age of Korean swords sits within a wider East Asian network. Gaya, nestled between the larger kingdoms, became known for high‑quality armor, swords and metalwork, and scholars have traced how decorative programs—dragons and phoenixes—matured across the sixth century in step with political and cultural exchange. Yet despite shared patterns, the hwandudaedo remains recognizably Korean in its archaeological profile and social use.
After the unification of much of the peninsula under Silla, curved single‑edged sabres gradually displaced earlier straight blades. By the Goryeo era (918–1392), Korea’s cavalry warfare and continental ties pulled sword design toward the practical sabre forms common across North Asia. The historical record hints at Mongol and Chinese influences in metallurgy and mounting during and after the Mongol incursions of the thirteenth century, though the finished products retained local character in proportions and fittings. The documentary picture is uneven, but what survives suggests sabres became the default battlefield sidearm while double‑edged geom lived on as ceremonial and specialist weapons.
In the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), the sword most soldiers actually wore was the hwando—a light, single‑edged sabre with a gently curved or sometimes straight blade. Official sources emphasize function: a compact length (around 70 cm overall), easy to wear with bow, arrows and shield, and equipped with rings on the scabbard for tying or quick detachment. The Korean Culture and Information Service describes it as a practical sidearm tailored to the realities of armored marching and mixed‑weapons combat. Museums and encyclopedia entries connect the hwando’s name to those suspension rings and to references in the Goryeosa, the official history of the preceding dynasty. Whatever the exact etymology, the form is unmistakable: a compact sabre meant to be carried everywhere.
Joseon is also when Korea did something many cultures aspire to but few achieve: it codified its martial curriculum. The arc begins with Muyejebo (1598), compiled by Han Gyo in the wake of the catastrophic Imjin War. It set down core methods, and an expanded Sequel in 1610 (the Muyejebo Beonyeoksokjip) added further material, including documentation of Japanese methods encountered in war. A century and a half later, the court revisited and enlarged the canon: Muyesinbo (1759), associated with Crown Prince Sado, added twelve disciplines to the earlier six. Finally, under King Jeongjo, the court commissioned the Muye Dobo Tongji (1790s), a four‑volume illustrated survey that tested, organized, and presented twenty‑four weapons and methods for state training. Depending on the source, you’ll see the publication dated to 1790 or 1795; either way, it’s the late‑eighteenth‑century culmination of a long project to modernize a Confucian state’s military practice. Within these pages, you can read descriptions and see plates for native sword methods (Bonguk Geom), short sabre (Yedo), paired swords (Ssanggeom), and more—techniques and geometries mapped to the weapons soldiers actually carried.
This codification matters because it rebuts the idea that Joseon swordsmanship was a hazy borrowing. The handbooks are explicit about sources and aims. They fold in Chinese learning and battlefield lessons from the 1590s, they standardize training for the capital guards and provincial forces, and they treat sword work as one element in a combined‑arms statecraft. For modern readers, they also preserve terminology— geom for double‑edged, do for single‑edged, though “geom” often stands in colloquial speech for any sword—and show how Joseon balanced native forms with imported methods without surrendering identity.
By the late nineteenth century, gunpowder weapons and modern armies rendered swordsmanship a secondary skill. The twentieth century’s upheavals, including occupation and war, fractured living lineages, and much practice went private or ceremonial. Yet the sword never vanished from Korean culture. Military and police academies retained ceremonial blades; museums elevated the hwandudaedo and hwando as art and heritage; and in the late twentieth century, civilian arts revived training with both blunt and live blades. Today, when practitioners speak of jingum (live blades) and kagum (blunt trainers) or practice kumdo and other arts, they stand—whether they know it or not—on foundations that reach back to the ring‑pommel’s loop and forward through Joseon’s illustrated manuals. The lineage is not a straight line; it is a web tied to courts and campaigns, to tombs and textbooks, to taste and to necessity. That is what makes Korean swords Korean: a habit of adaptation carried in forms that remained legible as Korean across two millennia.
