Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty (조선왕조실록 and 조선봉건왕조실록 ) are the annual records of Joseon, the last royal house to rule Korea. Kept from 1392 to 1865, the annals (or sillok) comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to be the longest continual documentation of a single dynasty in the world. With the exception of two sillok compiled during the colonial era, they are the 151st national treasure of South Korea and listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World registry. The texts are also known as the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty or the True Record of the Joseon Dynasty. Since 2006, the annals have been digitized by the National Institute of Korean History and are available on the internet with modern Korean translation in hangul and the original text in Classical Chinese. In January 2012, the National Institute of Korean History announced a plan to translate them to English by the year 2033. The work was scheduled to start in 2014 with an initial budget of ₩500 million, but it was estimated that an allocation of ₩40 billion is needed to complete the project. During the reign of a monarch, professional historiographers maintained extensive records on national affairs and the activities of the state. They collected documents and wrote daily accounts that included state affairs as well as diplomatic affairs, the economy, religion, meteorological phenomena, the arts, and daily life, among other things. These daily accounts became the Sacho ("Draft History"). Great care was taken to ensure the neutrality of the historiographers, who were also officials with legal guarantees of independence. Nobody was allowed to read the Sacho, not even the king, and any historiographer who disclosed its contents or changed the content could be punished with beheading. These strict regulations lend great credibility to these records. Yet at least one king, tyrannical Yeonsangun, looked into the Annals, and this led to the First Literati Purge of 1498, in which one recorder and five others were cruelly executed because of what was written in the Sacho.