From Cheongju to the World: How Jikji Ignited a New Era of Cultural Restitution

In the reading rooms of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a slim volume of Buddhist teachings rests in carefully controlled storage. Printed in 1377 at Heungdeok Temple in what is now Cheongju, South Korea, this text—known as Jikji—predates the Gutenberg Bible by roughly 78 years, making it the world's oldest surviving book produced with movable metal type. Yet for most of the twentieth century, it sat largely unacknowledged, catalogued under a French collection assembled by a 19th-century diplomat who acquired it through means that remain, at best, ethically contested.

Today, Jikji is no longer simply a bibliographic curiosity. It has become a symbol. Its story has helped catalyze a global reckoning with how major Western institutions came to possess so many artifacts from Asia, Africa, and the Americas—and whether those institutions are morally or legally obligated to return them.

A Dispute That Refuses to Stay Quiet

For decades, the South Korean government has formally requested the repatriation of Jikji from France. The French position has remained largely unchanged: the volume was legally acquired and is protected under French law, which prohibits the permanent transfer of objects from national collections. This legal wall has frustrated Korean diplomats and cultural advocates alike, but it has also had an unintended consequence. It drew international attention to the very mechanisms that allow former colonial powers to retain objects of immense cultural significance to other nations.

When UNESCO designated Jikji as part of its Memory of the World Register in 2001, the move was widely interpreted as an implicit acknowledgment of the book's singular importance to Korean heritage. That recognition gave fresh momentum to advocates who argued that legal ownership and moral custodianship are not the same thing—a distinction that has since become central to repatriation debates far beyond Korea's borders.

The Ripple Across Continents

The Jikji case did not emerge in isolation. It arrived alongside growing pressure on European museums to reckon with their colonial-era acquisitions. The Benin Bronzes, looted from the Kingdom of Benin by British forces in 1897 and now distributed across dozens of Western institutions, had long been a source of tension between Nigeria and the museums holding them. The Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon in Athens and held at the British Museum, had become a perennial flashpoint in Anglo-Greek relations. But Jikji added a new dimension to these conversations: the question of intellectual and technological heritage.

Unlike a sculpture or a ceremonial mask, Jikji represents something arguably more profound—a record of human ingenuity. Its existence challenges a Eurocentric narrative of progress that placed Gutenberg at the origin of the information age. By demanding its return, South Korea was not merely asking for a physical object. It was asserting the right to be recognized as a civilization that made foundational contributions to global knowledge.

This framing resonated deeply with advocates from other cultures who had long felt their histories were filtered through Western interpretive frameworks. Legal scholars in the United States began citing the Jikji case in academic arguments about the limits of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on cultural property. Activist organizations in Latin America pointed to it when challenging American natural history museums over pre-Columbian artifacts. The book from Cheongju had, in effect, become a shared reference point for a much larger argument.

Legal Precedents Taking Shape

The most consequential developments inspired by the Jikji movement may ultimately be legal rather than diplomatic. In recent years, several European nations have passed or proposed legislation designed to facilitate the return of colonial-era cultural property. Germany enacted a framework in 2021 to accelerate the repatriation of Benin Bronzes. France passed a law in the same year authorizing the return of objects to Senegal and Benin. While neither law directly addresses Jikji, both reflect a shift in political will that Korean advocates and their international allies have worked for years to cultivate.

In the United States, the conversation has moved more slowly, but it is moving. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), originally passed in 1990, has been the primary mechanism through which American institutions have returned objects to Indigenous communities. However, its scope is limited to Native American cultural items and does not address the broader category of internationally acquired artifacts. Scholars and museum professionals are increasingly asking whether a more expansive federal framework might be needed—one that could apply to objects like Jikji, held abroad, as well as to Asian, African, and Pacific artifacts held within the United States.

Some American institutions have begun acting without waiting for legislation. Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and several major art museums have voluntarily returned objects to communities of origin in recent years, often citing moral responsibility over legal obligation. These decisions reflect a cultural shift within the museum sector itself, one that Jikji's advocates have worked diligently to influence through public education, scholarly publication, and sustained diplomatic pressure.

What Preservation Really Means

At the heart of the Jikji repatriation debate is a fundamental question about the purpose of cultural institutions: Is preservation best achieved by concentrating rare objects in a small number of well-resourced Western repositories, or by returning them to the communities from which they came?

Proponents of repatriation argue that true preservation encompasses not only physical conservation but also the living cultural relationships between objects and the people they belong to. A Korean Buddhist text held in Paris may be physically stable, but it is culturally inert in a way it would not be if it were accessible to Korean scholars, students, and citizens in Cheongju. Preservation without context, this argument holds, is a diminished form of stewardship.

Opponents counter that major research libraries and museums provide resources—conservation technology, climate control, scholarly access—that smaller or less-funded institutions may struggle to match. They warn that a wave of repatriations could fragment collections that have been studied as unified wholes and reduce access for international researchers.

Both perspectives contain legitimate concerns. But the Jikji case has pushed the debate forward by demonstrating that these concerns are not irreconcilable. South Korea has invested significantly in facilities at the Early Printing Museum in Cheongju specifically designed to receive and care for Jikji should it ever be returned. The argument that the book cannot be properly preserved outside France grows harder to sustain with each passing year.

A Movement Still in Motion

Jikji has not yet come home. But its influence on the global conversation about cultural restitution is already profound and still expanding. Every time an institution voluntarily returns an artifact, every time a government passes a repatriation law, and every time a scholar cites the moral complexity of colonial-era acquisition, the long shadow of that 14th-century Korean text falls a little further across the world.

For those who work in cultural preservation and advocacy, the lesson of Jikji is not simply that one book deserves to be returned to one country. It is that the values we claim to hold—respect for human achievement, commitment to historical accuracy, and recognition of cultural dignity—must be reflected in the policies of our institutions. The world's oldest printed book asks a deceptively simple question: Whose history is it? The answer, the Jikji movement insists, belongs to the people who made it.