National Library of France
Toward the end of the Joseon Dynasty, a French diplomat bought in Seoul the second volume of the Jikji and took it to France, which has since preserved it at the National Library of France in Paris.
According to UNESCO records, the Jikji “had been in the collection of Victor Emile Marie Joseph Collin de Plancy, a chargé d'affaires with the French Embassy in Seoul in 1887 during the reign of King Gojong. The book then passed into the hands of Henri Véver, a collector of classics, in an auction at Hotel Drouot in 1911, and when he died in 1950, it was donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where it has been ever since.” Today only 38 sheets of the second volume of the metal print edition are extant.
In May 1886, Korea and France concluded a treaty of defense and commerce, and as a result in 1887 official diplomatic relations were entered into by the treaty's official ratification by Kim Yunsik (1835–1922) and Victor Emile Marie Joseph Collin de Plancy (1853–1924). Plancy, who had majored in law in France and went on to study Chinese, had for six years served as translator at the French Legation in China between 1877 and 1883. In 1888 he came to Seoul as the first French consul to Korea, staying until 1891. During his extended residence in Korea, first as consul and then again as full diplomatic minister from 1896–1906, Victor Collin de Plancy collected Korean ceramics and old books. He let Kulang, who had moved to Seoul as his official secretary, classify them.
Although the channels through which Plancy collected his works are not clearly known, he seems to have had collected them mostly beginning from the early 1900s. Most of old books Plancy collected in Korea went to the National Library of France at an auction in 1911, while the metal-printed Jikji was purchased in that same year for 180 francs by Henri Véver (1854–1943), a well-known jewel merchant and old book collector, who in turn donated it to the French National Library in his will.
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