An ongoing exhibition at the National Palace Museum of Korea called “Gifts and Records: 140 Years of Korea-France Friendship" offers visitors a rare glimpse into 140 years of Korea-France ties through a handful of carefully selected diplomatic gifts.
The exhibition features a variety of items exchanged between leaders of both countries for more than a century. Among the numerous items on display, five objects stand out as visual symbols of Korea-France relations and its ups and downs.
A pottery bottle is on display in the exhibition “Gifts and Records: 140 Years of Korea-France Friendship” at the National Palace Museum of Korea in Seoul, Tuesday. Yonhap
Wine bottle
One of the most disarming objects in the show is a plump brown pottery bottle once used to serve alcohol. The earthenware vessel, now housed at France’s Sevres National Ceramics Museum, is linked to a shipwreck off the shore of today’s Shinan County, South Jeolla Province, in 1851, indicating face-to-face exchanges decades before the 1866 French invasion of Ganghwa Island and the 1886 Treaty of Friendship and Commerce.
