Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty
annals
The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, sometimes called sillok (실록) for short, are state-compiled and published records, called Veritable Records, documenting the reigns of the kings of the Joseon dynasty in Korea. Kept from 1392 to 1865, they comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to be the longest continual documentation of a single dynasty in the world.
The records of the last two monarchs are believed to have been influenced by the Japanese colonial rule and, therefore, their credibility compromised. Excluding the records of the last two kings, the sillok is designated as the 151st national treasure of South Korea and listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World registry.
In 2006, the annals were digitized and made available online by the National Institute of Korean History. Both a modern-Korean translation in hangul and the original in Classical Chinese are available. In January 2012, the National Institute of Korean History announced a plan to translate them to English by 2033. The work was scheduled to start in 2014 with an initial budget of ₩500 million, but it was estimated that a total of ₩40 billion would be needed to complete the project.
Compilation process
The Ch'unch'ugwan, overseen by the three High State Councillors, served as the state archive for administrative records. However, the eight historians of the seventh, eighth, and ninth ranks in the Office of Royal Decrees (예문관; 藝文館) were responsible for maintaining daily records of official court activities.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty” as annals. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as annals. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q497030. VIAF identifies the subject as 174585562. The Library of Congress control number is n81028016. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1392, 1865, 2006 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.