Dyes and Dyeing in Korea, from 1876 to 1910

Abstract

It was the era, from 1876 to 1910, that some dramatic changes, including an influx of foreign dyes and the beginning of the modern dyeing manufacture, happened in Korea. This paper explores what dyes were sold in the market in this period, who was the main seller of the goods, and how the dyers produced their products. A wide range of natural dye stuffs coexisted with the various kinds of aniline dyes, alizarin dye and synthetic indigo in the market. Coloring materials had been sold by hwapi-jeon, a group of official merchants who acquired a privilege of monopoly from the government. However, the dyes were also traded by sang-jeon and yakguk merchants in the nineteenth century. Most of the synthetic dyes sold in Korea were produced in Germany or in Japan later, and imported in large amount by Chinese, Japanese and German merchants. Yet there also existed Korean merchants and peddlers who sold the goods to the local consumers. Dyers were male and female who belonged to the middle class. They received the orders and payments from the government or merchants. Not only did they dye textiles, threads, cotton, paper and leather, but they also redyed clothes. Indigo dyers were differentiated from other dyers. Modern dyeing manufacture, which was presumably forced to keep pace with the productivity of the weaving process, appeared in the 1900s. It was a branch of the modern weaving manufacture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.