Tracing “Korean Hyeam” across catalogues—and seeing the record corrected

RESEARCH · 2026 · CORRECTED

A 1609 colophon, then a nationality label in 1942

The manuscript’s colophon gives a date corresponding to 1609 and includes the name 惠庵. It does not call the person Korean. Features of the surviving copy point to Japanese binding and reading practices, but those physical features do not settle the identity or nationality of the original compiler.

I worked backward through Japanese bibliographies. A 1904 reference listed Hyeam and Yūha without a Korean label. The first trace I could verify appeared in Kyoto Imperial University’s 1942 medical catalogue. Its author index placed this manuscript and Hwang Do-yeon’s Bangyak Happyeon under a single entry: 惠庵〔朝鮮〕.

The chronology made that grouping difficult to accept. The manuscript carries a 1609 date. Hwang Do-yeon, who used Hyeam as a sobriquet, was born in 1808. If a shared name had caused the records to merge, a Korean attribution belonging to the later author may have travelled backward to the earlier manuscript.

The catalogue distinguished the books—and still merged the names

The 1942 catalogue did not treat the two objects as physically identical. It described Bangyak Happyeon as a Korean-format book and Benji Tekieishū as a Japanese-bound manuscript. The physical descriptions were separate; the author index was not. That mismatch became the lead worth following.

I preserved dated copies of the public records, matched shelf marks and record identifiers, and compared the old catalogues with the modern OPAC, digital archive, and authority data. I wanted to locate the label’s first appearance and follow how later systems turned it into structured data.

The holding library checked its source records

My enquiry to Kyoto University included the 1609 colophon, the two 1942 catalogue entries, the author index, and the current public record. The library checked its accession ledgers and old catalogue card. It reported that those materials did not contain information supporting the former author and nationality field.

The institution said the short wording in the 1942 catalogue appeared to have been carried into the author field when the original data were created. It also confirmed that the author row had been removed from KULINE. The private correspondence and staff details are not reproduced here; the dated public pages show the result.

The correction moved beyond one interface

An Internet Archive capture from May 15 still shows the RMDA author field. KULINE had removed it by July 31. When I checked again on September 3, RMDA no longer showed an author row, and the NIJL authority API returned an empty country value.

The KULINE removal is the action Kyoto University directly confirmed. The public records do not reveal the internal route by which RMDA and NIJL were subsequently updated, so I do not attribute every edit to a particular person or process. What can be checked is the before-and-after state across the three systems.

What remains unknown

The identities of Hyeam and Yūha remain unresolved, as does the place where the original work was composed. The surviving evidence supports an “unknown” nationality value rather than the inherited label.

A separate research project continues, but this record stops at the public correction. I will not present unpublished analysis, review material, or a manuscript in progress as a published result.

Public records

• Kyoto University RMDA record
• Kyoto University KULINE record
• NIJL authority 660118
• Author index in the 1942 catalogue
• Archived RMDA page from May 2026

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Project record
Period: July–September 2026
Role: source and catalogue comparison, provenance tracing, institutional enquiry, and public-record verification
External result: KULINE author-row removal confirmed; later changes verified in RMDA and the NIJL country field
Not established: the identities or nationalities of Hyeam and Yūha, the work’s place of composition, or each downstream system’s internal update process

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