Jikji: Amor Manet — Filming Locations & Real Places

Finish reading Jikji: Amor Manet and you naturally start wondering exactly where the real history ends and the novel's imagination begins.

Jikji is the kind of name you learn as a single textbook line back in school — 'the world's oldest metal-type book, 78 years before Gutenberg' — and move on. Reading this novel and then digging into it, though, there turned out to be far more concrete, and honestly moving, facts behind that one line.

Cheongju's Heungdeoksa temple site isn't a setting the novel invented. A 1985 excavation turned up a bronze gong actually inscribed with the temple's name, finally confirming the location of a temple that had, until then, only existed in old records. The novel starting its story here wasn't arbitrary.

The physical Jikji volume still exists today — just not in Korea. It's held at the National Library of France. It was donated there in 1952 per the will of its former owner, Henri Vever, and sat in the stacks as just another old book for nearly two decades until a librarian named Dr. Park Byeong-seon first identified what it actually was, in 1972.

프랑스 국립도서관 리슐리외관 살 오발(직지가 실제 소장된 곳), 파리 · Wikimedia Commons

That part of the story sits with you for a moment. The fact that the world's oldest metal-type book isn't even in the country that made it, and that the person who recognized what it was happened to be a Korean researcher working as a librarian far from home. The novel builds a fictional present-day murder investigation on top of this real history.

The novel's central mystery — an old letter from the Vatican, and a direct link tying that letter to Gutenberg — is author Kim Jin-myung's invention. Neither the novel nor this site treats that as confirmed historical fact, and it's worth being clear about that.

That said, the invention isn't pulled entirely out of thin air. Gutenberg completed the 42-line Bible in his hometown of Mainz, but before that, real history shows he spent nearly a decade, starting in 1434, secretly experimenting with movable type in Strasbourg. The novel builds Eun-su — Karena's — European storyline on top of this confirmed record.

Whether there was ever a direct transmission between Jikji and Gutenberg's technology hasn't been confirmed by scholars. But the plain fact that two printing revolutions happened at opposite ends of Eurasia, 78 years apart, isn't fiction — that part is just history. Thinking about that distance and that gap in time, it's strange to imagine they're truly unconnected, and there's a certain pull to imagining they might somehow be linked after all.

The novel moves by interweaving the present-day murder investigation with the eras of King Sejong's Joseon and 15th-century Europe. The early stretch, where journalist Kim Ki-yeon — investigating the death of Professor Jeon Hyeong-woo — meets researcher Kim Jeong-jin at Cheongju's Heungdeoksa site and printing museum and edges closer to the truth about Jikji, is fiction, but it sits naturally on top of the real excavation history described above.

구텐베르크 박물관의 옛 인쇄기, 마인츠(독일) · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

From there, Kim Ki-yeon traces the whereabouts of the real Jikji volume at the National Library of France in Paris, while Eun-su's European storyline gets tangled up in Avignon and Strasbourg — a stretch that also happens to be a journey through real, existing places, one by one.

The section where Professor Fischer surfaces clues connecting Gutenberg and Mainz, and where the secret of the old Vatican letter starts coming to light through a character named Pemberton, is where the novel's mystery-genre machinery works hardest. I won't reveal here exactly what truth lies behind Jeon Hyeong-woo's death — that part is worth reading for yourself.

But what stays with you after closing the book isn't so much who the culprit was, as the sense of how a single book, made by unnamed monks at Heungdeoksa, ended up standing alongside the history of human printing itself, 78 years ahead of its time.

So if you trace this novel's route from Cheongju to Paris, Avignon, Strasbourg, and Mainz, sorting out what's confirmed history and what's the novel's imagination as you go will make the trip feel a lot deeper.

Standing at the Heungdeoksa site in Cheongju in particular, it hits you that this isn't just a novel's backdrop — it's the actual spot where the history of printing, for the whole world, began. That fact alone is enough to make the trip worthwhile.