Busan Museum

This guide to Busan Museum begins in September 1969, when an excavator clearing a hillside in Dongnae for new housing cracked open a wall sealed for around fifteen hundred years. A site supervisor chose to report the strange debris rather than shovel through it, a decision that preserved one of Korea's richest untouched graves. Archaeologists opened a stone-lined chamber holding gilt-bronze crowns, gold earrings, iron ingots, and horse gear belonging to a Gaya-period ruler. Those crowns and blades sit in the halls in front of you now.