Dyeing Red: The History and Cultural Meaning of Hongyeom: 홍염의 역사와 문화적 의미

I. What hongyeom is

In the broad sense, hongyeom means any dyeing of cloth in red. In the narrow sense, used by the Joseon court and by the heritage designation of 2017, it means dyeing with safflower (홍화 紅花, Carthamus tinctorius), known in native Korean as itkkot (잇꽃).

Three other red dyes stood beside safflower. Sappanwood (소방목, also 단목), a tropical heartwood never grown in Korea, was imported from Silla onward and gave cheaper reds. Madder (꼭두서니) grew wild in Korean hills and gave a fast, slightly yellowish red, but appears rarely in Joseon court records. Gromwell (지초) produced purple rather than red, but was often regulated alongside it.

Safflower was the prestige dye because its red is clear and luminous in a way the others are not, and because it is scarce: the petals hold far more yellow pigment than red. Old texts give it many names, including 홍람 (紅藍), 황람, 오람, 대홍화 and 홍화초. Joseon people also called it 이시 (利市), "profit at market," a name that records how much it sold for.

II. Origins and transmission

Safflower is among the oldest dyes on record. It was grown in the Nile valley and the Near East, and chemical analysis has confirmed carthamin, its red pigment, on red linen shrouds from Pharaonic Egypt and on the wrappings of animal mummies. Safflower-dyed textiles are attested from Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty (1991 to 1802 BCE). From there the plant spread to India and, along the routes of Central Asia, to China by the Han period.

The Chinese word for rouge preserves that path. Yanzhi (燕支, 臙脂), Korean yeonji (연지), is linked to Yanzhi Mountain in the Gansu corridor, a Xiongnu region that Han Wudi conquered around 127 BCE; the safflower of that region gave its name to the rouge made from it.

Arrival in Korea

How and when safflower reached the peninsula is not recorded. The earliest physical evidence comes from the Nangnang tombs outside Pyongyang, where safflower seeds have been excavated and cosmetic containers held residue of rouge about two thousand years old.

The Goguryeo tomb murals show red in daily use. At Susan-ri and Ssangyeongchong, noblewomen and their attendants wear red on lips and cheeks; at Deokheung-ri, men's lips are painted red as well. Figures wear red-edged or red-paneled clothing. None of this proves safflower specifically, but it shows red dress and red cosmetics were ordinary among the elite by the fifth century. Goguryeo dancers are said to have painted their foreheads red.

There was a regional difference: Silla made rouge from safflower, while Goguryeo favored cinnabar, which was brighter but, with long use, harmful to the skin.

Korea and Japan

In Japan, safflower red (beni, kurenai) appears in the eighth-century Shōsōin textile stores in Nara, was worn by Heian court women as rouge, and reached its commercial peak in the Edo period. Korean tradition holds that the Goguryeo monk Damjing (담징) brought safflower seed and dyeing methods to Japan in 610. In the Nara period safflower red was so costly that one don of dye was worth one-sixtieth of a nyang of gold, and the Japanese term karakurenai (韓紅花), the deepest safflower red, is linked with daehong.

The Damjing story needs care. The only early account of him, for the year 610, credits him with knowledge of pigments, paper, ink and millstones, and does not mention safflower. Safflower most likely reached Japan from China between the third and sixth centuries, and the Damjing link is best treated as a tradition rather than an established fact.

III. Three Kingdoms and Silla: offices and rank

In the Three Kingdoms, red was valued but was not the highest color. Purple held that place.

In Goguryeo, the king wore five-colored garments with a white silk crown; high officials wore bird-feather caps of blue silk, and ordinary people caps of red silk (강라). In Baekje, the king wore a wide-sleeved purple robe, and officials were ranked by the color of their belts: purple for the first to sixth ranks, black for the seventh and eighth, red for the ninth, then blue, yellow and white below. Silla's seventeen-grade system ranked officials by robe color: purple for grades one to five, crimson (비색) for six to nine, blue for ten and eleven, and yellow for twelve to seventeen. Red was a middle-rank color in all three kingdoms.

Silla's dye offices

Silla ran specialized dye offices at court: the 염궁, with eleven female workers, and the 소전, 홍전 (紅典), 소방전 (蘇芳典), 찬염전 and 표전 with six each. Other offices handled bleaching and drying. The 홍전 was, by its name, the red-dyeing office; since madder gives a more orange red, it was most likely a safflower office. The 소방전 handled imported sappanwood.

That Silla kept separate offices for safflower red and sappanwood red shows how early the two dyes were treated as different things. The date is uncertain: the red and sappanwood offices may go back to 514, under King Beopheung, or to the administrative reforms of 756.

Heungdeok's decree, 834

In 834, King Heungdeok issued a sumptuary decree fixing clothing, fabric and color by bone rank, from the true-bone aristocracy down to commoners. Its color rules, recorded for women, banned red and crimson for commoners through the fifth head-rank, banned red for the sixth head-rank, and allowed both to the true-bone class, while reserving 자황 (赭黃) for the king. By the end of the Unified Silla period, then, red was controlled by rank but still ranked below purple. A portrait of King Gyeongsun in a red robe, often cited, is a Joseon-era painting of 1749 and reflects Joseon conventions, not Silla ones.

IV. Goryeo: the rise of red

Under Goryeo, red began to climb. The state dyed cloth through the 도염서 (Office of Dyeing), which produced crimson, indigo, green, blue, pale yellow and other colors for the court and officials. Purple remained Goryeo's specialty; Chinese observers praised Goryeo as particularly skilled at red and purple.

The clearest witness is Xu Jing, a Song envoy who visited in 1123 and wrote the Gaoli Tujing (『고려도경』). He reported that Goryeo queens and noblewomen prized red, painting and embroidering it on their clothing, while palace women and commoners did not dare to. At state banquets, the embroidered curtains hung in the halls were red and yellow on a ground of patterned red silk, and they were set up only for envoys and formal assemblies. Palace guards wore red figured-gauze robes, and unmarried girls tied their hair with red silk.

The surviving images tell the same story. The portrait of the scholar Yi Je-hyeon, painted in China in 1319 by the Yuan painter Chen Jianru (National Treasure No. 110), shows a red mat rendered in Yuan color; a Buddhist sutra cover sent from Song to National Preceptor Uicheon uses Song red. Goryeo Buddhist paintings are full of red, from the robes of kings and queens to the long red sashes of ordinary women. The double portrait of King Gongmin and Queen Noguk shows both in red robes, though the date and painter are uncertain.

Red becomes royal, 1370

The turning point was diplomatic. After the fall of the Yuan, Goryeo opened relations with the new Ming dynasty. In 1370 King Gongmin adopted the Ming era name and Ming dress regulations, and in 1371 the Ming Hongwu emperor sent envoys to invest him, with a crown, robe and court dress made according to Ming rules for a subordinate prince.

Under those rules, the Chinese emperor wore yellow; a prince wore red. When King U took the throne in 1375, he wore a red robe as his daily dress from the start of his reign. From this point, red was the color of the Korean king, not because it ranked highest in the abstract, but because it was the highest color the Ming order allowed him.

V. Joseon: daehong as the king's color

Joseon inherited red as the royal color and fixed it in the deepest safflower shade, daehong (대홍 大紅).

Three moments

Three moments mark the change. In 1402 (Taejong 2), the Ming Jianwen emperor sent Joseon a full set of royal regalia, including red silk ribbons and red shoes. In 1403 (Taejong 3), the word 대홍 appears in the Sillok for the first time: Ming envoys arrived with ceremonial robes for the king, the retired king and the queen, and nearly all the fabrics were daehong. In 1444 (Sejong 26), the envoy Yu Su-gang returned from Beijing with the king's ceremonial robes and three daily robes of daehong silk woven with dragons in gold. With this last gift, daehong became, officially, the king's color.

In between, daehong was not yet exclusive. In 1429 a Ming envoy presented daehong silk to the crown prince; in 1433 Sejong gave a daehong silk garment to the official Jo Jong-saeng; in 1436 he rewarded Sin In-son with a daehong robe. Crown princes and senior officials wore daehong court robes into the fifteenth century.

The king's robe

Once fixed, the rule was plain. The Gukjo Oryeui (『국조오례의』) prescribed the king's daily robe in daehong: satin in winter, gauze in summer. From then on, every Joseon king except the founder and the two Korean Empire emperors wore the red dragon robe, the gollyongpo (곤룡포), for daily governance. Taejo, the dynasty's founder, was painted in a blue dragon robe, and Taejong was reluctant to wear red before Ming envoys in 1417 because he had not yet received formal investiture.

Only two garments of the king were red: the court robe (강사포, whose name means crimson gauze robe) and the daily robe. Dragon roundels on the chest, back and shoulders marked rank by claws: five for the emperor, four for the king, three for the crown prince.

Why red and not yellow

Yellow was the Chinese emperor's color, and under the tributary order a Joseon king ranked as a prince. Daehong was the robe color of a Chinese prince, but within Joseon it was the color of the sovereign. The literati understood this. Yi Ik, writing in the eighteenth century, described the king's robe as a dark, deep red dyed with safflower, and argued that because it was the king's garment, others should not wear it.

No king's daily robe survives. What daehong looked like has to be reconstructed from royal portraits, records, and the few royal textiles that remain. The portrait of King Yeongjo (Treasure No. 932), the portrait of Heungseon Daewongun, and the fire-damaged portrait of Crown Prince Hyomyeong (later honored as King Ikjong) are the main visual references.

VI. Prohibition and cost

Once daehong belonged to the king, it had to be policed. Before 1444 there had been little need to regulate it; after, the court issued ban after ban. The bans themselves are the best evidence of how much people wanted red.

The early bans

In 1427 (Sejong 9), the Office of the Censor complained that everyone from high ministers to slaves was wearing purple, so that dyeing one bolt purple now cost another whole bolt of cloth. Because even the linings of clothes were being dyed red, the prices of sappanwood and safflower had risen too. The censors asked that purple be limited to the king and palace, and that red linings be forbidden to clerks, provincial functionaries, artisans, merchants and slaves.

In 1446 (Sejong 28), the State Council went further. Citing the Ming wedding code of the Hongwu era, which had forbidden black, yellow, daehong and purple even to wealthy Chinese families, it argued that a small state like Joseon had even less excuse. Since daehong was the color presented to the king, from first-rank officials down to privileged sons and women, red could be worn only as an undergarment; everyone else was banned from red entirely, except light red dyed with sappanwood. The council then compared daehong to imperial yellow: if the emperor's subjects could not wear yellow even underneath, then daehong, as the king's color, should be forbidden even as underwear.

In 1449 (Sejong 31), the rule was fixed: the outer garments of yangban women and all garments of commoners and the lowborn could not be daehong. Only peach red (도홍) and pink (분홍) were allowed.

Later bans

The bans kept coming, which shows they kept failing. In 1476 (Seongjong 7), garments close to red were forbidden when receiving Ming envoys. In 1498 (Yeonsangun 4), lower officials were banned from daehong and court officials from reddish clothing. In 1619 (Gwanghaegun 11), daehong silk embroidered with patterns was banned for officials. Under Sukjong, the court complained that from ministers down to clerks and servants, everyone wore safflower red, so that high and low could not be told apart, and poor families were ruining themselves to keep up.

The bans had three motives: keeping the order between king and subjects, showing deference to Ming envoys, and curbing luxury.

The cost to growers

The demand for safflower fell on the farmers who grew it. In 1512 (Jungjong 7), an official reported that in 개천, where one du of safflower was owed as tribute, local officials collected thirty du from the people, and families were fleeing the county. The court's answer was to ban daehong, reasoning that fewer red clothes would mean less extortion. The king agreed that red should be restricted.

Red as a household trade

The bans were never total. In the late eighteenth century, the scholar Yi Deok-mu wrote that a scholar's wife in poor circumstances could, without shame, buy safflower, sappanwood and other dyes and learn to dye peach red and pink as a side trade, along with weaving, raising poultry and selling preserved fruit. Safflower dyeing was a legitimate source of household income outside the palace. What ordinary people were allowed to dye, however, were the intermediate shades, never the pure daehong.

VII. The court system and its economy

The hongyeomjang

The Gyeongguk Daejeon (1485), Joseon's legal code, lists the court's artisans by office. Two offices kept red dyers, hongyeomjang (홍염장):

The division was deliberate: the Sangeuiwon dyers made daehong for the king, while the Jeyonggam dyers made ordinary red for state use, so that the king's color was produced separately from everyone else's. The Sangeuiwon also sent dyers to China to learn: in 1461 (Sejo 7) the court proposed sending skilled workers with the embassy because Korean spinning and dyeing lagged behind; in 1502 and 1504 Yeonsangun had daehong silks bought in Beijing.

The system did not last unchanged. By the later nineteenth century the Jeyonggam had no artisans left, as state workshops gave way to private trade. The Sangeuiwon's dyers survived to the end of the century.

Supply

In the late Joseon period safflower came to the court three ways: as regular tribute paid for from state revenue, as a supplementary levy in kind, and as an annual allotment from the Ministry of Taxation. The supplementary levy fell on Hamgyeong Province, where the best safflower grew. Only safflower and gromwell reached the court by every route, which shows these two were the dyes the court needed most.

Safflower was the costliest dye in the system. Sappanwood cost about one-twentieth as much, and the court used the two differently: safflower for the outer fabric of royal garments, sappanwood for linings. The scholar Yun Jeung, writing in 1713, praised officials who wore sappanwood red as a sign of restraint. The choice of red dye thus marked both the layer of a garment and the rank of the wearer.

The king's red was also deliberately darker than anyone else's. Royal daehong called for more safflower than the government office's 다홍, and for plum rather than the cheaper omija.

Scale

Red dominated court textiles. Of about 1,400 colored fabrics set down in the court's 1750 rulebook, the Sangbang Jeongrye (『상방정례』), 915 are in the red family. Red was dyed not only in the Sangeuiwon but in the palaces themselves: in 1778 King Jeongjo ordered 100 geun of safflower sent to Hyegyeong Palace, the residence of his mother, to prepare for a royal wedding.

VIII. The names of red

Few colors in Korean have as many names as red. The Joseon court annals alone use over forty red-family terms. The vocabulary grew as red became more regulated: because daehong and 강색 were reserved for the king's robes, everyone else dyed around them, and a whole range of permitted reds acquired names of its own.

Names by depth

An old system named red by the number of dips. One dip gave 縓 (전), two gave 赬 (정), three gave 纁 (훈), four gave 朱 (주). The Han-dynasty dictionary Shiming (『석명』) gives 絳 (강) a special note: of its thirteen colors, only 絳 is described with the word for skilled labor, because it was hard to dye. 紅 was defined as a lighter 絳. 絳, the deepest dyed red, most likely corresponds to what Joseon called daehong.

Names across periods

Names by dye

The dye mattered as much as the depth. Safflower gave 대홍, 다홍, 진홍, 분홍, 도홍, 연홍, 은홍 and 수홍. Sappanwood gave 목홍 ("wood red"), 소홍 and, with alum, 번홍 (礬紅). Madder gave 천홍 and the crimsons 비 (緋). Red earth gave 토홍. Some names recorded compound dyeing: 다홍 was safflower laid over a yellow ground.

Joseon names also shifted from single Chinese characters to Korean compound names, often joined to fabric names, as in 다홍갑사 (red gapsa gauze) or 진분홍숙갑사 (deep pink glossed gauze). Court records hold over a hundred such fabric-and-color names, many of them still used by hanbok makers today.

IX. Uses and appearances

Safflower red reached far beyond the king's robe. It dressed the court, the temple and the bride; it colored faces; it went into medicine.

Royal dress

• Gollyongpo (곤룡포) / hongryongpo (홍룡포): the king's daily robe of daehong, worn from 1444 until the Korean Empire, when it passed to the crown prince. Red outside, blue inside; gauze in summer, satin in winter.
• Gangsapo (강사포): the king's crimson court robe, worn with the tall crown for audiences.
• Hongwonsam (홍원삼): the red ceremonial robe of the queen, with gold-woven phoenixes, dragon roundels, and multicolored sleeve bands.
• Royal wedding dress: daehong robes (장삼, 노의) were prepared for royal brides, and daehong silk robes were ordered for princes' weddings and, at times, bought from Liaodong.
• Cushions and furnishings: the queen's and princesses' cushions, with red centers framed in green and yellow.

Officials and the military

Red official robes were limited to the crown prince and officials of the upper third rank (당상관) and above. Red also dyed military dress: the armor of generals and kings was often red, a color signifying dignity and a prayer for safe return from battle. Cinnabar was used alongside safflower on Joseon armor.

Buddhist use

Red was the color of the monk's formal robe, the gasa (가사, kasaya). Korean gasa survive in red silk, ramie and figured satin, and Buddhist banners and ritual furnishings used the same red. Surviving examples include the kasaya of National Preceptor Daegak at Seonamsa and later robes held in museum collections.

Books and records

Red silk covered royal records. The cloth covers of the uigwe, the illustrated records of court ceremonies, and of the Annals were dyed in red and blue, and their restoration in recent decades has required recovering those colors.

Women and the household

Outside the palace, red lived in women's dress and household textiles: red skirts (다홍치마), the red edges of quilts, the red stripes of saekdong (색동) children's sleeves, and red pouches. By late Joseon, even young servants in yangban houses wore red skirts, whatever the law said.

Rouge

Yeonji (연지) and gonji (곤지), the red dots painted on a bride's cheeks and forehead, were the last touch of wedding makeup. Safflower rouge was costly; poor households cut circles from dried red chili skins backed with hanji as a substitute. Rouge on the cheeks appears among the Xiongnu as a sign of marriage and in Han and Tang China as a court and then a fashionable cosmetic; in Korea it became a festive and ceremonial mark.

Medicine and oil

Joseon medicine knew safflower as the red flower that dyes 진홍, and it was used to move stagnant blood and for women's complaints. The yellow pigment was valued as an insect repellent, and the seed oil was pressed for food, burned in lamps, and its soot made into a prized ink.

Where red appears

The visual record of hongyeom runs through Korean art: the Goguryeo murals of Susan-ri, Ssangyeongchong and Deokheung-ri; Goryeo Buddhist painting; the portraits of Yi Je-hyeon and of King Gongmin and Queen Noguk; and the Joseon royal portraits, above all King Yeongjo's in daehong. Court documentary paintings of royal processions and banquets show red across officials, banners and furnishings.

X. The cultural meaning of red

Red carried several meanings at once in Korea, and they coexisted rather than replaced one another.

Life

In early societies red was the color of blood and so of life: it was smeared on the body, eaten or scattered in ritual. In farming societies it became the color of the sun, longed for and relied on. It was also the color people used to ward off misfortune and invite good luck. From the Three Kingdoms onward it took on a new layer, as a color of power and rank, central to painting, crafts, palaces, temples and dress.

Cosmology

In the five-phase system that organized Joseon thought, red belonged to fire and corresponded to:

The Rites of Zhou grouped red with blue and white in the patterns of noble dress, and red was one of the five pure colors (정색). Intermediate shades, mixtures of the pure colors, were ranked below them; this is why commoners could be allowed pink and peach red while daehong stayed with the king.

Protection

Red's most widespread meaning in folk life was protective. Among Korean apotropaic colors, red was the most common of all, grounded in yin-yang thought: red is strongly yang, and the spirits that bring harm are yin. The same logic runs through many customs:

• red bean porridge eaten and scattered at the door on the winter solstice;
• chili peppers tied into the straw rope hung at a house where a child is born, and dropped into soy sauce jars;
• red talismans, red paper and five-color thread;
• red pouches carried by the elderly and by children.

Red's lucky meaning and its power to keep evil spirits away made it the central color of weddings.

Marriage

At the wedding, the protective and the festive met. The bride's rouge dots, her red skirt, and the red-and-blue lanterns that lit the procession all joined red's promise of good fortune to its power to guard against harm at a moment of transition. Commoners who could never wear daehong in daily life were allowed ceremonial dress above their station on their wedding day.

Power

At court, the meaning was political. Daehong marked the king; its depth, set by the amount of safflower, was itself a mark of rank. The long chain of bans shows that the power of red came precisely from its scarcity and its controls. The more the court restricted red, the more people wanted it.

XI. Decline and revival

Loss of meaning

The end of daehong began with a change in the king's own title. When Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire in 1897 and took the title of emperor, he adopted the imperial yellow dragon robe. Daehong passed to the crown prince. The color that had meant the sovereign for four and a half centuries now meant the second in line, and its symbolic weight faded.

Loss of the market

At the same time the old dye economy collapsed. After the ports opened in 1876, synthetic dyes arrived: aniline dyes, alizarin, and synthetic indigo, most of them made in Germany and later in Japan, sold beside the natural dyes. They were cheaper, faster and brighter. Under colonial rule, Korea became a market for Japanese dyes, and the natural dyers, their customers gone, could not make a living. The craft of daehong, and the artisans who could make it, were in effect cut off.

Farmers kept growing safflower, but increasingly for its seed, pressed for oil and later sold as a health food, not for its dye.

Revival

The recovery began in scholarship. Research on Korean red dyeing started with Lee Yang-seop's study of traditional hongyeom (1979 to 1980) and was followed by work on color names, court dyeing, and the chemistry of safflower on silk and ramie. Master Kim Gyeong-yeol's thesis (2010) joined that literature with the results of decades of practice, and his restoration work supplied the physical evidence.

In 2017 the Seoul Metropolitan Government designated Hongyeomjang as Seoul Intangible Cultural Heritage No. 49, the first heritage designation of red dyeing in Korea, and recognized Kim as its holder. Seoul tied the designation to its identity as the seat of the Joseon court: daehong was the court's color, and Seoul its home.

In 2025 hongyeom was presented at the launch of the effort to nominate Korean hanbok culture to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, placing the craft within a national case for the living tradition of Korean dress. The red that was once reserved for one man is now being argued for as the inheritance of everyone.

Appendix A: Chronology

References

Primary sources

• Joseon Wangjo Sillok (『조선왕조실록』). Entries for Taejong 3 (1403), Sejong 9 (1427), Sejong 26 (1444), Sejong 28 (1446), Sejong 31 (1449), Jungjong 7 (1512), and others. National Institute of Korean History. Sillok database · Sejong 9 (1427) entry
• Gyeongguk Daejeon (『경국대전』), 1485. Gongjeon, Gyeonggongjang. Gongjeon, Gyeonggongjang · Full text
• Sangbang Jeongrye (『상방정례』), 1750–51. Kyujanggak
• Samguk Sagi (『삼국사기』). Japji: offices and clothing. Clothing · Offices
• Xu Jing, Gaoli Tujing (『고려도경』), 1124. Korean Classics DB
• Yi Ik, Seongho Saseol (『성호사설』). Korean Classics DB
• Yi Deok-mu, Cheongjanggwan Jeonseo (『청장관전서』). Korean Classics DB
• Heo Jun, Dongui Bogam (『동의보감』). Korean Medicine Classics DB
• Nihon Shoki (『일본서기』), vol. 22, Suiko 18 (610). e-Kokuho

Studies and documentation

• Kim Gyeong-yeol (2010). 韓國 傳統 紅花染色 硏究. MA thesis, Dongguk University. RISS
• Kim Gyeong-yeol (2025). 「한복이 내재한 장인의 기술과 정신: 홍염장을 중심으로」. Symposium paper, 2030 '한복생활' 유네스코 인류무형문화유산 등재추진단 발대식 및 제2차 학술 심포지엄, 22 October 2025.
• Yoon Yang-no (2019). 홍염장, 서울특별시 무형문화재 제49호. Seoul Metropolitan Government. Seoul e-book
• Kim Soon-young (2013). "The Dyeing Culture of Royal Garments in the Late Joseon Dynasty." Fashion & Textile Research Journal 15(2): 192–201. doi:10.5805/SFTI.2013.15.2.192 KCI
• Kim Soon-young (2010). "Dyes and Dyeing in Korea, from 1876 to 1910." Journal of the Korean Society of Costume 60(9): 77–94. KoreaScience · RISS
• Lee Yang-seop (1980). 「한국 전통 홍염연구」. Konkuk University.
• Min Gil-ja (2000). 한국 전통 직물사 연구. Hallimwon. National Assembly Library
• 「한국전통색연구 2: 벽사색에 관한 고찰」. KCI. KCI
• Tamburini, D. et al. (2019). "Compositional and Micro-Morphological Characterisation of Red Colourants in Archaeological Textiles from Pharaonic Egypt." Molecules 24(20): 3761. DOI · PubMed Central
• Suzuki, S. (2021). "Carthamin Synthase Provides New Insight into Traditional 'Beni' Red Pigment Production from Safflowers." Plant and Cell Physiology 62(10). doi:10.1093/pcp/pcab162

Reference works

• 홍염, 연지, 염료. 한국민족문화대백과사전, Academy of Korean Studies. 홍염 · 연지 · 염료
• 견직물의 제직실태 및 종류. 우리역사넷, National Institute of Korean History. Read online
• 담징. 위키백과. Wikipedia
• "Benibana: Safflower Red in Japan." Asian Art Newspaper. Read online