Cho Mi-soon and her colleagues at the National Naju Research Institute of Cultural Heritage have put a name and a probable origin to a bronze cylinder about nine inches long that a soldier turned up on Mount Geumseong in southwestern South Korea. It is a Hwangja Hwatong, a handheld gunpowder weapon, and the institute reads a mark on its muzzle as evidence that the Korean state, not a private smith, had it cast.
The Korea Heritage Service announced the identification on September 21, 2026, and called the piece the oldest gunpowder weapon yet confirmed in the country. Its two possible dates, 1377 and 1437, sit at the hinge between the late Goryeo and early Joseon dynasties, a stretch for which actual firearms are almost absent from the ground.
A mine sweep, a bronze tube and 28 characters
The object came out of the ground in November 2023 during a search for unverified mines on Mount Geumseong in Naju, South Jeolla, according to Kyunghyang Shinmun’s English edition. The bronze piece measures 23.75 centimeters, has a bore of 1.66 centimeters and weighs 1,032 grams, which is the roughly two pounds Archaeology magazine cites. It has a muzzle, a powder chamber and a socket meant to take a wooden handle, the layout of a portable weapon for one person rather than a cannon mounted on a carriage.
Archaeology magazine reports that the researchers used X-ray examination and inscription analysis, and that the weapon fired arrows or pellets. Korean coverage adds that the bronze is an alloy of copper, tin and lead, with the tin held under 10 percent by weight.
The inscription and its named officials
Twenty-seven characters on the handle socket, plus one on the muzzle, carry the paperwork. As Seoul Shinmun’s report transcribes it, the text says the Hwangja Hwatong was made in the twelfth month of a Jeongsa year, gives its weight as one geun and 14 ryang, names the supervisor as the official An Hyu-bo and names the craftsman as Seok. “Hwangja” refers to the character “yellow,” one slot in the Thousand Character Classic sequence that the name borrows to classify the piece.
The Korea Heritage Service stressed what that combination delivers. No earlier find from the dawn of Korean gunpowder weapons, it said, has had its find location, production period and maker all verified together. Kyunghyang Shinmun puts the piece at least 118 years earlier than previously known examples.
The Korean reports date the piece by the sexagenary cycle, the 60-year calendar in which a Jeongsa year recurs. That explains why the same inscription yields two candidates exactly six decades apart, and why the incomplete date on the handle, as Archaeology magazine describes it, leaves the institute unable to choose. The name, weight, supervisor and craftsman entries, by contrast, are legible.
The reading behind the state attribution
The attribution to the state is the researchers’ inference rather than a line in the inscription. The single character on the muzzle, the numeral eight, is presumed to be a manufacturing or management number, News1 reports. Archaeology magazine quotes the institute describing it as evidence of state-organized firearm production, meaning centralized manufacture rather than independent craftsmanship. A numbered piece, with a named official overseeing a named artisan, looks like inventory from a workshop that kept records.
The dating options point the same direction. According to the Medievalists.net account, 1377 is the year the Firearms Bureau, or Hwatong Dogam, was set up and Korea began producing gunpowder weapons at the state level, while 1437 falls in the reign of King Sejong, when firearm designs were being refined. Either way, the Jeongsa year lands inside a period of official arms-making, and the supervisor’s title is tied by the same account to the military equipment administration of the era.
The Medievalists.net account also ties the 1377 candidate to Choe Museon, the Goryeo official credited with establishing the bureau, which gives the earlier date a named institutional sponsor. That context matters because earlier knowledge of the era’s firearms leaned on written records of what the bureau made, with almost nothing physical to check them against. A cast, numbered, signed object recovered from a hillside gives researchers a relic to hold against those records.
Cho Mi-soon framed the importance in terms of scarcity. “It comes from a crucial transitional period between the late Goryeo and early Joseon dynasties, when physical artifacts of firearms are exceptionally rare,” she said, as quoted by Archaeology magazine.
The artifact went on display at the National Palace Museum of Korea from September 23. The year remains open: the institute says comparative material is too thin to choose between 1377 and 1437, a gap of 60 years that decides whether the tube belongs to the first Goryeo gun foundry or to Sejong’s refinements.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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