종류

Every bojagi has a job.

28 kinds of bojagi, by what they were for, how they were made, and whether they came from the palace or the village.

보자기 is 褓 ('wrapping cloth') plus suffixes; plain 보 was the older word, and the form 보자기 is first written down only in the 1890s. No one knows when wrapping cloths began; the Samguk yusa (compiled in Goryeo, 1280s) tells how Gaya's founder came down from the sky in a golden box wrapped in red cloth, but that is legend, not a record of practice. The oldest surviving bojagi is an embroidered late-Goryeo cloth in the Jeonju City Museum, probably a sutra wrapper. In Joseon, sumptuary rules reached even wrapping cloths: in 1408 a servant's yellow bo, the Chinese emperor's colour, led to two officials' exile. The court ordered bojagi to fixed sizes (상방정례, 1752) and logged them in 발기 inventories and wedding 의궤; these single-piece silk and ramie 궁보 contrast with 민보, the household cloths that women sewed from scraps and embroidered at home. Wrapping something was also thought to keep its 복 (fortune) inside, which is why wedding gifts were always wrapped. Everyday use faded after the 1950s, but collectors such as Huh Dong-hwa from the 1960s, museum exhibitions from the 1980s, and today's artists and biennial Korea Bojagi Forum (since 2012) recast bojagi as art.