Stationery Box

Yeonsang is a small table with a storage space for various stationery items including an ink stone. It was placed in front of where the room’s owner would sit, and used along with a writing table. Unlike yeongap, which was designed to only store an ink stone, the table had a drawer or open storage space for writing brushes, a dropper, an ink stick and a paperweight. Some ink stone tables called yeondae did not have a lid on top, and an ink stone was instead placed on top. Some yeonsang had two side panels decorated with an openwork design, as with small dining tables made in the Haeju region, and others were made to the same height as a stationery chest or a writing table to serve as their substitutes. Yeonsang was a form of furniture developed to fit the Korean lifestyle of using ondol, a traditional floor heating system. The table was made of ginkgo wood, black persimmon wood, paulownia wood, pinewood and zelkova wood. It was rarely decorated with metal fittings, and was instead generally embellished by emphasizing the natural wood grain, as well as with lacquer, engravings, or mother-of-pearl inlay. The yeonsang shown here is a three-tiered cuboid table. The first tier is an open shelf with four triangular pillars at each corner, which allows items to be easily placed on the bottom board. The edges of the bottom board are raised to keep things from falling. The second tier is a drawer, and the third tier is divided into two compartments covered with two separate lids for easy opening and closing. Door edgings are attached to two sides of the lid, in the same way that door edgings are fixed to a door panel, in order to prevent wood from warping. On the surface of the lid, a tree motif within a circle was engraved using the sgraffito technique. The entire surfaces of the pillars and the drawer were engraved with chrysanthemum and leaf motifs. The height of the drawer’s front panel was made longer than that of the drawer’s body so that the base frame of the drawer could not be seen when the drawer was closed. The body of the drawer was made to occupy only three-fourths of the base frame so that the drawer could be opened easily. Its low triangular feet under the bottom board were designed to prevent the table from directly touching the ground.