'The King: Eternal Monarch' makers apologise after controversy over building designs

The King: Eternal Monarch managed to make it to the headlines since the show premiered over the weekend. The  Korean television series released two episodes and managed to bring back Lee Min-Ho and Kim Go Eun to the small screen. But the show is getting a lot of backlash due to a montage featured in the opening credits scene. The montage shows a monument similar to the Jasnapese building, Tōdai-Ji. A number of views of the show have pointed out this detail and have been expressing their distress about the same. Read more about The King: Eternal Monarch. 

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Lee Min's The King: Eternal Monarch controversy

The makers have been getting a lot of negative response for showing one of the seven most influential Buddhist temples in Nara in the show. A number of internet users taken to their social media accounts to point that it was offensive to use a Japanese building in a show in a show that is supposed to represent the Korean Daehan empire. This has forced the makers of the show to release an official apology statement for their fans. A Korean entertainment portal released the statement made by The King: Eternal Monarch makers.

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The King: Eternal Monarch makers release an apology statement

We are conveying Hwa & Dam Pictures’s statement regarding the current controversial issue. First, we will address the imperial seal of the Korean Empire. In order to represent a constitutional monarchy in which the National Assembly or Executive Branch is centred around the imperial family, we created the Korean Empire’s imperial seal with a ‘double plum flower’ design in which a flower is enfolded by another flower. It’s completely unrelated to the Imperial Seal of Japan.

We will address the production of the title video. First, in the case of the wooden pagoda, we used the Baekje five-story wooden pagoda, which is on display the Baekje History Reproduction Complex, as a base. We hoped that we would not cause misunderstandings through designing a fictional wooden building by recreating a wooden pagoda that is seen in historical records.

However, in the case of the two-story wooden pagoda, we used features of Korean Buddhist temples and Chinese royal palaces as the base to make a fictional wooden pagoda, and we have verified that some features of a Japanese temple were used in the process. It was clearly our mistake, no matter the reason for it, for us to have not paid close attention to every detail in the process of designing the fictional world of the Korean Empire, and we sincerely apologize.

The production team will immediately correct this, and we will make sure that you feel no discomfort when watching the show from episode 3 onwards. We will also correct this in the reruns and video-on-demand services for episodes that have already aired. We once again apologize, and we will try our best to make a high-quality drama.

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