Biography | 이재용 Lee Jae-yong — Oriental History on the Gwanak Slope

The heir story usually jumps from a Seoul boys' school to a factory floor. The years in between were spent on a humanities hillside: Seoul National University's Department of Oriental History, College of Humanities, Gwanak campus.

Lee entered with the class of 1987 and took a B.A. in 1992.

Two company-profile timelines published independently — Chosun Ilbo's English company page (updated 2024) and Kyunghyang Shinmun's 27 October 2022 promotion report — both list the Oriental History degree and the 1992 leaving year.

English Wikipedia records the same department under the later English label East Asian history.

The College of Humanities had already moved from Dongsung-dong to Mount Gwanak in February 1975. By Lee's freshman year the department sat in the humanities cluster on this slope, not in a business school.

Building 8, later called Doosan Humanities Hall, now holds the college offices. The present name and fabric are later than 1992, so the pin is the humanities cluster rather than a single classroom door.

The choice of major is the fact that still surprises readers who assume an industrial heir studies management first.

He did not. The management degree came later, in Yokohama.

He also joined Samsung Electronics in 1991, while the SNU degree was still unfinished — a sequence confirmed by the same two Korean timelines. The campus pin therefore records the degree, not the first pay packet.

Gwanak remains a working campus. A visitor reaches the humanities buildings by climbing from the main gate past Kyujanggak; the department is still listed under the College of Humanities.

Stand here for the formation the public record actually supports: a history degree on this hill, dated 1992, taken before the Japanese MBA and before any chairman's title.

Photo: KBS, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 2016).