Biography | 이재용 Lee Jae-yong — The Boys' School Below Gyeongbok Palace

People meet Lee Jae-yong as the heir who later ran Samsung Electronics. The public pin that belongs first is quieter: a boys' high school under the ridge of Bugaksan, a short walk from Gyeongbok Palace, the compound that gave the school its name.

Kyungbock High School (Gyeongbok High School; 경복고등학교) stands at 9 Jahamun-ro 28ga-gil in Cheongun-dong, Jongno-gu.

It opened in 1921 as Gyeongseong's second modern secondary school and took the Kyungbock name in 1938.

Lee finished here in 1987.

Two independent Korean company-profile timelines — Chosun Ilbo's 2024 English company page and ZDNet Korea's official promotion profile of 27 October 2022 — both list the 1987 Kyungbock graduation before the Seoul National University years.

The English Wikipedia page for the school also names him among the alumni, as vice-chairman and de facto head of Samsung at the time that page was written.

This is a public school, not a private academy built for chaebol sons.

The campus still occupies the same hillside lot a visitor can walk today: classrooms, a gym, a memorial hall of school history, and the usual Seoul high-school gates on exam mornings.

Korean profiles of Lee's school years describe a quiet student rather than a public prince. Those anecdotes are second-hand; what can be dated is the diploma year and the address.

1987 was also the year he entered Seoul National University's Department of Oriental History. The high-school pin therefore closes one formation and opens the next.

Birthplace is a separate, unresolved problem. English Wikipedia and Wikidata give Washington, D.C.; Chosun's timeline and several Korean profiles give Seoul. No hospital has been named, so this collection does not invent an origin pin.

Stand at this gate for the documented start of the public record: a Jongno boys' school, a 1987 leaving year, and a next stop already chosen on the other side of the Han.

Photo: KBS, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 2016). The campus itself is separately documented on Commons as File:Kyungbock High School.JPG.