A 19th-century composition of the Korean folk song “Arirang” has been found, antedating the oldest composition of the song by ten years.
      
Synnara Record and a civic organization promoting the traditional folk song said the newly found score of Arirang—the oldest ever found—had been transcribed by American missionary Homer Hulbert in a letter to his sister in the United States.
 
In the letter dated October 17, 1886, Hulbert wrote that two children in the neighborhood repeated the short song so many times that he had memorized it.  
 
Prior to the finding, the earliest composition of Arirang had been a printed version that Hulbert contributed to an English magazine in 1896, which comes ten years after the transcribed version found in the letter. 
 
Noting that only a microfilm version of the letter has been located, Synnara and the Arirang organization called for efforts to find the original copy and designate it as a cultural asset, adding that the original letter is presumed to have been brought into the country in the 1990s.
 
Currently, the microfilm version of the letter is kept at the Independence Hall of Korea.  
     
Hulbert arrived in Korea as an English teacher in 1886, after which he worked to publicize Japan's colonial atrocities to the world. He was expelled from the country by Japan in 1907. While visiting Korea in 1949, he died of pneumonia and was buried in a cemetery for foreign missionaries in the Mapo district of Seoul.