KT&G (CEO Min Young-jin) and KOSAF (Chair of the Board Lee Gyeong-suk) led the “Sangsang, Pride of Korea” project aimed at visiting Korean cultural assets in Japan with 200 university students.

This project was launched under the sponsorship of the Cultural Heritage Administration and overseas cultural heritage foundations with the aims of gaining an accurate understanding of Korean history and nurturing talents with a sense of pride in our culture, with all expenses covered by the KT&G Sangsang Fund. The Sangsang Fund is KT&G’s unique social contribution fund set up with voluntary donations by KT&G officers and employees and a company support fund, and is used to assist the neighbors such as low-income families and seriously ill patients.   

Participants are recruited twice, in the first and second halves of the year. Applications for the first round of participation may be made either at the KT&G Sangsang Univ. homepage (www.sangsanguniv.com) or at the KOSAF homepage (www.kosaf.go.kr) by 30^th of this month. Entry is open to anyone who is a student of Korean nationality enrolled in a university in Korea (including those on a leave of absence).

A total of 200 students, 100 each for the first and second halves of the year, will be selected based on the combined results of document screening and SNS support score. They are scheduled to visit Korean cultural assets in the Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara regions of Japan for four days and three nights in July of this year and in January of next year. After the visits are completed, they are planning to carry out activities to propagate the excellence of our cultural assets far and wide through documentary videos and blogs posts.

A KT&G official said, “Currently more than 150,000 pieces of our cultural assets are overseas, and more than 60,000 of them are in Japan,” adding that “this project has been planned to arouse the interest in our 5,000-year cultural heritage and to increase pride and self-esteem in our culture.”