The Goryeo Dynasty (918–1392 CE) gave Korea its name and one of its great cultural flowerings — a Buddhist kingdom that reunified the peninsula, made celadon counted among the finest ceramics ever produced, carved the entire Buddhist canon onto more than eighty thousand woodblocks as a prayer against the Mongols, and printed with movable metal type generations before Gutenberg.
The English word “Korea” comes from Goryeo, a Buddhist kingdom whose name traders carried west. It was also, in 1377, the place that printed a book with movable metal type — the Jikji, cast decades before Gutenberg in Europe made a single letter.