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After South Korea was forced to accept the largest IMF bailout in history in 1997, more than three and a half million ordinary citizens donated their wedding rings, family heirlooms, and Olympic gold medals to help repay the country's debt — collecting 227 tons of gold in four months
Three and a half million Koreans lined up outside their banks in January 1998 to hand over their family jewelry.By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process
Published July 1, 2026
Three and a half million Koreans lined up outside their banks in January 1998 to hand over their family jewelry. The response to the KBS campaign was, by essentially every measure of subsequent 20th-century civic mobilisation, substantially unprecedented. On the first day of the campaign, 5 January 1998, approximately 44,748 separate consignments of gold were received at the six participating banks, totalling approximately 3,314 kilograms. Peak single-day participation reached approximately 88,500 individual donors within the first two weeks. Approximately 500,000 Koreans had participated by 6 January. Approximately one million had participated by 15 January. By the end of January, approximately 1.67 million people had contributed, and the initial KBS campaign was extended into a second phase running through 30 April. The total gold collected across the four-month campaign reached approximately 227 metric tonnes — worth approximately $2.13 billion at contemporary market prices — and the total number of participants reached approximately 3.51 million, representing approximately 23 percent of all Korean households in the country. The Bank of Korea’s gold holdings, which had been substantially depleted across the prior years, increased by approximately ten to twenty times over the four-month campaign period.
