Director of the World Jewelry Museum Lee Kang-won remembers vividly an Ethiopian woman she saw 37 years ago in the corner of a local market in Addis Ababa.



The woman, dressed in a white cotton dress, was wearing a meticulously detailed, “ultramodern looking” silver necklace. Her necklace captivated Lee, who had just arrived in the country.



“Her necklace was breathtaking,” said Lee, in an interview last month at the museum in Hwa-dong near Samcheong-dong.



The handcrafted silver necklace was the woman’s wedding gift and she wasn’t selling it to anyone. But to Lee, it was the most beautiful object she had seen in the grim city, marred by violence in a civil war with her diplomat husband in 1978.



Since that day, when she began her search to find a similar necklace, Lee has become a devoted jewelry collector.





Lee Kang-won, director of the World Jewelry Museum, poses with her collection at the museum in Hwa-dong, Seoul. Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald





Lee collected ethnic jewelry from countries where she and her husband were stationed. She has lived abroad in eight countries, including Brazil, Germany, Ethiopia, the U.S., Jamaica, Colombia, Costa Rica and Argentina for 30 years until her husband’s retirement in 2002.



Her current jewelry collection includes more than 10,000 pieces, ranging from necklaces, bracelets, anklets, rings, earrings to masks and crosses that date from 1 B.C. to the 20th century. It is one of the largest and the most comprehensive ethnic jewelry collections in the world.



“I took advantage of my husband’s job in building my jewelry collection,” said Lee.



Life as a diplomat’s wife was the foundation of her jewelry collection. But she confessed that it wasn’t easy for her. “I was always balancing the tug-of-war between my official responsibility as an ambassador’s wife and my private life,” she said.



Her major diplomatic duty was hosting dinner events and preparing meals for a variety of guests. She developed Korean food recipes to suit foreigners’ palates, organized different menus for diverse occasions. She believed that the food she prepared represented Korean culture.



“A diplomat’s wife is a chef without a license,” she wrote in her 2002 book, “Tango and Guerrilla,” on her diplomatic life in Latin America.





Ethiopian crosses on display at the World Jewelry Museum. World Jewelry Museum