Koreans have been conditioned for centuries to form cooperative groups made up of family members, friends and fellow villagers to pursue a variety of goals. The key to the efficiency and importance of these groups was expressed in the word gye (geh), which means "agreement" or "bond," and is used in compounds that refer to a variety of social organizations that are formed to raise money for specific purposes. In this sense, it means something like "money pool."

One of the most common of these organizations today is the wichin-gye (weech-een-geh), which can be translated as "parents' organization." People who have aged parents organize wichin-gye to help them raise money and make arrangements for celebrating their parents' 60th birthdays - an important occasion in Korean society that can be very expensive and require a great deal of advanced preparations.
Another traditional type of rural gye are sangjo-gye (sahng-joh geh), "funeral associations," which are organized to help families prepare and pay for a parent's funeral. Members of these groups donate money, serve as messengers, help dig the grave, carry the bier and provide other services for the bereaved family. In a sangpo gye (sahng-poh geh) or "funeral gye," the people meet and work out the details of the group, beginning with a formal name, its location, and all of the provisions that the members must agree to follow, including the timing and manner of the monetary contributions and how they are to be distributed.

Kyorhon gye (kyohr-hohn geh) or "wedding pools" are also popular because weddings are both a major undertaking and expensive. In addition to monetary donations and such gifts as bedding and household utensils, members of wedding gye also stage one or more receptions for the families and friends of the bride and groom.
There have also traditionally been village gye that were more or less standby organizations that went into action when there was some special need, such as repairing a home, building a new home, repairing and building community facilities, and providing emergency aid following typhoons, fires and other disasters. At fixed times, each family in the village contributes agreed-upon sums of money to the village gye fund. Korean villages have also traditionally formed pumasi (puum-ah-she), "cooperative labor groups," to help each other during the annual busy seasons.
In more recent times, a new kind of gye has appeared among housewives in larger cities who want to broaden their social activities. These housewife gye raise funds that are used to finance parties at which the wives eat, drink, gossip and generally have a good time.

Another form of cooperative in Korea is the ture (tuur-eh), which is work-oriented. These groups are formed to provide the labor for planting, weeding, harvesting, digging or repairing wells, repairing bridges, and so on - a custom that originated during the Shilla dynasty (618-935 AD). Each family in a village usually contributes one worker to a ture -usually men but sometimes women as well. When a ture group is working in a field or on a project the area is surrounded by banners identifying the group and their activity.

It has long been the custom for some of the work done by the ture to be accompanied by rhythmic music, with workers being accompanied to and from the fields by a nong ak (nohng ahk) or "farmers' band," made up of drummers, cymbalists and ribbon twirlers. Workers are paid for their ture labors. Part of the money is contributed to the village welfare fund and another part is used to pay for a party after the project is completed.
Another common form of cooperation and mutual help in Korea is the gye or "money pools" established by a group of individuals who need extra money to finance business ventures or other kinds of investments, and prefer to raise the money privately rather than go to banks. These private money-pool groups are limited to a small number of people who are carefully screened to make sure they are trustworthy.

Other types of gye include chonchak gye (chohn-chahck geh), a rotating syndicate for ceremonial food and liquor; unsang gye (unh-sahng geh), a syndicate for raising money for a palanquin or kama (kah-mah) to accompany a coffin to a grave site; and kap-gye (kahp-geh) or "same-age associations" to raise money for sponsoring various programs. The chief or leader of a gye is called gye jang (geh jahng). A gye meeting is a gye gori (geh goh-ree).

Like most other Asians, Koreans traditionally lived on the floors of their homes, sitting on floor cushions to rest, eat and do various kinds of work, and sleeping on floor mats. A long time ago, someone in the northern area of Korea where it gets frigidly cold in winter, picked up on the old Chinese idea of using the heat from cooking fires to make life considerably more comfortable during the cold season.

This heating system, known as ondol (ohn-dohl) in Korean, consisted of funneling the heat from fire-places into a series of flues or channels beneath the floor. Building on the Chinese concept, early Koreans first dug channels in the ground floor, covered them with thick slabs of granite, then spread a layer of clay over the stones. (In later centuries, the clay was then covered by heavy sheets of oiled paper.) The hot smoke and heat from the fireplaces were funneled into the flues, heating the granite slabs and the clay covering. The stones and clay held the heat for several hours after the fires burned out.

The ondol was one of the world's first and most efficient central heating systems, not only because heat rises but also because Koreans literally lived on top of their built-in floor radiators. Both the original style of ondol as well as modernized systems are still in use in Korea today. (In earlier times, rice and barley straw as well as wood were burned in the fireplaces). Korean sleeping mattresses are made thin in order not to block the heat rising from the floor, while quilts or comforters that go on top are generally quite thick to hold the heat in.

In modern homes, apartments and office buildings in Korea metal pipes installed under the floors carry heated water instead of the exhaust from fires. On the average, however, Korean homes and workplaces are not kept as warm in winter as Westerners generally like, not only as an economic measure but also because enduring cold weather without complaining has traditionally been a sign of strength of character. In addition to their custom of enduring cold temperatures, however, Koreans also traditionally wore padded clothing indoors as well as outdoors during the coldest months.

Modern-day technology has not yet improved upon the ancient ondol concept of heating the floors in homes and buildings instead of heating the inside air, which is inefficient and wasteful. Foreigners who have occasion to visit some luxurious Korean homes and plush apartments in winter are often surprised and delighted to find the floors delightfully warm.

In 109 B.C. a Chinese army under the command of the reigning emperor, Wu-Ti, invaded the several small kingdoms on the Korean peninsula, occupied them, and turned them into vassal states that were required to pay annual tribute to China. Over the next several centuries, the ruling classes of these kingdoms adopted and assimilated Buddhism, Confucianism, and numerous arts and crafts, including the Chinese writing system, from their huge, highly advanced neighbor.
Another Chinese custom adopted by Koreans during this period was the use of the dojang (doh-jahng), "name-seal" or "chop," for affixing their names on letters, documents, paintings and drawings. Dojang, consisting of family names rendered in Chinese ideograms and carved onto the ends of small cylinders of wood, ivory or other materials, apparently originated in India where they were known in the Hindi language as chhap, pronounced "chop," meaning "seal." Korea's early kingdoms also adopted the Chinese military and civil administrative systems, creating a professional class of bureaucrats whose power eventually came to be represented in their dojang. Government edicts and other documents had to bear the seals of all the appropriate ministry officials or bureaucrats to be official.

As time went by, the use of dojang spread among all members of the gentry, the commercial class, and eventually common people, as their official "signature," resulting in the appearance of large numbers of professional dojang carvers. This custom caused a great deal of confusion in Korea because so many of the people had the same family name, with Kim, Lee, Choi and Park accounting for over half of the entire population. About the only way one Kim could have a different seal from those of other Kims was to have the carving of the Chinese ideographic writing of his name stylized in a way that made it unique.
But despite these built-in differences, dojang presented a serious problem. Since they were the official signature of the individual, anyone who found, stole or otherwise got hold of someone's seal could legally obligate that person, it being the same thing as having their power of attorney. Finally, this danger led to government officials and merchants having one version of their dojang registered at their local city, town or ward office in order to authenticate it as their official signature. This registered seal was then locked away when not being used. Generally, people who had registered dojang for official purposes also had unregistered seals that they used for ordinary letters, drawings, and so on.

With the spread of literacy in Korea from the end of the 19th century on, and especially with the dramatic increase in international business and other affairs from the 1950s on, the use of dojang gradually diminished in favor of the written signature. Shortly after Korea regained its sovereignty from Japan in 1945, a law was passed recognizing the written signature as the legally valid signature. This action could have consigned dojang to Korea's colorful past, but it did not for several reasons: the carving of the seals was an important handicraft industry; many Koreans liked the traditional flavor of the seals on their private papers and other things; and visiting tourists began buying generic seals as souvenirs as well as having their own dojang made, with their names rendered in phonetic Chinese or in Hangul (Hahn-guhl), the purely Korean system of writing.
Modern-day dojang carvers use a variety of materials that include less expensive wood, plastic, marble and metal, as well as expensive jade.