Do you love watching K-Drama? In a real-life story in 1998, banks in South Korea saw something that no international lender had ever recorded before: millions of ordinary citizens walking in, one by one, to hand over their wedding rings, baby bracelets and Olympic medals, not for a loan, not for a scheme, but to help their country repay a debt they had never personally taken.
On the very first day of a public gold-donation drive launched by South Korean broadcaster KBS, banks logged close to 44,748 separate gold deposits, adding up to roughly 3,314 kilograms of gold. Within two weeks, single-day participation touched about 88,500 people. By the time the campaign wound down at the end of April, after being extended into a second phase, nearly 3.51 million South Koreans, about 23 percent of all households in the country, had taken part, contributing an estimated 227 metric tonnes of gold worth close to $2.13 billion at the time.
