The academy — shuyuan in Chinese, seowon in Korean — combined a lecture hall and a shrine in a single compound, which is the important structural fact: teaching and sacrifice to a revered scholar were understood as one enterprise. Zhu Xi's restoration of the White Deer Grotto Academy in 1179, with its articles of learning, was the model for hundreds afterwards. Korea took the institution further than China: Sosu Seowon received a royal charter in 1550 and by the nineteenth century there were roughly six hundred, endowed with tax-exempt land and exempt slaves, and they had become the institutional base of the factions that dominated Chosŏn politics. The Daewongun suppressed them in 1868, closing all but forty-seven, which remains a standard case study in what happens when an educational institution acquires fiscal privileges and political function. Nine of the surviving Korean seowon were inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2019. Vietnam's Quốc Tử Giám in Hanoi, founded 1076, is the corresponding institution there.