The Golden Dragon was founded in 1977, give or take a year.
That makes The Golden Dragon, alongside STUCO and Kulsai yearbook editors, one of the oldest student-led organizations of TCIS. 1977 predated CDs, Star Wars, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even before the inauguration of our former principal Mr. Penland.
Let’s start from the present and travel back in time:
When I inherited The Golden Dragon in October 2025, I knew two things: 1) it has seen better days and 2) I had nothing. Skeletal is the word I would use. Even last year, as a writer I knew the club was barely surviving: it had by far the fewest members and the resulting product was a poorly-aligned pamphlet printed on plain A3 paper. I won’t fault you if you didn’t even know the newspaper existed. Desperate to gain even the smallest of footholds, I began searching for what the Golden Dragon truly was like in the past.
From 2021 to 2023, some of you may remember that the paper was only digitally published on Issuu, with custom designed covers and supervised by Mr. Joshua Smith. That was as far back as my memory stretched, so I began looking into old socials. On Facebook, I discovered an now-inactive but official The Golden Dragon account, though the password was never conveyed to me nor to the last two editors-in-chiefs. From there, an old website was linked (thegoldendragononline.wordpress.com). Its articles revealed that it was active from 2017 to 2021.
From there, things become fuzzier. Longtime teachers recall The Golden Dragon used to be printed on paper, but nothing specific. The F3 librarian told me that old issues were likely thrown away with old books a few years ago.
Jumping further back, I discovered that an even older account, which linked to an entirely separate website: hsj.org. The now-defunct website by American Society of News Editors (ASNE) was a home to thousands of school newspapers before its abrupt shutdown in 2013. While some issues’ frontpages are archived in the Wayback Machine, individual articles are sadly lost to time. My attempts to contact ASNE were in vain, as it later merged into the News Leaders Association, and it too went under.
Nearly 15 years into the past, even the longest-serving teachers have scattered memories of the paper. It’s old enough that the current math teacher Mr. James Kang used to write for the paper when he was a student; he recollected that the club used to spend hours on the computer lab to write and typeset new issues.
Before 2011, we only have few sources to depend on. I looked into archives of our school’s website, tcis.or.kr, first launched in the early 2000s, and uncovered various school publications that are no longer accessible. For instance, summer of 1996 is when the first issue of Views and Visions, a now-defunct TCIS newsletter was published and made a passing mention of the newspaper. (Unrelated note: this was a time where newsletters actually came in letters!) After Views and Visions came the magazine Prestige, maintained by the marketing department.
There was also a short lived spinoff called Golden Pages, written by the elementary schoolchildren.
Before the .com boom, there are only yearbooks left. Luckily the F3 library kept past copies of the Kulsai all the way to 1963, just five years after the founding of TCIS. Some of the yearbooks were on the verge of becoming dust and some had even pieces cut out of them for I guess a collage. Doing an impromptu binary search, I found that the 1978 yearbook had a listing for The Golden Dragon while 1975 did not. Of course, I knew things had been going way too smoothly as I was informed that the 1976 and 1977 issue is missing, making the determination of the exact founding date impossible. (Huge thanks to the librarian for fetching dozens of yearbooks!)
It was a bewildering and at times frustrating journey to see how many forms the newspaper took over the years: the differing websites, platforms, formats, editors, members, club sizes. Although the lack of recordkeeping sadly cast much of the school history into oblivion, the now nearly-50-years-old The Golden Dragon lives on to see another year.
List of lost media
Any help recovering these pieces of lost media is appreciated!
- Every issue of The Golden Dragon before 2017
- Every issue of Golden Pages
- 1976 and 1977 yearbooks
- Every issue of Prestige
- Every issue of Views and Visions except the first issue
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