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. It has been around longer than CDs, the first Star Wars movie, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the inauguration of our former principal, Mr. Penland!
When I inherited The Golden Dragon in October 2025, the club was in a skeletal state. Even last year, as a writer I knew the club was barely surviving. The year 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 realize the newspaper existed. But The Golden Dragon wasn’t always this way.
From 2021 to 2023, some may recall that the paper was digitally published on Issuu. With illustrated covers and under the supervision of Mr. Joshua Smith, The Golden Dragon adopted a quasi-magazine aesthetic.
Beyond that point I could not rely on my memory, so I began digging through 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 the site 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’ front pages 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, which too went under.
Nearly 15 years into the past, even the longest-serving teachers have scattered memories of the paper. The publication has existed long enough that our current math teacher, Mr. Kang, once wrote for it as a student in 2011. He shared that the club used to spend hours in the computer lab writing and laying out each issue.
Before 2011, the information trail narrows significantly. 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 saw the first issue of Views and Visions, a now-defunct TCIS publication, which made a passing mention of the newspaper (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 dot-com boom, the only source left are the yearbooks. Luckily, the F3 library preserved copies of the Kulsai all the way back to 1963, just five years after TCIS was founded. Some of these were incredibly fragile, ripping as I turned the pages, and a few even had pieces cut out—presumably for a collage! I found that the 1978 yearbook had a listing for The Golden Dragon while 1975 did not. Annoyingly, the 1976 and 1977 issue is missing, making the determination of the exact founding date impossible. (Huge thanks to the librarian Ms. Cho for her patience!)
It was a bewildering and at times frustrating journey to see how many forms the newspaper took over the years: the shifting websites, platforms, formats, editors, members, club sizes. Although the lack of recordkeeping sadly cast much of the school history into oblivion, it’s wonderful to know that the now-nearly-50-year-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