Lecture : The beginning of the present day liver surgery in Korea dates back to 1960 when late professor Chang performed the first right lobectomy. This event inspired a select number of surgeons to involve themselves with intensive investigation of basic surgical anatomy of the liver and its clinical applications. Over the ensuing 10 years, Dr. Lin Tien-Yu of National Taiwan University Hospital was the man we followed very closely. His impressive description of 82 resected cases of hepatocellular carcinoma was the exciting topic of the liver surgeons at the time. His “finger fracture technique” and Lin’s hepatic clamp helped him known to most general surgeons in the country, although his clamp never gained widespread acceptance in Korea. Surgery as well as the rest of the medical disciplines in Korea has been under strong American influence since the end of the WWII for the obvious reasons. Massive liver resections mostly done by the great names of New York Memorial Hospital, caught the imagination of the Korean surgeons in 1970s. Dr. Joseph Fortner who was the head of the gastric and mixed tumor service of MSKCC did a fairly large number of radical liver resections, but few of the livers he resected were anything we ordinarily encounter in clinical practice here in Korea. By far the most significant contribution to the rapid development of liver surgery in Korea came from our Japanese colleagues who devised a number of ingenious innovations that enabled the safe resection of cirrhotic liver. The issue of resecting cirrhotic liver had never been so systematically addressed until then. The decision to undertake liver resection in cirrhotic patients used to be guided mostly by the consistency of the cirrhotic liver as roughly measured by the surgeon’s hand. But, with the introduction of ICG tests for more accurate assessment of the functional hepatic reserve and intraoperative ultrasonography for better delineation of local anatomy, increasing number of patients with HCC had the benefit of liver resection with decreasing morbidity and mortality. The refined technique of anatomic liver resection, either systematic subsegmentectomy of Dr. Makuuchi or Glisson’s pedicle approach of Dr. Takasaki, has since become the routine for most Korean liver surgeons. Four years of hibernation after the first liver transplantation in Korea, the second case in 1992 at Paik Hospital sparked a chain of liver transplant events, opening a whole new horizon for the eager young liver surgeons. It heralded a new exciting era of liver surgery in Korea.