Did former South Korean President Moon Jae-in take a dining table from the official presidential residence, the Blue House, after his term was over to furnish his private residence? No, that's not true: His longtime architect friend made him a similar-looking, darker-shaded table.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) which was published on May 21, 2023, by @daebbang7336 on TikTok. It opened with a screenshot of a Conservative Daily's YouTube news show with a caption that read:
The table from the Blue House appears in Moon Jae-in's private home?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Jul 10 15:01:23 2023 UTC)
The claim was previously published in an article by another Conservative newspaper, Weekly Chosun. The article reported that in a photo posted by Park Young-sun, the former Minister of SMEs and Startups, a wooden kitchen table of a similar design to the one in the Blue House could be seen in the home of the former president. This led to premature suspicions that Moon took the table from the Blue House after the end of the term.
However, side-by-side photos of the tables show that they are clearly of different shades, Moon's table being darker, with a different pattern from the table photographed in the Blue House. Moon's daughter, Moon Da-hye, further clarified through a tweet that the table in Moon's current residence was another table designed by Seung Hyo-sang, a well-known architect and a longtime friend of Moon's, who also designed his residence in Yangsan.
She wrote:
My father's old friend, the architect Seung Hyo-sang, designed his house, as well as the said piece of furniture. What is currently in his private residence is another table of the same design but a different color. He was particularly mindful of such matters and did not bring back even an air purifier.
