Background The digitization of historical collections aims to increase global access to scientific artifacts, especially those from currently inaccessible areas. Historical collections from North Korea deposited at foreign herbaria play a fundamental role in biodiversity transformation patterns. However, the biodiversity pattern distribution in this region remains poorly understood given the severe gaps in available geographic species distribution records. Access to a dominant proportion of primary biodiversity data remains difficult for the broader scientific and environmental community. The digitization of foreign collectors’ botanical collections of around 60,000 specimens from the Korean Peninsula before World War II is ongoing. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by developing the first comprehensive, open-access database of biodiversity records for the Korean Peninsula. This paper provides a quantitative and general description of the specimens that Urbain Jean Faurie, Emile Joseph Taquet, and Ernest Henry Wilson kept in several herbaria. New information An open-access database of biodiversity records provides a simple guide to georeferencing historical collections. The first dataset described E. H. Wilson’s collection of woody plants in the Korean Peninsula preserved at the Harvard University Herbaria (A). This includes 1,087 records collected from 1917 to 1918. The other collections contained specimens by E. J. Taquet (4,727 specimens from Quelpaert, 1907–1914) and U. J. Faurie (3,659 specimens from North Korea and Quelpaert, 1901, 1906, and 1907). For each specimen, we recorded the species name, locality indication, collection date, collector, ecology, and revision label. This dataset contained more than 9,400 specimens, with 22 % of vascular plants from North Korea and 66% from Quelpaert (Jeju) island. In these collections, we included some images that correspond to the specimens in this dataset.