The South Korean government Wednesday made public newly declassified documents on its first-ever formal meeting with North Korea since the division of the peninsula and other cross-border exchanges in the early 1970s, offering a glimpse into the beginning of a new chapter in tumultuous inter-Korean relations.

The dossier included a transcript of a three-minute conversation between the South Korean Red Cross envoy and his North Korean counterpart at the truce village of Panmunjom on Aug. 20, 1971 at the first meeting between the two Koreas divided right after the 1945 liberation from Japan's colonial rule.

The set of documents also highlighted their rigorous effort for the successful launch of their first inter-Korean Red Cross talks in Pyongyang the following year through four subsequent discussions and 25 preliminary meetings.

The dossier consists of 1,652 pages of documents declassified under the Ministry of Unification's new rule on disclosing documents of more than 30 years on past inter-Korean talks. Over a quarter of the dossier has been blacked out, the ministry said, for privacy and security reasons.

The ministry said it will review whether to reveal documents from 1972 on Lee Hu-rak, then head of South Korea's state intelligence agency, who traveled to Pyongyang on a secret diplomatic mission to meet then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. Kim is the North's founding leader and late grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong-un.

At their historic meeting, the two sides agreed upon the July 4 inter-Korean joint communique, known to be the first agreement signed by South and North Korea since the division of the peninsula.

The latest documents, however, show that Seoul and Pyongyang had reached their first-ever agreement prior to that at a Red Cross preliminary meeting on Sept. 29, 1971, during which the two sides agreed to establish liaison offices and install telephone lines between the South's House of Freedom and the North's Panmungak at Panmunjom located inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

The 30-year-old documents are available at the Office of the Inter-Korean Dialogue and the ministry's major research center. (Yonhap)