Jumong

An egg the size of a half-gallon measure lay in the horse pen of the Buyeo court, and the horses would not tread on it. King Geumwa had put it there on purpose. When the horses stepped around it he had it carried out and thrown down a steep hillside, and the wild animals came and lay against it to keep it warm. He tried to break it himself and could not get it open. In the end he handed it back to the woman who had produced it, and some days later it split along one side and a boy climbed out.

His mother was called Yuhwa, Willow Flower, eldest of the three daughters of Habaek, the earl of the river. The oldest full account has her meeting a man who introduced himself as the son of the Heavenly Emperor. He came down in daylight in a chariot drawn by five dragons, with hundreds behind him in streaming robes, riding swans, and the air chiming with music. He saw the three sisters at play in the Bear’s Heart Pool, their jade ornaments knocking softly together, and wanted an heir. When they fled into the water he traced the foundations of a palace with his riding whip, a bronze hall rose out of nothing, and he laid out silk cushions and gold cups of scented wine and hid until the sisters came back and drank.

Habaek sent a messenger to ask what kind of rogue this was. Haemosu answered that he was Heaven’s son and would like the girl’s hand, and the river god, unimpressed, demanded proof. He dived into the green water as a carp; Haemosu became an otter and had him before he could turn. He sprouted wings and went up as a pheasant; Haemosu came down on him as a golden eagle. He bolted as a stag and was run down by a wolf. Only then did Habaek pour the wine and agree to the marriage, and then he got his son-in-law drunk, sewed him into a leather bag and loaded him into the dragon car beside his daughter. The car had not cleared the water before Haemosu woke, took the gold pin out of Yuhwa’s hair, punched a hole through the leather and went up alone through the red clouds. He did not come back.

Her father punished her for it. He stretched her lips three feet long and threw her into the Ubal stream with two maidservants, and there a fisherman saw something strange turning in the eddies and reported it to King Geumwa, who set an iron net in the current and pinned her against a rock. Her lips had to be cut back three times before she could speak. Geumwa worked out whose wife she was and gave her rooms in his palace, and it was there that a shaft of sunlight came through and moved across the room to find her, and followed her when she turned away from it. Five days later she laid the egg.

Nobody who wrote him down thought to say what his face was like. What survives instead is the noise he made. His first recorded words, spoken while he was still an infant on a mat, were a complaint that flies were nibbling his eyes and he could not lie still and sleep. His mother made him a small bow and a set of arrows and he never missed with them, which is where the name comes from: the twelfth-century chronicle stops the narrative to explain that in the speech of Buyeo, jumong means a good archer.

That skill is exactly what got him into trouble. Geumwa’s sons watched him outshoot them, decided he would be a problem later, and had him sent down to the horse pens to see what he would do. He tended the horses and thought about it, and the conclusion he reached was that a grandson of Heaven mucking out a stable is a shame that cannot be borne. His mother agreed and went out to the corral with him. They drove the herd with long whips until one bay cleared a wall two fathoms high, and then they fixed a needle under its tongue so that it could not eat. Within two days it looked like a worn-out nag, and when the king came to choose it was the one he gave away. Jumong took the needle out and fed it properly.

He left with three friends and rode south until the Eomni water stopped them, with no ferry and pursuit behind. He raised his whip at the sky and said the only thing he had. The oldest version of the sentence is cut into stone: I am the King Chumo, my father is the Emperor of the Heavens and my mother is the daughter of Habaek. Then he struck the water with his bow. Fish and turtles came up nose to tail and made a bridge, the four of them crossed, and when the soldiers rode onto it the bridge came apart under them. A pair of doves arrived overhead with barley grain in their bills, sent after him by his mother, who had thought of what he had not.

He took a site among mountains and thick woods in the valley of the Piryu, seated himself on the royal mat, and started handing out ranks. His neighbour Songyang, king of Piryu, asked him to become a vassal, which went badly. They shot at a target and Songyang could not hit the navel of a painted deer while Jumong split a jade ring at a hundred paces. Songyang’s own drum and bugle turned out, on inspection, to have changed hands, and the pillars of the newcomer’s hall were somehow older than his own. So Jumong went hunting in the west, took a tall white deer, strung it up by its hind feet at Haewon and told it to cry until Heaven heard, and would not cut it down. Rain fell for seven days. Songyang’s people were still clutching at ropes stretched along the flood, sweating and gasping, when Jumong drew a line with his whip and the water stopped where he put it.

Everything he can do runs on the same current. He is fast, accurate and lucky with animals because his father came out of the sky and his mother was born in a river, and the river creatures answer him at the moment he says so out loud. The invocation at the water is not a spell, it is a claim of parentage, and it works because it is true. His limits sit in the same place. He cannot fight Buyeo, only run from it. He needs the horse, the three friends, his mother’s warning and his mother’s barley. And he cannot stay: after nineteen years a yellow dragon came down to fetch him, and from the hill east of his capital he went up by the dragon’s neck and left the throne behind, which meant leaving his wife and his eldest son in the country he had escaped from.

The oldest telling of this story is not about him at all. A Chinese philosophical work of the first century, Wang Chong’s Lunheng, already has the sunlight, the egg, the hostile king, the pigs and horses that will not harm the child, and the river that fills with fish and turtles, but it tells the whole thing about the founding of Buyeo, and the hero’s name is Dongmyeong. Two centuries later, Chen Shou’s account of the eastern peoples still keeps Buyeo and Goguryeo apart as separate nations with separate histories. Only from the fifth century onward does the same story turn up as Goguryeo’s own, with Buyeo demoted to the place the hero was born and had to flee. Mark Byington has argued that the borrowing was a claim to legitimacy rather than an accident of memory, and that Baekje later helped itself to the already-borrowed version.

The stele his great-great-grandson raised in 414 is the earliest Goguryeo version there is, and it is worth reading for what it leaves out. It gives Chumo a father who is the Emperor of Heaven and a mother who is the daughter of Habaek, and it does not name either of them. No Haemosu, no Yuhwa, no five-dragon chariot, no shapeshifting contest, no golden hairpin. All of that arrives later, most of it through a long poem Yi Gyu-bo wrote in 1193 out of an older Goguryeo history that has since been lost. What the stone does do, immediately after the dragon carries him off, is name the two kings who followed him. That was always the point of the egg.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Jumong?

Jumong was the founding king of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, traditionally dated to 37 BCE. In the myth he is the son of Haemosu, a figure who descends from the sky, and Yuhwa, daughter of the river god Habaek, and he is born from an egg. He is also known posthumously as King Dongmyeong, and the Gwanggaeto Stele of 414 records his name as Chumo.

Why is Jumong born from an egg?

Egg birth marks him as something other than an ordinary child, and it is a recurring feature of Korean and wider East Asian foundation stories. In the tale his mother Yuhwa is impregnated by a shaft of sunlight and lays the egg five days later. King Geumwa of Buyeo tries to destroy it by feeding it to animals and by breaking it himself, and the failure of both attempts is what proves the child is protected.

What does the name Jumong mean?

The twelfth-century Samguk sagi states that jumong meant a skilled archer in the language of Buyeo. The name suits the story, since his mother makes him a bow while he is still an infant and he never misses with it, and it is his marksmanship that makes the Buyeo princes want him dead.

How did Jumong cross the river when he fled Buyeo?

He called out his own parentage, declaring that his father was the Emperor of Heaven and his mother the daughter of Habaek, and struck the water. Fish and turtles rose and formed a bridge that he and his three companions crossed, and it broke apart under the soldiers pursuing him. That moment is recorded on the Gwanggaeto Stele, which makes it one of the oldest written pieces of the legend.

Is the Jumong story originally Korean?

The legend as Goguryeo told it is Korean, but the plot is older than Goguryeo’s use of it. Wang Chong’s Lunheng, written in China around 80 CE, tells almost exactly the same story about the founding of Buyeo under the name Dongmyeong. From the fifth century onward Goguryeo tells it about its own founder, with Buyeo reduced to the hero’s birthplace.

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