Mount Taebaek

The stone is stacked, not cut. On the summit, an oval wall of piled rock rises about two and a half metres, twenty-seven and a half metres around, with a flight of steps climbing the southern face. There were nine of those steps originally, which is why people took to calling the thing a nine-tier pagoda, though nobody has ever mistaken it for one. At this height the wind comes across the ridge with nothing to break it. The yews at the top have grown sideways under it, and the surviving needles smell of resin and cold.

This is the Cheonwangdan, the Altar of the Heavenly King, and it is the largest structure of its kind in Korea. A second altar, the Janggundan, stands on the rise behind it to the north, and a lower one sits below the southern slope. Every year on 3 October, the national holiday that commemorates the founding of the country, offerings are laid on the top of the oval and a rite is made to heaven.

The reason an altar is up there at all comes from a thirteenth-century monk’s compilation. In the Samguk Yusa, Hwanin has a son called Hwanung who keeps looking down at the human world and wanting it. The father works out what his son is after, looks over the peaks of Samwi and Taebaek, and judges that from up there humanity could be greatly benefited. He hands over three heavenly seals and sends the boy off to govern. Hwanung comes down onto the summit of Taebaek with three thousand followers and settles beneath the sindansu, the tree of the divine altar. He calls the place Sinsi, the divine market, and takes the title Heavenly King. With the earl of the wind and the masters of the rain and the cloud under his command he handles grain, life span, sickness, punishment, right and wrong, and three hundred and sixty other human affairs. Then a bear and a tiger who share a cave start praying at him to be made human, and he gives them a bunch of mugwort and twenty stalks of garlic and tells them to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days. The tiger cannot manage it. The bear lasts twenty-one and comes out of the dark as a woman, with nobody to marry, so she goes back to the tree and prays to be pregnant. Hwanung takes human shape for the occasion. Their son is Dangun Wanggeom, who founds the kingdom.

Here is the awkward part. Iryeon, compiling that passage, added his own note in small characters directly after the mountain’s name: Taebaek is present-day Myohyangsan. That mountain stands in what is now North Pyeongan province, hundreds of kilometres away, and the chronicle even writes the name with a different second character from the one the Gangwon mountain carries. Since the Joseon period a good many people have argued that neither is right and that the real Taebaek must be Baekdusan on the northern border. So the most famous mountain in Korean mythology may not be this one. What the Gangwon peak has instead is an unbroken record of people treating it as sacred, which is a different kind of claim and in some ways a stronger one.

That record starts with Silla, which counted Taebaeksan as the northern peak of its five sacred mountains, alongside Tohamsan, Jirisan, Gyeryongsan and the mountain then called Buak, and sent the middle grade of state sacrifice up it. The Goryeosa records shamans taking part in the rites here. A Samcheok gazetteer put it in verse: how blue-green it is, this Taebaek, with a shrine house on its top that they call the Heavenly King, revered ever since Silla and Goryeo, and the whole place a gathering of mudang and baksu. The Goryeo official Choe Seon was blunter. The famous mountains under heaven are many in the Three Han, the finest part of the Three Han is the southeast, and the most outstanding thing in the southeast is Taebaek.

The mountain earns none of this by looking dramatic. It has no strange rocks and no cliffs worth the name, and the walk up is easy enough that the summit is busy in good weather. The same gazetteer explains the name by pointing at Munsusan, the whitest of its peaks, where pale sand and gravel lie heaped as though under snow. Water is the other thing it gives. The Nakdong River rises on this mountain, and the streams that run east off the ridge feed it while the ones that run west end up in the Namhan, so the ridge line is a decision about which sea a raindrop reaches.

The old rite had an animal in it. According to the Dongguk Yeoji Seungnam, at the spring and autumn sacrifices a live ox was driven all the way up to the shrine and tethered in front of the altar, and once the offering was made the celebrants walked back down without turning round, because turning round was held to be an impiety. Three days later somebody came back up and led the ox home. It had a name of its own by then, the toe-u, the retired ox. The custom belonged to the Joseon period and is not kept any more.

What is kept is elaborate. The celebrant purifies himself for a year, sleeps on the mountain and makes the offering at midnight in a white robe. Flags of the Seven Stars and the Black Tortoise stand at the centre of the altar with banners for the thirty-three heavens and the twenty-eight lunar lodges planted around them. Almost every dish carries the word heaven in its name, heaven water, heaven fruit, heaven soup, heaven vegetables, heaven rice, laid out with tribute of silk, grain and money. A written order of service takes the rite through opening, summoning the spirit, offering the silk, presenting the food, stating the business, music, the prayer itself, farewell and close.

The mountain also acquired a god with a death certificate. Danjong was a boy king, deposed by his uncle and killed in 1457, and his tomb lies at Yeongwol not far from here. The story locally is that he rode a white horse up into Taebaeksan and became its mountain spirit, and a stele on the mountain names him in exactly those terms, King Danjong of Taebaeksan of the kingdom of Joseon. Shamans across the southern Gangwon valleys still work with him.

In the valley at Sodo-dong that everyone calls Danggol, the shrine valley, the great tree of the old shrine is still standing and the platform beside it is still there. The shrine house itself came down in the 1970s, when folk religion on the mountain was cleared out in the name of tidiness. What replaced it is a cement-brick altar on a stone terrace roughly fourteen metres by ten, and it is never cold, because people never stopped coming and the incense and the candles are always going.

Honesty requires two more things. Nothing prehistoric survives on this mountain, no artefacts and no legend older than the books; the name simply appears one day in the Samguk Sagi and the Samguk Yusa and everything else is downstream of that. And the hall of Dangun that now stands in Danggol was built in 1978, by people from Samcheok who had organised a society and raised the money because they felt the joint Dangun rite up at the Cheonwangdang had drifted too far into shamanic performance. The shrine to the founder on the mountain of the founding is younger than the coal mines in the town below.

Buddhism got its own story out of the place. The Samguk Yusa has the monk Jajang waiting at a spot on Taebaeksan for Manjusri, who had promised to meet him. An old layman turns up in a patched robe carrying a dead dog in a bramble basket and says he has come to see Jajang. Jajang takes one look and has him thrown out as a lunatic. The old man remarks that he had come expecting a man who had reached release and has evidently got the wrong person, sets the basket down, and the dead dog stands up as a lion and carries him off in a blaze of light. Jajang chased that light up the southern ridge and never caught it.

What the mountain gives is protection and access: a thousand years of war are said never to have reached it, and it is still regarded as the training ground where a shaman is made. What it withholds it withholds on conditions. The offering only works if the year of fasting has been kept, the road home only works if nobody looks back, and the mountain’s own claim to be the one in the story is a matter of a small annotation that a monk wrote seven hundred years ago and that nobody has been able to overturn or confirm since.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mount Taebaek?

Mount Taebaek, or Taebaeksan, is a 1,566.7-metre mountain on the border of Taebaek City in Gangwon and Bonghwa County in North Gyeongsang, South Korea. It has been treated as a sacred mountain since at least the Silla period and carries the largest heaven-altar in the country on its summit. The Nakdong River rises on its slopes.

Is Mount Taebaek the mountain where Hwanung came down from heaven?

That is disputed, and the dispute is older than it looks. The Samguk Yusa places Hwanung’s descent on the summit of a mountain called Taebaek, but the compiler Iryeon annotated the name as Myohyangsan, in what is now North Korea, and from the Joseon period onward many have argued instead for Baekdusan. The Gangwon mountain carries the name and the ritual tradition, but the identification is not settled.

What is the Cheonjedan on Mount Taebaek?

The Cheonjedan is the set of altars at the summit of Mount Taebaek, dominated by the oval Cheonwangdan of piled stone, about 2.4 metres high and 27.5 metres in circumference, with the Janggundan to the north and a lower altar to the south. It was designated a national folklore heritage property in 1991. A rite to heaven is performed there each year on 3 October.

Why is King Danjong worshipped on Mount Taebaek?

Danjong was a child king of Joseon who was deposed by his uncle and killed in 1457, and he is buried at nearby Yeongwol. Local tradition holds that he rode a white horse into Mount Taebaek and became its mountain god, and a stele on the mountain names him as such. Shamans throughout southern Gangwon still address him.

What was the retired ox of Mount Taebaek?

At the spring and autumn sacrifices recorded in the Dongguk Yeoji Seungnam, a live ox was driven up to the summit shrine and tethered in front of the altar, and the celebrants descended afterwards without looking back. Three days later the animal was led back down, and it was called the toe-u, the retired ox. The custom belonged to the Joseon period and is no longer practised.

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