Yong

Rain arriving after forty dry days has a smell to it, wet dust and cold stone lifting off the paddy banks, and in Korea that smell was credited to something enormous turning over in the water. The yong did not hoard gold or burn villages. It carried weather. Where European dragons were an obstacle to be got past, the Korean dragon was closer to a landlord, and the correct posture toward it was not courage but courtesy.

Look at one on a Joseon scroll and the body is all motion, a slow S of muscle disappearing into painted cloud. The scales run to eighty-one, nine times nine, a doubled auspicious number that marks the animal as saturated with yang. The beard is the tell. Chinese and Japanese dragons carry beards, but the Korean one grew longer over the centuries until it trails behind the jaw like river weed in a current. Four claws, not five, and the folk reasoning for that fourth digit is pleasingly practical: it works as a thumb, and a dragon needs a thumb to hold the yeouiju, the burning pearl that falls from heaven and grants its bearer creation at will. Three-toed dragons went without. They were reckoned the lesser sort.

No yong was born a yong. Korean folk tradition puts every one of them at the end of a long apprenticeship as an imugi, a vast python-bodied serpent living in cold water or in caves, hornless, patient and generally harmless to anyone who leaves it alone. The accounts do not agree on what ends the wait. Some say a thousand years in the water is the price. Others say the imugi must catch a yeouiju as it drops from the sky, and that the catching is the whole of it. Others again say the imugi is a cursed thing, barred from ascent by an old offence nobody can now name. Spotting one was good luck, which suggests the sighting was rare enough to be worth mentioning and benign enough to be worth wishing for.

The rest of the time they were simply in the landscape. A man walking a paddy bank at dusk sees the surface of the irrigation pond shudder without wind, once, and then settle. He goes home. He does not go back to that pond after dark for a month, and he tells nobody, because saying it out loud invites the kind of attention nobody wants.

The most famous yong in Korea was a king. Munmu of Silla, who finished the unification of the peninsula, left instructions before his death in 681 that he was to be cremated and laid in the East Sea, because he intended to become a dragon there and keep Japanese raiders off his coast. His ashes went to a low rock a few hundred metres offshore from the Gyeongju coastline, still called Daewangam, the Great King’s Rock. Waves break over it constantly. His son Sinmun finished the coastal temple his father had begun and named it Gameunsa, the Temple of Gratitude, and had the masons cut an opening beneath the stone floor of the main hall, facing east, so that the sea could run in under the building and the dragon could come and go as it pleased.

That opening is still there in the ruins, a dark channel under the foundation stones with salt air moving through it. Whatever the builders believed, they built for it.

The sequel is stranger. A small mountain appeared in the sea off that coast, floating, shaped like a turtle’s head, with a single stalk of bamboo growing on it that split into two by day and closed into one by night. Sinmun sailed out. A dragon met him and told him to cut the bamboo and make a flute of it, saying the gift came from his father, now dragon of the East Sea, and from the general Kim Yusin, now a god of heaven. The instrument was called Manpasikjeok, the flute that calms ten thousand waves. Played, it turned back invading armies, ended plagues, brought rain in drought and stopped it in flood. It was kept as a treasure of the state.

Kings kept reaching for the same animal. The founding queen of Silla, Lady Aryeong, was said to have been born from the flank of a hen-dragon that appeared at a well, the left flank in one telling and the right in another, which is the kind of disagreement that tends to mean the story was old before anyone wrote it down. The Goryeo royal house traced itself to the daughter of the Dragon King of the West Sea, who married a man named Jakjegeon and bore the grandfather of the dynasty’s founder, and Goryeo kings were said to carry dragon scales in the hollow of the armpit as proof. When the Joseon dynasty needed to explain why it had replaced Goryeo, its scholars produced the Yongbieocheonga in 1447, the first substantial work ever printed in the new Korean alphabet, whose title means Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and whose six dragons are six royal ancestors. Kings wore the animal on their backs, five of them embroidered on the gonryongpo, and the navy carved its head onto the prow of the turtle ship.

Its powers follow from its element. The yong makes and unmakes rain, raises and settles the sea, and moves in cloud rather than merely through it. It can speak, and the old texts credit it with devotion and gratitude, which makes it negotiable in a way that most monsters are not. In the hand of a four-clawed dragon the yeouiju is close to unlimited, granting its holder whatever it can imagine.

The limits are the ones that come with being a creature of water. A yong is bound to the wet places, the river bend, the deep pond, the harbour mouth, and its power over a village is exactly as large as that village’s dependence on rain. It can be petitioned, which means it can also be neglected, and coastal communities kept up their offerings at the tideline for the same reason anyone keeps up a payment. Failure is the real weakness, and it is a failure of ascent. An imugi that never finds its pearl stays a snake in a cold pool for centuries. Worse, some of them turn. The seventeenth-century scholar Yi Sugwang recorded in his Jibong yuseol the country talk of the gangcheori, and the eighteenth-century Seongho saseol fills the picture in: a venomous dragon of swamps and lakes that gives off a heat fierce enough to burn the moisture out of the air, dragging drought behind it, throwing down hail and lightning on the crops. Where the gangcheori passes, the saying went, autumn feels like spring, and the fields die of it.

A dragon that fails is just a very large snake with a grudge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a yong in Korean mythology?

A yong is the Korean dragon, a benevolent serpentine water spirit associated with rain, rivers, lakes and the sea rather than with fire and destruction. It is described with eighty-one scales along its back, a long trailing beard and four clawed feet. Farmers and fishing communities treated it as the power responsible for rainfall and safe water.

How does an imugi become a yong?

Korean folk tradition holds that dragons begin as imugi, huge python-like serpents that live in deep water or caves, and the accounts differ on how the change happens. One version says the imugi must survive a thousand years. Another says it must catch a yeouiju, a wish-granting orb that falls from heaven. A third says imugi are cursed creatures permanently barred from becoming dragons.

What is the yeouiju?

The yeouiju is the luminous orb a Korean dragon carries in its claws or mouth, the Korean form of the wish-fulfilling jewel. Whoever wields it was said to be able to create at will. Korean tradition holds that only four-clawed dragons could grip one properly, since the fourth digit functioned as a thumb, which was taken as proof that they were the wiser and more powerful kind.

Which Korean king became a dragon?

King Munmu of Silla, who completed the unification of the Korean peninsula, asked before his death in 681 to be cremated and laid in the East Sea so that he could become a dragon and defend the coast from raiders. His remains were placed at the offshore rock still known as Daewangam. His son Sinmun completed the nearby temple of Gameunsa with a channel cut beneath the main hall so that the dragon could enter from the sea.

Are Korean dragons dangerous?

Korean dragons are generally benevolent and were petitioned rather than fought, but the tradition does keep a hostile counterpart. Seventeenth and eighteenth century Korean writings describe the gangcheori, a venomous failed dragon of swamps and lakes that radiates heat, burns the moisture out of the land and brings drought, hail and lightning down on crops.

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