Somewhere far below the surface of the sea, Korean storytellers say, there is a palace. Its halls are built of seven kinds of treasure, its food is fragrant and delicious, and everything in it is spotlessly clean. This is the Yonggung (용궁), the Dragon Palace, and its ruler is the Yongwang (용왕), the Dragon King, master of the waves, the fish and the winds. Kings claimed him as an ancestor. Fishing villages built shrines to him. And in one of Korea’s most famous tales, he falls ill and sends a turtle to fetch a rabbit’s liver.
The water god who became a king
Korea has always had water gods: gods of the sea, of rivers, of ponds and of wells. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture explains that, more often than not, these gods took the form of a dragon, so that belief in water gods and belief in dragon gods became almost the same thing. After Buddhism arrived in the Three Kingdoms period, the old water gods blended with the dragon kings of Buddhist scripture, and later Daoism added the idea of four Dragon Kings, one for each of the four seas, each ruling his own waters like a governor.
On land, dragon gods were farmers’ gods who brought rain. Legends from dragon pools and dragon wells all over Korea tell of dragons who repaid a kindness by sending rain and turning barren land into rich fields. At sea, the Dragon King ruled the fish and the waves, which made him the most important god of all for people who lived by fishing or trading across the water.
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Dragon kings and Korean kings
The Dragon King appears again and again in the old histories, often at the side of the nation’s rulers.
The Samguk Yusa tells of Lady Suro, a woman of famous beauty, who was travelling with her husband, newly appointed governor of Gangneung, when a sea dragon snatched her away into the water while they ate lunch at a seaside pavilion. On an old man’s advice, the people gathered, beat the ground with sticks and sang together, and the dragon returned her. Afterwards she told them what she had seen: a palace of seven treasures beneath the sea, with sweet, fragrant food, cleaner than anything in the human world.
The same book tells how, when a Tang Chinese fleet threatened Silla, the monk Myeongnang, who was said to have learned secret arts in the Dragon Palace, performed a ritual that sank the enemy ships. And King Munmu, who completed the unification of Silla, asked to be buried in the Eastern Sea so that he could become a great dragon and protect the kingdom. The encyclopedia records that he was laid to rest on a rock in the sea, and that he went on working wonders as a guardian dragon.
The Goryeo dynasty went further and claimed the Dragon King as family. According to its official history, Jakjegeon, the grandfather of Goryeo’s founder Wang Geon, was sailing to China to find his father when the Dragon King of the Western Sea begged for his help. A fox disguised as a Buddha statue had been tormenting him. Jakjegeon shot the fox with an arrow, and in thanks the Dragon King gave him his daughter as a wife. Their eldest son was Yonggeon, and Yonggeon’s son was Wang Geon, the king who founded Goryeo. A dragon’s blood, in other words, ran in the royal line.
Treasure from the Dragon Palace
Because the Dragon Palace was full of riches, many Korean legends tell of humans who were invited there and came back with a treasure. Often it begins with a kindness: someone rescues the Dragon King’s son and is taken down to the palace to be thanked. The encyclopedia mentions legends of this kind attached to real places, including a story about the origin of a temple’s sacred “sea seal” and the legend of Gongjicheon stream in Chuncheon.
Praying to the Dragon King
For Korea’s fishing families, the Dragon King was never just a figure in stories. The encyclopedia describes how villages on the east coast kept a Yongwangdang, a Dragon King shrine, and held a rite for him as a whole village on the first full moon of the lunar year, praying for a big catch and the safety of everyone in the community. On the west coast, women went down to the shore at night or before dawn with simple offerings to pray to the Dragon King, and when boats set out to fish, a larger rite was held on board. The Dragon King’s rite, the encyclopedia explains, was often led by fishing families’ women, who chose a high tide early in the lunar new year or the second month to lay food on the beach and pray to the Dragon Kings of the four seas for their families’ safety.
Inland, families also honoured the Dragon King at wells and springs, praying that the water would never run dry, and farmers held rites for him in summer to ask for rain. In great shaman rituals on the coast, offerings wrapped in paper, called “Dragon King rice”, were thrown into the sea at the end of the ceremony.
The Dragon King’s illness
The Dragon King’s most famous appearance in Korean storytelling is as a patient. In the pansori Sugungga (“Song of the Underwater Palace”), he falls gravely ill, and his doctors say only one cure will work: the liver of a rabbit. A loyal turtle volunteers to go up to the land, charms a rabbit with stories of the wonders of the palace, and carries it down on its back. Faced with the king’s knife, the rabbit thinks fast. It claims it left its liver hidden on land and must go back to fetch it. The Dragon King believes it, and the rabbit escapes.
The tale is a comedy, and part of the joke is the king himself: powerful, rich and surrounded by courtiers, yet so desperate and so gullible that a small animal outwits his entire court.
Read The Rabbit and the Dragon King →
The Dragon King’s daughter
On Jeju Island, a shamans’ myth makes the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea the father of a troublesome daughter, who is cast out of the palace in a stone chest and tries, disastrously, to become the goddess of birth. She loses the role in a flower-growing contest, and becomes instead the goddess who cares for children who die young.
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Quick facts
The Yongwang, or Dragon King, is the Korean god of the sea, who rules fish, waves and wind from a treasure-filled palace beneath the water. He grew from ancient water gods blended with Buddhist and Daoist dragon kings. Silla’s King Munmu became a guardian dragon of the sea, and Goryeo’s royal family claimed descent from the Dragon King of the Western Sea. Fishing villages hold Dragon King rites for a good catch and safety, and in the pansori Sugungga he is the sick king outwitted by a rabbit.