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Search all stories & guides ↗The magistrate's daughter of Miryang vanishes one moonlit night. Soon every new magistrate who comes to the town is found dead by morning, until one man keeps his candle burning and waits for the ghost.
Two brothers find two lumps of gold on the road and share them. Halfway across the river, the younger one suddenly throws his into the water. When his brother asks why, his answer surprises them both.
A girl on a swing and a magistrate's son fall in love in a single spring afternoon. When he leaves for Seoul and a cruel new governor arrives, Chunhyang chooses prison rather than break her word.
A cruel stepmother, impossible chores, magical helpers and a lost shoe. Korea's Kongjwi and Europe's Cinderella share the same beginning. But Kongjwi's story keeps going long after the wedding, into murder, a talking flower and a fire.
A young man lost in the hills near Gongju is carried off by a she-bear who takes the shape of a woman. They have two children together. Then one day he sees his chance to run, and the bear follows him to the river.
A son of heaven comes down to a mountain, and a bear and a tiger beg him to make them human. Only one of them can wait in the dark long enough. This is Korea's founding myth.
A kind boy hiding in an empty house cracks a hazelnut at exactly the wrong moment, and a party of goblins runs for their lives, leaving their magic club behind. Then his greedy brother tries the same trick.
A white horse bows beside a purple egg. Six golden eggs come down on a crimson rope. A boy sails in from the sea in a chest. Three kings of ancient Korea, and the strange eggs they came from.
A traveller shoots a snake to save a nest of baby magpies. That night, in a lonely house in the mountains, the snake's widow wraps herself around his neck. He will live only if the temple bell rings three times before dawn.
A little tree frog does the exact opposite of whatever his mother says. When she dies, he finally obeys her, and it is the worst thing he could have done.
The weaver of heaven marries a herdsman, and they are so happy that they forget all their work. Her furious grandfather sets the River of Stars between them. Once a year, the crows and magpies of earth fly up to build a bridge.
Two sisters die because of their stepmother's lies. Their ghosts go to every new magistrate for justice, and every new magistrate dies of fright, until one brave man stays to listen.
Disguised as a messenger from heaven, a young wizard orders the king to hand over a beam of solid gold. He sells it, feeds the starving, and spends years tricking the powerful, until he meets a scholar whose magic is greater than his.
Hatched from an egg that dogs would not eat and birds kept warm, the boy who never missed grew up hunted by seven jealous princes. When the river blocked his escape, the fish rose to carry him across.
A kind younger brother saves a swallow with a broken leg and gets a magic gourd seed. His greedy older brother decides to break a swallow's leg himself.
A clever man from Pyongyang gets nowhere in Seoul because of where he was born. So he decides to beat the rich and powerful at their own game, starting with a chicken he calls a phoenix and ending with the sale of an entire river.
Born to a minister and a servant, Hong Gildong is brilliant, gifted in magic and forbidden to call his own father 'father'. So he leaves home, gathers a band of outlaws and takes from corrupt officials to give to the poor.
A man who never lifts a finger tries on an old craftsman's ox mask, just for fun. It will not come off. Now he must plough fields from dawn to dusk, and there is only one thing that can turn him back.
A girl with a cruel stepmother is given impossible tasks, helped by a cow, a toad and a flock of birds, and loses a shoe on the way to a feast. It is Korea's Cinderella, but it keeps going after the wedding.
A king owns a millstone that grinds out anything you ask for. A thief steals it, rows out to sea and asks for salt. It works perfectly. The trouble is, he never learned how to make it stop.
An old man with a big lump on his cheek sings to a crowd of dokkaebi in an empty house, and they pay him to take the lump off. His jealous neighbour, who has a lump too, decides to try the same trick.
A king teases his crying daughter that he will marry her to Foolish Ondal, the beggar boy everyone laughs at. Years later she holds him to it, walks out of the palace, and turns the beggar into a general.
The Dragon King under the sea is dying, and only a rabbit's liver can save him. A loyal turtle sets off to fetch one. The rabbit has other plans.
A grandmother so tall that she used Hallasan as a pillow carried earth in her skirt and built the island of Jeju. Then she made the islanders an offer: sew her a pair of underclothes, and she would build them a bridge to the mainland.
To pay for her blind father's promise of three hundred sacks of rice, a girl of fifteen sells herself to sailors who need a sacrifice for the sea. It is Korea's most famous story of a devoted daughter.
A tiger eats a mother on her way home, dresses in her clothes and comes knocking for her children. Their only way out is a rope from the sky.
A lonely farmer asks who he is working for, and a voice from the field answers. Soon a hot meal is waiting for him every evening. But the woman who lives in the snail shell has asked him to wait, and he cannot.
A man hides the robe of a heavenly maiden bathing in a pool, and she cannot fly home. Korea, Japan and China all tell this story. What happens next depends on where you hear it.
A tiger who fears nothing hears a girl quiet her crying baby brother with a dried persimmon, and decides the persimmon must be the scariest monster in the world.
A beast eats a mother or grandmother, puts on her clothes and talks its way through the door to the children. Korea's sun and moon siblings, Little Red Riding Hood and their cousins from China, Taiwan and Japan all face the same disguised monster.
A woodcutter saves a deer and is rewarded with a secret: where the heavenly maidens bathe, and how to keep one on earth. It is Korea's best-known love story, and one of its saddest.