The Brothers Who Threw Away Their Gold

In the days of King Gongmin of Goryeo, two brothers lived in a village not far from the Yangcheon River. Their parents had died when they were young, and they had grown up looking after each other. They shared one small field and one small house, and when there was only one bowl of rice, they split it down the middle without even thinking about it.

People in the village used to say that you could not get a knife blade between those two brothers. If the older one was sick, the younger one did his work as well as his own. If the younger one was in trouble, the older one was always there before anyone had to call him. Neither of them could remember a single serious quarrel.

One autumn morning they set off together to visit a market town on the other side of the river. The road was dusty and the sun was warm, and they walked side by side, talking about the harvest, about the price of rice, about whether it would be a cold winter.

Something in the dust

They had gone a fair way when the younger brother suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” asked the older brother.

The younger brother did not answer. He was staring at something at the side of the road, half buried in the dust, that caught the sunlight and threw it back. He bent down, brushed away the dirt and picked it up. It was heavy for its size, and it was yellow, and it glowed.

“Brother,” he whispered, “I think this is gold.”

The older brother came and looked. It was gold, a lump of it as big as a hen’s egg. And when he looked down, he saw that right beside the place where it had lain there was another one, just the same.

For a long moment neither of them said anything. Then they both began to laugh. They looked up and down the road, but there was no one in sight, no traveller who might have dropped it, nobody to claim it. It was as if the gold had been waiting there just for them.

“Two lumps,” said the younger brother, “and two of us. One each!”

He kept one and held out the other to his older brother, who took it and turned it over and over in his hands. They tucked the gold away safely in their sleeves and set off again, and now the road seemed to fly past under their feet.

“With this I could buy a field of my own,” said the older brother. “A good one, down by the river, where the soil is rich.”

“And I could mend the roof before winter,” said the younger brother, “and buy an ox, and never have to borrow one again.”

They talked like this all the way to the riverbank, each dreaming out loud, and each laughing at the other’s dreams.

But somewhere along the way, though neither of them noticed it at first, the laughter grew a little quieter. The older brother found himself walking half a step ahead. The younger brother found himself touching his sleeve every few minutes, to make sure the gold was still there. And when a stranger passed them going the other way, both of them glanced at him sharply, and then at each other, and then away.

Crossing the river

At the crossing called Gongam ferry, an old boatman was waiting with his flat wooden boat. The brothers paid their fare and climbed in, and sat side by side on the plank seat as the boatman pushed off from the bank with his long pole.

The river was wide there, and smooth, and the boat moved slowly. The brothers had stopped talking. The older brother was looking out across the water. The younger brother sat with one hand inside his sleeve, resting on the lump of gold.

Swallows dipped low over the water. On the far bank, women were washing clothes and beating them on flat stones, and the sound came across the water in a slow, steady rhythm. It should have been a peaceful crossing.

Halfway across, without a word, the younger brother took out his gold. He held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, looking at it. Then he threw it as far as he could out into the river. It flashed once in the sunlight and vanished beneath the water with a small splash.

The boatman nearly dropped his pole. The older brother leapt up so fast the boat rocked.

“What are you doing?” he cried. “Are you mad? Why did you throw it away?”

The younger brother did not answer at once. He sat looking at the ripples spreading out over the place where the gold had gone. When he spoke, his voice was quiet.

“Brother,” he said, “you know I have always loved you. All my life, there has never been anything I would not share with you. But just now, sitting here with the gold in my sleeve, I caught myself looking at you, and a thought came into my head. I thought, if I had found it alone, both lumps would be mine. And for a moment, just a moment, I felt something like hatred for you.”

He shook his head.

“I never felt that before in my whole life. It frightened me. This gold has only been mine since this morning, and already it is turning me into someone I don’t want to be. It is an unlucky thing. It is better to throw it into the river and forget all about it than to let it come between us.”

The older brother sat down slowly. He took out his own lump of gold and looked at it for a long time, while the boatman waited and the river slid past.

For a while he did not speak. The boatman, not knowing where to look, kept his eyes fixed on the far bank and pushed steadily on his pole.

“You are braver than me,” he said at last. “I was feeling the same thing. I was thinking that the field by the river would be even better if I had your gold too. I was ashamed of it, and I was going to keep quiet and hope it went away.”

And he threw his gold into the river after his brother’s.

The Shallows of Thrown Gold

The brothers reached the far bank with empty sleeves and light hearts. They did their business in the market town, walked home together in the evening, and went on living just as they always had, in their one small house with their one small field, sharing everything. They never did buy the ox, or the field by the river. But nobody in the village ever saw a quarrel between them for the rest of their lives.

As they climbed out of the boat, the younger brother laughed, and this time it was his old laugh, the one from before the gold. The older brother put an arm round his shoulders, the way he used to when they were boys.

Word of what had happened at the ferry spread up and down the river, and people began to call the stretch of water where the brothers threw away their fortune Tugeumroe, the Shallows of Thrown Gold. In time the name was written down in the great geography book of the kingdom, so that anyone who crossed at Gongam would know what had happened there.

Other versions

Storytellers have told this tale in many ways. In the most common spoken version, the brothers find just one lump of gold, but when they come back to it later it has become two, and to other people passing by, it looks like a snake. In another, it is two poor men named Jiseong and Gamcheon who refuse to be greedy. And in yet another, the older brother finds a magic pearl inside a fish, the brothers keep politely offering it to each other until they throw it away, and the next fish they catch has two pearls inside.

Talk about it

Would you have thrown the gold away? Was there another way the brothers could have solved the problem? Why do you think the younger brother told the truth about his feelings instead of keeping quiet?

Words to know

Hyeongje (형제) means brothers. Tugeum (투금) means throwing gold. Uae (우애) is the love and loyalty between brothers and sisters. Goryeo (고려) was the Korean kingdom from 918 to 1392, which gave Korea its English name.