If one animal belongs to Korean folklore above all others, it is the tiger. Old Korean stories traditionally begin “long, long ago, when tigers smoked pipes”, and from that first line the tiger is everywhere: prowling the mountain roads at night, knocking on cottage doors in disguise, sitting beside the mountain god, grinning foolishly in folk paintings and, more than once, being outwitted by a rabbit or a baby’s dried persimmon. Few creatures in any culture manage to be so frightening and so funny at the same time.
A real and terrible neighbour
Korean tigers were not imaginary. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture notes that the Samguk Sagi already records five tigers entering a Baekje fortress in the reign of King Onjo, and that the records of every Korean kingdom, from Goguryeo and Silla to Goryeo and Joseon, are full of hohwan (호환), tiger attacks. As late as the early twentieth century, Korean newspapers were reporting tigers in Seoul’s Samcheong-dong, a tiger inside Changgyeonggung Palace and people killed on mountain roads in Gangwon province. During the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, Japanese generals competed to hunt Korean tigers, and around ten were captured or killed and taken back to Japan.
The tiger’s names show how people felt about it. The old native word is beom (범). Joseon writers also called it sangun, “lord of the mountains”, or even sansin, “mountain god”. The word horangi, now the everyday word for tiger, was once a vague term for any dangerous beast, combining the characters for tiger and wolf, and the encyclopedia suggests it only became the standard name in the twentieth century.
Lord of the mountains
Because the tiger was the most dangerous animal in the country, the encyclopedia explains, people treated it with enormous respect, as the lord of the mountains. Ancient Chinese records say the Ye people of the northeast made offerings to the tiger and worshipped it as a god. In later belief, the tiger became the messenger of the mountain god, or the mountain god himself, and people believed that if they neglected the rites for the mountain god, a tiger attack would follow. On the first tiger day of the lunar new year, the encyclopedia adds, people avoided going out and behaved with care, to keep tigers away for the year.
That is why almost every painting of the mountain god includes a tiger, usually lounging beside him like a giant pet with a sweet, slightly silly face.
Meet Sansin, the mountain god →
The tiger who failed to become human
Korea’s founding myth gives the tiger a famous walk-on part. When the god Hwanung came down from heaven, a bear and a tiger living in a cave begged him to make them human. He gave them mugwort and garlic and told them to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days. The bear endured and became a woman, who later gave birth to Dangun, the founder of Gojoseon. The tiger could not bear it and ran out of the cave.
Ever since, Koreans have joked about the impatient tiger and the patient bear. But the story also places the tiger at the very beginning of Korean history, as one of the two animals that wanted, more than anything, to be human.
Grateful tigers and tiger maidens
Korean storytelling gives the tiger many personalities. The encyclopedia notes that in legends the tiger often appears as a symbol of filial devotion, as an animal that repays kindness, and as a mysterious, almost holy creature, while in folktales it tends to be greedy and stupid. Folktales and folk paintings also show tigers helping good people, loyal subjects and devoted children. In many stories, a person helps a tiger in trouble, and the grateful animal later repays the kindness.
The most moving tiger tale is very old. The Samguk Yusa tells how a young man of Silla named Kim Hyeon met a tiger maiden in human form during a temple festival. When her brothers’ crimes brought heaven’s punishment on her family, she chose to die in their place, and to die by Kim Hyeon’s hand so that he would be rewarded. Kim Hyeon built a temple in her memory. The encyclopedia describes this tiger as an image of love, sacrifice and holiness.
The tiger in folktales
In everyday folktales the tiger is a much less dignified figure. It is huge, hungry and not very bright, and the fun is watching small, clever people and animals get the better of it.
In The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon, a tiger overhears a mother hushing her crying baby. Threats of a tiger mean nothing to the child, but the moment the mother offers a dried persimmon, the crying stops. The tiger concludes that a “dried persimmon” must be a monster even more terrible than himself, and the misunderstanding only gets worse from there.
Read The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon →
In The Sun and the Moon, the tiger is far more sinister. It eats a mother on her way home over the mountain passes, puts on her clothes and comes knocking at her children’s door. The children escape up a tree and pray to heaven, and become the sun and the moon.
The tiger’s role changes from tale to tale, and there is no single “Korean tiger”. It can be a deadly threat, a figure of fun, a grateful friend or a sacred guardian, sometimes all in the same evening of storytelling.
The tiger today
The tiger still stands for Korea. Folk paintings of a goofy tiger and a cheeky magpie are among the best-loved images in Korean art, and a friendly tiger was the mascot of the 1988 Seoul Olympics and, in a white tiger version, of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Korean children still grow up on tiger stories that begin in the days when tigers smoked pipes.
Quick facts
The tiger, horangi or beom, was both a real danger in old Korea and the central animal of Korean folklore. It was honoured as the lord of the mountains and the messenger or form of the mountain god. In the Dangun myth it fails the test of becoming human. Legends show grateful, devoted and even self-sacrificing tigers, while folktales make it a greedy fool outwitted by the small and clever, as in The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon.