Jumong foundation myth

At a Glance

• Central figures: Haemosu, the sun-god who descended to the banks of the Amnok River; Yuhwa, daughter of the river god Habaek, who bore a miraculous egg; Jumong, the divine archer who founded the kingdom of Goguryeo.
• Setting: The lands around the Amnok River and the kingdom of Buyeo in the northern Korean peninsula, as recorded in the Samguk Sagi and Samguk Yusa.
• The turn: King Geumwa of Buyeo discovered Yuhwa cast out by her father and took her into his court, where she gave birth to a great egg from which Jumong was born - a boy whose skill with the bow aroused the murderous jealousy of the king’s own sons.
• The outcome: Jumong fled south with three companions, crossed the Eomho River by miraculous intervention, and established Goguryeo at Jolbon in 37 BCE, becoming its first king.
• The legacy: Goguryeo endured for nearly seven hundred years as one of the great kingdoms of Korean history, and Jumong is honored as its divine founder - the Holy King of the East, Dongmyeongseong Wang.

Haemosu came down from the sky riding a chariot drawn by five dragons. He alighted on the banks of the Amnok River near the capital of Buyeo and saw three women bathing in the shallows of a place called Bear Heart Pool. They were daughters of Habaek, lord of the river. The youngest was Yuhwa.

He pursued her. She tried to flee, but he was a god, and the river bent to hold her. He took her as his wife. Habaek raged - his daughter had been dishonored without the proper rites of marriage. He demanded Haemosu prove his divinity. Haemosu proved it. But the arrangement fractured anyway, as arrangements between gods and river lords do, and when the sun-god returned to the sky, Yuhwa was left behind - pregnant, disgraced, and cast out by her own father.

The Egg in the Palace

King Geumwa of Buyeo found Yuhwa by the Ubal River. She was living rough, her lips swollen, her clothes torn. He recognized something extraordinary in her and brought her to the palace, but she was not treated as a queen. She was kept in a closed chamber. Sunlight followed her. No matter how the servants shuttered the windows or moved her to darker rooms, a beam of light tracked across the floor and fell on her body.

She became pregnant from the light and gave birth not to a child but to an egg the size of a man’s fist. Geumwa was disturbed. He ordered the egg thrown to the dogs. The dogs would not eat it. He ordered it cast into the road where ox-carts would crush it. The oxen walked around it. He ordered it thrown into the fields. Birds gathered over the egg and covered it with their wings to keep it warm. He tried to crack it open himself. He could not. Finally he returned it to Yuhwa.

She wrapped the egg in cloth and kept it in a warm place. A boy broke through the shell. He was strong from the first hour, and his eyes were sharp and restless.

The Boy Who Never Missed

They called him Jumong. The word meant “skilled archer” in the Buyeo tongue, and it fit before he could walk properly. By seven he was making his own bows. By the time he was a young man, he could hit a fly on the wing across a courtyard. No one in Buyeo could match him.

This was the problem. King Geumwa had seven sons of his own. The eldest, Daeso, watched Jumong split arrows at impossible distances and understood what the court understood: a boy born from an egg, fathered by a sun-god, who never missed a shot, would not remain a subject forever. Daeso and his brothers went to their father.

He is not human. If we do not deal with him now, there will be trouble later. Kill him.

Geumwa would not kill him - he had some feeling for Yuhwa, or some fear of what Haemosu might do. But he demoted Jumong to stable-keeper to humble him. This was a miscalculation. Jumong learned the horses. He identified the best one in the king’s herd and starved it until its ribs showed. He fed the worst one until it gleamed. When the king inspected the stable, he saw a fat horse and a thin horse and gave Jumong the thin one. Jumong took it and fed it back to strength. Now he had the fastest horse in Buyeo, and no one knew.

The Crossing at Eomho

Yuhwa found out what Daeso was planning. She went to her son at night.

They will kill you. Go south. Go now.

Jumong rode before dawn with three men - Oi, Mari, and Hyeopbo. They rode hard toward the Eomho River. Behind them, Daeso’s riders came fast. At the riverbank Jumong pulled up. The water was high and wide. There was no bridge, no boat, no ford.

He stood at the bank and spoke to the water.

I am the son of the sun-god and the grandson of the lord of the river. I am being chased. The crossing is before me and the swords are behind me. Help me.

Fish and turtles rose from the river. They packed themselves together, back to shell to back, and formed a bridge across the current. Jumong and his three companions rode across. The moment they reached the far bank, the creatures dispersed. Daeso’s riders arrived at the water and could not cross.

Jolbon

Jumong traveled south until he reached the Jolbon valley, a place of high ground and flowing water where the Biryu River bent around a defensible rise. He met three men on the road - one wearing hemp, one wearing monk’s cloth, one wearing water-grass. They joined him. Others followed. He had the look of a king about him and, more importantly, the lineage: grandson of the river, son of the sun, born from an egg that dogs would not eat and oxen would not crush.

He established his capital at Jolbon and named his kingdom Goguryeo. The year, by later reckoning, was 37 BCE. He was twenty-two years old.

He was not gentle in what followed. The neighboring Biryu kingdom resisted him. Its king, Songyang, challenged Jumong’s legitimacy - Prove you are a king. They competed: whose deer park was larger, whose palace older, whose rains came first. Jumong won every contest, some by divine intervention, some by cunning. Songyang’s kingdom was absorbed. Goguryeo grew.

Dongmyeongseong Wang

Jumong reigned for nineteen years. He consolidated the northern territories, married a woman of the Jolbon region, and fathered a son named Yuri who would succeed him. When Yuri arrived at Jolbon from Buyeo - having found the broken sword-piece his father had left as a token of recognition - Jumong acknowledged him and named him heir.

Jumong died in the ninth month of his fortieth year. The Samguk Sagi records that he ascended to heaven and did not return. His body was not buried - or if it was, the chronicles do not say where. He was given the posthumous title Dongmyeongseong Wang, the Holy King of the East.

Goguryeo endured for six hundred and sixty-eight years after him. It stretched from the Amnok to the plains of Manchuria, fought the Sui and Tang dynasties of China to standstills, and produced warrior-kings who traced their blood to the egg, the river, and the sun. Every one of them claimed descent from the boy who never missed.