Ch'unhyang ka is Korea’s favorite story. No one knows when it was first told or who told it, but every Korean alive knows both the plot and the characters intimately. The tale had been told thousands of times: in Korean and Chinese, in verse and in prose, as opera, drama, film and musical comedy; in cartoons, and in elegant embroidery on screens and scrolls. It has become part of Korea’s folk heritage. Namwŏn, the town in Chŏlla province where the tale is set, thrives on the tourist trade attracted by Ch’un-hyang. There is no proof that she ever existed, but in Namwŏn there is a shrine to her where sacrifices are offered. Nothing could demonstrate more effectively the importance of the story in Korean tradition.
The tale is simple. An aristocrat’s son falls in love with the daughter of a kisaeng. They marry secretly, and are parted when the boy’s father is transferred to a new post in the capital. Another governor is appointed in the town who tries to take the girl into his household, but she refuses, despite cruel beatings, and is imprisoned. Meanwhile the boy attains government rank as an inspector and returns to punish the lecherous governor and deliver his faithful wife. It is a tale which blends eroticism and sadism under the twin banners of justice and morality. Popular literature knows no surer recipe for success.
The history of the text is so entangled that, although every important collection of Korean books has significant versions in woodblock or manuscript, the relations between them are barely clear. The consensus of opinion is that Ch’un-hyang was first heard of in a story sung by the wandering players of old Korea, the kwangdae, reciting a form of rhythmic chanted narrative now called p’ansori. The oldest version which is reliably datable is Ch’unhyang ka (Song of Ch’un-hyang) written as a long poem in Chinese by Yu Chin-han in 1754. How long the story had been in existence before that is sheer guesswork.
No other text can be certainly dated earlier than the nineteenth century, and most of them belong to a date later than 1860. Different traditions are discernible in the woodblock texts printed in Seoul (with related editions from Ansŏng, a town in the capital province) and those printed at Chŏnju, an important town in Chŏlla province. Two famous versions for singing were written by the well-known music teacher Sin Chae-hyo between 1866 and 1884. These and the many manuscripts show differences which have been compared with great diligence by Professor Kim Tong-uk (Ch'unhyang-jŏn yŏn ’gu. 1965) but their chronological relationships resist definitive clarification.
There have been several English versions of Ch’unhyang. The only one which is a translation is that published in the Korea Magazine in eleven instalments from September 1917 to July 1918. It was the work of Dr. James Gale, the distinguished Canadian missionary and lexicographer. He made a faithful rendering of Yi Hae-jo’s Okchunghwa, published in 1911. Others have translated modern rewritings of the tale, or used older texts but departed widely from them.
I have here made a new and complete translation of the Chŏnju woodblock edition. It is usually referred to as the Wanp’an, ‘printed in Wanju’ (Wanju is a literary name for Chŏnju). In recent years this text has attracted most attention from Korean scholars. It is the longest and fullest of the old versions. There is a convenient modern facsimile reprint of the woodblock edition (Seoul, Ehwa University, 1958) and several modern annotated editions, of which that by Professor Yi Ka-wŏn (1957) is perhaps the best.
The title of the Wanp’an edition is Yŏllyŏ Ch'unhyang sujŏl ka (Song of the Constancy of the Faithful Wife, Ch’un-hyang). Other versions have such titles as Ch’unhyang chŏn (‘Story of Ch’unhyang’—the most widely-used in common parlance), Honam akpu (‘Song of Chŏlla’), and Okchunghwa (‘The flower in the prisonhouse’—a twentieth-century invention). All these titles emphasize either the local setting of the story, or the heroine and the center of the romance. Calling Ch’un-hyang a faithful wife puts the story into an acceptable category of improving tales that the orthodox Confucianism of Korea could happily accept; but this high moral tone has less emotive effect than the elemental story of romance, separation, suffering and deliverance, which is the real artistic and psychological power of the Ch’unhyang legend. It is a classic expression of the love and redemption theme, and its spiritual roots go far deeper into human experience than Confucianism ever reaches.
Some writers pay great attention to the social criticism implied in the story: the problem of marriage across class boundaries, the plight of the countryfolk under a bad governor, the cheekiness of the servants, and other points showing sympathy for the oppressed rural population. This interpretation is a reading back into last century’s Korea of preoccupations that did not develop until later. There were the nineteenth-century peasant revolts in Korea, and there were even older satires against the aristocracy; Ch’unhyang ka shows concern about social injustice; but this concern is incidental to its main purpose. Marriage across class boundaries is a necessary device of the plot, and the remarks about the plight of the farmers come naturally from the fact that the hero is a government inspector. The book is remarkably free of true social satire, in strong contrast to the virulent satire of the Korean mask plays.
The literary style is not scholarly, but it presupposes education. Many of the jokes depend on a knowledge of Chinese characters, and it is packed with Chinese literary allusions and poetic quotations which would be meaningless to real peasants.
Nevertheless it is not a book to be read, but a text for a storyteller or reciter, or for performance by a small group of entertainers. Even in English translation it is clear that the style of composition differs in various sections of the work. Especially in the earlier parts there are long sections of lyrical descriptive writing, much of it heavily Chinese in style. These are designed for chanted or recitative performance. At various points there are songs in a more purely Korean style—the love-songs, Ch’unhyang’s songs and the farmers’ songs—which are also texts for singing. The thread of the story is kept up in swift and lucid prose, but is interspersed with long monologues in rhythmic prose and dramatic conversations which, especially in the closing pages, sometimes move with impressionistic speed and lightness of touch. Ch’unhyang ka is in the strict sense of the word a melodrama, a drama with singing.
The structure of the work in some respects resembles a film scenario. (One recent film used the text almost as it stands, and with great success.) It falls naturally into four sections. In many forms of entertainment the acts get shorter as the play progresses, and in Ch’unhyang ka the first section is by far the longest: the story of the meeting and marriage of the hero and heroine. It has the most ornate prose and the tenderest love passages, full of frank eroticism which uses imagery to create an effect at once sensuous and playful, tinged with innocence and genuine love. The second section tells of their parting, the third of Ch’un-hyang's sufferings and constancy under the new governor; here are the passages least likely to appeal to Western taste in their melodramatic pathos and sadistic violence. The last section describes the heroine’s deliverance by her husband, bringing the tale to a close with brisk narrative and dialogue. The whole has the pattern of a sonata with movements marked Allegretto amoroso, Largo lacrimoso, and Allegro vivace. This structure is simple and episodic. It shows no true development, no complications of plot which have to be solved: all moves in a single line. Interest is sustained by elaboration of themes and by the insertion of purple passages and songs.
Many of these descriptions and songs are in that favorite traditional Korean form, the list or litany, part of whose ancestry is the Chinese fu. The litanies may be built round puns, which are abundant in Korean because of the immense vocabulary based on Chinese homonyms: for instance, the songs on the puns for love, palace and farewell. The lists are usually opulent—the hero’s clothes, the food and wine on a table, a roll of beautiful women, lists of Korean beauty spots, even an exciting list of the towns passed through on a long journey. These compositions have a joy and zest which are paralleled in many Korean folk songs. Narrative ballads are less important in Korea than counting songs, alphabet songs (the hero’s explanation of the primer in Ch’un-hyang ka is essentially an alphabet song) topographical catalogues and commented lists of people and things.
The episodic structure makes for a loosely-knit work. Whole sections could be omitted without damaging its unity; and the time scheme of the story is sketchy, even at some points confused and contradictory. There are two different accounts of Ch’un-hyang’s birth, two different dates (springtime and Tano, which is summer) for the beginning of the love affair; the honeymoon cottage of the early section is suddenly given a proper name only in the last few pages. Clearly the book was not composed by a single author, and for that reason, if for no other, it is misleading to call it a novel.
The western reader who expects the intellectual texture and development of character that are essential aspects of the western novel will not find them in Ch’unhyang ka. Instead he will find the qualities of the romance: simply-defined issues, broadly-drawn characters, exciting incident relieved by comic interludes. Ch’un-hyang herself is an uncomplicated person: we know only that she is stubborn, beautiful, and truthful—all that a well-bred girl would wish to be. Her lover, Yi Mong-nyong, is no more clearly individuated: he is a model son and lover, handsome and clever and good. They each have a servant, much as Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines have corresponding attendants of a lower class, but Ch’un-hyang’s maid and Mong-nyong’s valet are not developed into a sub-plot; their purpose is purely dramatic, to give the leading characters someone to talk to. Ch’un-hyang’s mother says, or sings, a great deal, but does not emerge as anything more than a shrewd old woman. Mong-nyong’s father appears only in one ironical scene such as is otherwise provided by lower-class characters from the yamen offices. The villain, Pyŏn Hak-to, is a tyrant and no more. The minor characters are all more or less humorous, from the corrupt secretaries to the pathetic soothsayer and the venal guards.
Yet this simplicity builds up into the strong effect that Ch’unhyang ka has on its Korean audience. Especially when recited with music, the repetition of images, the inner consistency of each of the characters, the insistence on the elemental emotions of each incident—the beauty of the spring landscape, the love of the two youngsters, the bitterness of parting, the agonies of torture and waiting, the turmoil of the scene of deliverance and the peacefulness of the ending—all combine and fuse to create one of those works of popular art whose inspiration is derived less from the skill of the artist than from the demands of the audience. From its beginning in spring to its end in the harvest of another autumn, Ch’unhyang-ga is an intense and unified experience.
This translation has been made to be read and enjoyed, to give the pleasure intended by the original. The following notes are intended to help the reader find the flavor of Korean literature without being cloyed and hampered by too much detail.
The political setting
During the Yi dynasty (fifteenth to nineteenth century) Korea had a strictly Confucian polity. The king was supreme and sole ruler, but the country was administered by an elite of scholar-officials. These held all executive posts in capital and countryside, and were frequently transferred from one post to another to ensure that they did not become entrenched. Yi Mong-nyong’s father and Pyŏn Hak-to are members of this class. Lower ranks in the administration were not moved from post to post, but served the changing governors and magistrates, forming a stable local bureaucracy. Government was often corrupt: the governors milked their districts for all they were worth, and the underlings were experts in bribery and squeeze. These were the staff of the local government offices, or yamen, who play such an important role in Ch’unhyang ka.
The king occasionally appointed secret inspectors (amhaeng ŏsa) to travel incognito and detect misgovernment. The inspectors’ insignia were a heavy round brass plaque with a design of horses on it, and a brass yardstick. Yi Mong-nyong is made a secret inspector in Ch’unhyang ka, and the description of the office is realistic.
Social classes were clearly delineated. There was no hereditary nobility, but there was an hereditary aristocratic class (yangban) which alone could aspire to government service above the level of clerks.
Korean living
Most of the references to Korean life are self-explanatory. Koreans still use little furniture. Chairs were practically unknown in the times of Ch’unhyang ka; people sat on the floor, and the wealthier ones used cushions. Bedding was laid out on the floor, which was warmed by flues underneath in cold weather. Meals were arranged in the kitchen on low tables and the food-laden table carried in and set before the diner.
Long distances were measured in li. Ten li approximated to one hours walking distance.
The yang was the Chinese or Korean dollar, the largest silver coin that was used.
Kisaeng
Kisaeng were lower-class women trained in literature, music and dancing as entertainers for men of the upper classes. They were often but not always courtesans. The ambivalence of Ch’un-hyang’s social position as the daughter of an aristocrat and a kisaeng is crucial to her story. The version translated here lays more stress than some others do on her aristocratic parentage and gentle upbringing.
Names of the characters
Koreans avoid the use of names and prefer to substitute titles or relationship-terms for them. It seems that in the earliest version Ch’un-hyang was the only character to be named. Ch’un-hyang means ‘spring fragrance’, and is a highly romantic invention. It is the type of name given to kisaeng—there is a list of such names in the middle of the story and her mother’s name, Wŏl-mae, ‘moonlit plumblossom’, is another example. The maid’s name, Hyang-dan, ‘fragrant cinnabar’, is of the same kind.
The hero was originally called Yi Torŏyng. This is still the popular way of referring to him. Toryŏng was a respectful form of address and title for an unmarried youth of good family, but is untranslatable in modern English. In some versions of the story he is called Yŏng, and in others Ch’un-dŭk. The name Mong-nyong, ‘dream dragon’, and the incident of Wŏl-mae’s dream about it are late additions, but are now firmly established in the popular mind.
His servant is described in Korean as a pangja. A pangja was a servant attached to a provincial yamen. I have called him a valet, even though this is not an accurate translation, in order to distinguish him from other servants and ‘boys’. Pangja has disappeared from the vocabulary of modern Korean, and many Koreans are now mistakenly convinced that the word is a proper name, but it is unquestionably a title. Modern feeling about the story has magnified the pangja’s role, often excluding other servants. It has not only made him a wit who outshines his master, but has also given him a romance of his own, so that he ends up marrying Ch’un-hyang’s maid, Hyang-dan. The Wanp’an version makes less of the pangja than some of the other texts do, but in the traditional story he is a necessary minor character and no more. The modern enlargement of his part in films and rewritings of the story is a legitimate development from his pertness in the older versions, and an interesting demonstration of the ability of such a story to keep its place in the Korean mind by changing with the times.
The age of the protagonists
Ip’al ch’ŏngch’un, ‘Twice eight green spring-time’, is the conventional phrase used to describe the age of Mong-nyong and Ch’un-hyang at the time of their meeting. This is literally sixteen, but making allowance for the Oriental method of reckoning age, I have translated it as fifteen. It is the same age as that of Pao-yüeh, the hero of the Dream of the Red Chamber, and of Shao-yu in the Nine Cloud Dream. It compares favorably with the age of Shakespeare’s Juliet. In nineteenth-century Korea it would not have been considered an early age for marriage. Many boys were married at twelve.
The punishment
The punishment scene has some obscurities.
The executioner deliberately chooses a paddle that will break easily so that he can break it and pretend to beat Ch’un-hyang much harder than he really does. He loudly declares that he will be merciless, but quietly tells her he will make the beating as light as possible so long as she screams and reacts violently—joining him in a pretence of fierce torture. This vignette of another kind of corruption does not fit well with the ensuing songs of exquisite pain; but the audience would want to feel that the executioner was soft while at the same time it would not want to be spared any of the possible agonies of the torture.
The cangue was a large and heavy board with a hole near one end, through which the prisoner’s neck was inserted. The opening was sealed behind the prisoner’s head. While it was being worn the prisoner was forced to sit or squat, because the cangue made walking impossible, unless someone else took the weight of it; and of course the prisoner could not lie down.
The place of Chinese literature
In Korea at the time of Ch’unhyang ka the only education given to anyone was in Chinese grammar and literature, much as Latin grammar was the staple of medieval European education. So great was Koreans’ reverence for the Ming dynasty that they even produced the legend, referred to near the beginning of Ch’unhyang ka, that the first Ming emperor had been born while his parents were living in Korea. Hence when Yi Mong-nyong goes home to read books he reads the Chinese classics, eventually spending most time on the Ch’ŏnja-mun (T'ien-tzu-wen) or Thousand Character Classic, which was the traditional primer of all Korean boys. It consists of 250 four-character lines of Chinese verse, in which no character is ever repeated. His long explanation of the opening verses, character by character, begins in high style but deteriorates into erotic fantasy. The whole episode illuminates the place of the book in Korean education in a pleasantly humorous way. Because it is a primer Ch’ŏnja-mun is the only book the pangja claims to know anything about.
The peak of Chinese study was reading and writing poetry in Chinese, according to the rules of Chinese prosody. It was a favorite pastime for all the members of a party to write verses on the same subject with the same rhyming words, in a kind of poetic contest. This is done at the governor’s birthday feast in Ch’unhyang ka, though we are given the text of Yi Mong-nyong’s verses only.
Such poems were usually written in conscious imitation of T’ang and Sung poets. Li Po, Tu Fu, Su Tung-p’o and Po Chu-i were for Koreans the poets par excellence. Most of the verse quoted in Ch'unhyang ka is from Li Po or some other of the T’ang poets. A notable exception is the first stanza of the first song in the ancient Shih ching (Book of Songs). This marriage song, undoubtedly because it is the first in the book, was the best-known poem in the Shih ching and widely quoted. In Ch’unhyang ka the verse fitting partner for a lord is quoted so frequently that it becomes a refrain. Mong-nyong’s restlessness when waiting to see Ch’un-hyang again (longing, longing, he tossed and fidgeted) and Wŏl-mae’s remark about a happy marriage (with lutes and guitars) are from the same poem.
References to Chinese stories are so numerous in Ch'unhyang ka that full annotation of them in a translation would only be pedantic. Fortunately the purpose of most of the allusions is self-evident, so that annotations are not necessary for the general reader. Though they appear rich and varied to the Westerner who approaches them for the first time they in fact represent a limited and romantic repertoire. Most of them can be reduced to a few categories:
1) FAMOUS BEAUTIES. Yang Kuei-fei, the plump and extravagant concubine of the Emperor Hsüan Tsung of T’ang. Because of her pathetic end, executed at the roadside, and in spite of her profligacy, she has become East Asia’s paramount symbol of beauty and pathos.
Wang Chao-chün was a concubine in the harem of the Han Emperor Yüan-ti. She earned the hatred of a minister, Mao, who by skillful use of a false portait succeeded in keeping her from the emperor. Eventually she was used as a bribe to persuade a barbarian Khan to withdraw from Chinese soil. When she reached the boundary at the Amur River she plunged in and was drowned. Her tomb there is called the Verdant Tomb. There are several versions of this legend.
The fairy of Wu-shan occurs in the very old story of a prince who was enticed into spending a night with a fairy in the mountains of Wu-shan. On departing she said:
At dawn I marshal the morning clouds,
And at night I summon the rain.
From this legend the phrase ‘clouds and rain’ became a sobriquet for sexual intercourse.
2) CHARACTERS AND INCIDENTS FROM THE SAN-KUO-CHI YEN-I (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). It is not often recognized that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is Korea’s most popular work of literature, even today. There are many more editions of it on sale than there are of Ch’unhyang ka. It tells of the wars between Wei, Wu and Shu in the third century AD. The heroes of the book, Kuan Yü(later canonized as the god of war), Liu Pei and Ch’ang Fei swore the famous Oath of the Peach Orchard. Ts’ao Ts’ao is the great villain of the piece, and Chu-ko Liang is the greatest magician-sage in Chinese story.
3) LEGENDS OF THE HSIAO-HSIANG RIVERS AND THE TUNGT-’ING LAKE AREA Central China are fundamental in traditional Korean literature, in There the legendary sage-emperor Shun died and his wives O-huang and Nü-ying, weeping for him, shed tears on the bamboo stems, thus giving rise to the dappled bamboo whose stems are blotched to this day. Here is the Huang-ling shrine, famous in many poems, and nearby is the sacred mountain of Heng-shan.
4) THE LEGENDARY PRIMEVAL RULERS belong to the traditional Chinese accounts of pre-history, which tell of the three first imperial houses of Heaven, Earth, and Man; followed by Fu-I, who discovered divination, Shen-nung, who invented agriculture and medicine, and the Yellow Emperor. Then came Yao and Shun, the ideal rulers whom Confucius himself revered, to whom are attributed the principles of morality.
Yü of Hsia drained China of floods by nine years’ labors. The Hsia dynasty ended in disgrace, but the Emperor T’ang appeared to restore peace and prosperity by founding the Shang (or Yin) dynasty. Shang also deteriorated and was replaced by the state of Chou under King Wen and his son Wu. This was the state into which Confucius was born.
Two loyalists of the fall of the Shang dynasty, Po-I and Shu-ch’I, are constantly referred to by Korean writers. They refused to ‘eat the grain of Chou,’ the usurping dynasty, so ‘refusing to eat millet’ became a phrase typifying constancy.
5) THE FAIRIES of THE WESTERN PARADISE. An ancient group of legends tells of the Queen Mother of the Western Paradise, putatively located over the mountains of Tibet. She holds court by the Lake of Gems, where the peach of immortality grows, and she uses blue birds for messengers. Her legends are related to those of the Sky God who lives in the ‘Jade City of the Heavens’. In China they have blended with popular Taoism, but in Korea they were the stock material of fairy stories.
Beyond these five categories of literary allusion there are few in Ch’unhyang ka. The mighty and wise minister Chiang T’ai-kung is often referred to—once with his mortar made in the year, month, day and hour which all had the same designation in the cycle of sixty character combinations which were used for measuring time. (In this case it was keng-shen.)
All such references are simply literary; more tiresome for the translator, because they hinder the foreign reader in enjoying the wit of Ch’unhyang ka, are the Chinese and Korean puns. Many of these are comparable to the English schoolboy’s reading of Caesar adsum iam forte as ‘Caesar ’ad some jam for tea.’ Different readings can be obtained from a Chinese phrase by writing it with different characters of the same sound, or interpreting the sounds as if they were pure Korean words. Mong-nyong enjoys a couplet which can be taken as referring either to local government or to local amours: he has an involved punning game with suktŏk (‘secret virtue’ or ‘steamed rice cakes flavored with herbs’) and moktŏk (‘virtue of the element wood ’or ‘steamed cakes made of wood’—an absurdity).
Other puns are simpler, as when the secretary Mok deliberately puns on chŏngsŏng (minister of state) and changsŭng (devil post), and the cawing of the rooks is interpreted as Chinese by the soothsayer. The puns of the punning songs fall somewhere between the two categories.
There are two points where understanding depends on knowing the written forms of Chinese. One occurs in Mong-nyong’s love song where he describes the character for ‘good’, or ‘to like’, which is composed of two simpler characters for ‘woman’ and ‘son’. The other is the reference to the torn inscription where the character for ‘loyalty’ has lost its top part (‘central’) so that only the bottom half (‘heart’) remains. Such games with Chinese logograms were an unfailing source of pleasure to Koreans.
In this translation all Chinese names referring to Chinese places and people have been transliterated as Chinese; but Chinese words used in Korean names and phrases, or as Korean puns, have been transliterated according to their Korean sounds.
Stock imagery
Much of the imagery of Ch’unhyang ka is repeated many times in the course of the work. This would not strike the Korean audience as monotonous because the symbols were replete with meaning. Some of the most frequently repeated ones are:
The phoenix and the phoenix tree (often called the paulownia). The Chinese legendary phoenix is entirely unrelated to the Egyptian and Arabian phoenix which rises again from its ashes. The Chinese phoenix, probably really derived from a Himalayan pheasant or other beautiful gallinaceous bird, is a symbol of conjugal love and fidelity. It eats only bamboo fruit and roosts only in the phoenix tree. It dances when great men appear. It is a commonplace symbol of romantic love.
The p’eng is another mythical bird, the Chinese equivalent of the roc, symbol of great size and strength, rising rapidly to great heights.
The mandarin duck mates for life and so becomes another symbol of married love and fidelity.
The wild goose is a symbol for a letter-carrying messenger, because of the story of the exile who tied the news of his survival to the leg of a wild goose which was shot by the emperor, thus who received the message. The goose is also a symbol of conjugal fidelity.
The cuckoo is the mourning spirit of an unfortunate dead person; there are several legends about this bird.
Cranes are mystic birds, the heavenly steeds of the immortals.
Sea-roses, the dark red rugosa, grow by the white sands of the east coast. Their beauty is one of the clichés of Korean poetry.
The moon dominates the whole of old Korean literature. The Kwanghal-lu is a pavilion deriving its name from the Kwanghan Palace of the moon maiden Heng-o. Moonlight suggests love and peace, but is usually tinged with sadness. In the moon there is also a cinnamon tree whose leaves confer immortality; and the Old Man of the Moonlight is responsible for fixing everybody’s marriage destiny.
Willow trees are frequent in poems of love and lovers’ partings.
The Herdboy and the Weaving Maid are two stars on either side of the Milky Way. They love one another but are divided by the waters of the Silver River (i.e., the Milky Way). Every year on the seventh night of the seventh moon the magpies form a living bridge over which the two can pass to meet. The Magpie Bridge outside Namwŏn is named from this legend, which is quoted by Mong-nyong at the bridge.
The Peach Blossom Valley, discovered by a fisherman who noticed peach-blossoms floating on the water, is a favorite sobriquet for fairyland or for beautiful scenery. The story comes from a prose fragment written by T'ao Ch’ien in the fourth century.
Korean literary references
The text of Ch’unhyang ka is sprinkled with Korean proverbs and quotations from sijo (short Korean lyrics). In some cases the quotation is direct, but often a half-quotation is dovetailed into the sentence. There are fewer Korean allusions than there are Chinese references, but enough to form a striking feature of the work.
There is also a reference to sasŏl, a longer and more colloquial form of Korean-language poetry. The sasŏl, like the sijo, are intended to be sung.
There are a few allusions to Korean writings and legends. Non’gae, the patriotic kisaeng of Chinju in the sixteenth century, who lured a Japanese officer over a riverside cliff to his death but herself died in the act, and several other famous kisaeng are mentioned. King Sejo was a mid-fifteenth century king of Korea, a devout Buddhist.
Kuunmong is alluded to twice: onc