Hahoe Village and Its Masks

Two hands open the lid of a wooden box, and from inside it they lift out a face.

The face is carved from wood, and it is far lighter than it looks. The man holding it turns it toward the window so that the sunlight runs across it. Strangely, the face changes. When it tilts down a little, the corners of the mouth droop, and it seems to sulk. When it rises just a few centimeters, the eyes crinkle and the whole face breaks into a laugh.

The secret is in the chin. The chin is carved as a separate piece, then tied back on with a thin cord. When the wearer opens his mouth to speak, the wooden chin nods up and down with him, and that stiff face suddenly seems to be talking.

The man who lifted the mask from its box is one of the village's mask keepers. He closes the lid, tucks the box under his arm, and steps out into the lane.

The lane is narrow. On both sides run walls of earth mixed with straw, so low that from outside you can still see the gourd vines trained over the yards. Overhead are the roofs. Here, a curved roof of gray tiles, laid in rows like fish scales. There, a roof of golden thatch, thick and round and plump, like a loaf turned upside down. The two kinds of roof stand side by side, close together, and neither one gives way to the other.

At the end of the lane is the water.

When the Nakdong River reaches this spot, it stops running straight. It bends back, wraps the whole village in one great curve, and only then wanders on. Seen from above, the river draws a full letter S around the village. And that embrace is the village's very name. The village is called Hahoe. Its name holds one word for the river and one for turning back. The river turns back. The village sits snugly inside that turn. It belongs to the city of Andong, about 225 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

The people of old chose this spot with great care. They studied the shape of the land and the shape of the water. Then they said the village lay in the middle like a lotus flower floating on the water. The way in is narrow, but inside it is wide and open. Across the river, to the north of the village, rises a sheer cliff called Buyongdae. From the top of that cliff, the whole village can be seen lying inside its ring of water.

One thing is worth knowing before going on down the lane. This is not a village rebuilt for visitors to look at. People still live here. Most of them belong to one family line, the Ryu clan of Pungsan, and to this day that clan still makes up about 70 percent of the villagers. The house the keeper has just passed is a real home, and inside it someone is cooking lunch.

So the mask keeper walks very quietly. He pushes open no one's gate and steps into no one's yard. Where bowls and chopsticks clink behind an earthen wall, he lowers his voice another notch. Here, the yard is a family's living room.

The wooden box under his arm leads to the village's second layer of stories.

For about 500 years now, whenever the village wished for a peaceful year, people would put on an open-air performance. It is called byeolsingut talnori, which roughly means the mask play of the village's ritual for peace. And here is the best part of it.

On ordinary days, a man who plowed the fields would never dare to say a word against the official or the scholar of the district. But once he put on a mask, the one speaking was no longer himself. On the bare earth of the yard there were only wooden faces. So a wooden yangban official and a wooden seonbi scholar were pushed out into the yard. They stood there arguing over which of them was more learned and whose forefathers were grander. They argued so hotly that they forgot what had started it all.

The audience laughed. It was gentle laughter, not bitter, not meant to put anyone down. When the play was over, the masks came off, the wooden official went back into his box, and everyone went home to eat. But what had been said had been said, and the whole village had heard it.

The village's oldest masks are no longer taken out to the yard to perform. They are too old now. They are the oldest theater masks still surviving in Korea. On March 30, 1964, 11 masks from Hahoe were named national treasures. Two masks from the neighboring village of Byeongsan were named with them. They rest quietly in a museum, behind glass, and no one wears them anymore.

What the performers wear today are remade masks. They are carved in exactly the old shape, and their chins are tied on in exactly the old way. That means the chin still nods, and the laughter is just like the laughter of several hundred years ago.

Among that set of old masks, one is the strangest of all. It is called Imae, the face of a servant, and it has no chin. People in the village still tell how, long ago, a carver took on the work of making this set of masks under one promise. He had to work alone, and no one was allowed to see him. When he reached the very last mask, someone grew curious and peeked through the wall. The work stopped right there, and that mask has been missing its chin ever since.

The village's third layer of stories is much more recent.

On April 21, 1999, a very special guest came to Hahoe. It was Queen Elizabeth the Second of Britain. As the story is told, on her visit to Korea she asked for just one thing. She wished to see the most Korean place in Korea. And so she was brought here, to the village inside the bend where the river turns back.

That day was her birthday. She turned 73. She took off her shoes to step up onto the wooden floor of an old house, just as the family inside did every day. She sat and watched the mask dance, and afterward she shook hands with each of the performers. The village laid out a birthday table of 47 dishes for her. She planted a tree in the village as a keepsake. And about 100,000 people poured into Hahoe that day, just to stand along the roadside.

An elderly English lady, shoeless on a Korean wooden floor. She sits in the earthen yard of a village by the river, watching a wooden official argue with a wooden scholar, and then she laughs.

In July 2010, Hahoe and the village of Yangdong were added to the World Heritage List. It was not for a castle, and not for a great temple. It was for a whole way of life that has stayed intact. There is the shape of the village and the shape of the river. There is a village that took form around the 14th and 15th centuries, early in the time of Joseon, the royal dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. And there are the people who have stayed on inside it.

As evening falls, the mask keeper comes back. He opens the box and lays the wooden face inside, looking up. He frees the cord that ties on the chin so it will not tangle. Before closing the lid, he tilts the mask toward the door one more time. The evening sun falls on it, the corners of the mouth lift, and the wooden face laughs again. Then the lid comes down. Outside, the river is still quietly turning around the village, as it has turned for hundreds of years.