Jumong Founds Goguryeo

On the earthen floor of a stable, an egg lay.

It was much bigger than a hen's egg. People set it down on the ground, among the livestock, and waited to see what would happen.

The dog came by. It sniffed the egg, then walked away.

The pig came by. It did not touch the egg either.

Then the birds flew down. Then the ox came. Then the horse came. Every one of them saw the egg lying right in its path, and every one of them stepped around it.

Not a single animal would harm it.

The people of old Korea told this tale, and nearly 900 years ago it was recorded in the Samguk Sagi. The Samguk Sagi is a history of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea. The story itself begins a little before the egg.

The egg's mother was Yuhwa. Her father was Habaek, the god who ruled over a river. The legend says she conceived from the light of the sun, and what she bore was not a baby but an egg.

King Geumwa of Eastern Buyeo heard of this and took it as a bad sign. He ordered his people to find a way to destroy the egg.

But, as the tale has already shown, the animals would not do it.

This is a moment worth pausing on. In the story, no god appears to protect the egg. No miracle bursts out. There are only a few farm animals, passing back and forth by that spot every day, and every day quietly stepping around it.

The old storytellers chose this for a reason. To say that a life was protected, they did not need thunder and lightning. They only needed to show a whole yard where every animal knew what must not be done.

At last the egg cracked open, and a little boy stepped out of it.

The boy grew quickly. And very early, people saw that he had a gift of his own. He was an unusually fine archer. At the age of 7, he could hit targets that grown men missed.

In the language the Buyeo people spoke at that time, there was a word for a skilled archer. That word was Jumong.

People called him by it, and in time the nickname became his name. So the name of the man who later founded a whole kingdom began as a word the neighbors used to praise a child's skill.

But being so gifted brings its own trouble.

King Geumwa had an eldest son named Daeso. Daeso watched the boy from the egg grow taller by the day and earn more respect by the day, and he began to worry. He wondered what would become of his own claim to the throne, with someone like that at court.

Jumong understood that he could no longer stay.

He left.

He traveled south, and men came chasing close behind him.

Then came the part the whole story builds toward. He reached a river.

The river was wide. There was no bridge. There was no boat. There was nowhere shallow enough to wade. Behind him, the men chasing him were drawing near.

This is where an ordinary story would end.

But the legend says Jumong did not turn back, and he did not leap into the water and risk his life. He stood on the bank and called out to the river itself.

And the river answered.

From under the water, fish rose to the surface. Then turtles rose. They pressed close together, back against back, until a firm strip lay across the water, strong enough for a man to step on.

A bridge made of fish.

Jumong crossed. And once he reached the far bank, the bridge came apart. The fish dived down, and the surface of the river closed again as before. When the men chasing him arrived, they found only water, and they turned back home.

On the other side of that river, at a place called Jolbon, Jumong founded a new kingdom. That kingdom was called Goguryeo. Tradition dates it to the year 37 before the Common Era, when he had just turned 21. Goguryeo was the largest of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea.

The story moves in three stages, and they are tightly bound together.

In the first, people want an egg destroyed, and the animals shield it.

In the second, a gifted child falls under suspicion in his own household and has to leave.

In the third, a river blocks the way, and the fish rise from the water to make a bridge.

All three stages say the same thing. When people turned their backs on him, something else did not.

That is how a people told the story of its own beginning. Not with a victory in battle, but with the image of a young man standing on a riverbank, with no way back behind him and only water ahead.

When people in Korea long ago imagined the first bridge of their country, they did not imagine wood or stone.

They imagined a school of fish.