Ondal and Princess Pyeonggang

"Keep crying like this, and when you grow up I will marry you off to Foolish Ondal."

The king of Goguryeo said it for the first time when his youngest daughter was still tiny. Then he said it a second time. Then a third. The little girl cried at the slightest thing, and her wails filled the whole hall. Every time she cried, the same line slipped out of the king's mouth, word for word.

Said so often, the line became a habit, and everyone in the palace knew it by heart. Goguryeo was the largest of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea. The young man in the king's saying was Ondal, and Koreans remember the girl who cried so easily as Princess Pyeonggang.

The king only said it in fun. He never guessed that someone in the palace was keeping every word.

Ondal himself was no joke, though. He really was poor. He was so poor that every day he had to beg for food to feed his mother, and his mother was blind. His clothes were torn, his shoes were worn thin, and his walk was clumsy. He went back and forth through the market like that, and the people there gave him a short, blunt name: Foolish Ondal.

Koreans describe him with two halves set side by side. On the outside, he looked awkward enough to laugh at. On the inside, his heart was clear and pure. People laughed at the torn clothes, but no one had ever looked closely at the second half.

When the princess was 16, the king chose a worthy match for her. He was a son of the Go family of Sangbu.

The princess refused.

What she told her father went roughly like this. He had always said that she would surely become the wife of Ondal. Why change his old word now? Even an ordinary person does not want to take back a word once it is spoken, let alone the sovereign of the land. As the ancients put it, a king does not speak in jest. Her father's command today was wrong, and she did not dare obey it.

The king flew into a rage. A daughter who would not obey her father, he said, was no longer his daughter. Why should they live under one roof? She could go wherever she pleased.

And she really did go.

She tied several dozen gold bracelets behind her elbows and walked out of the palace alone. No carriage. No servants. No one to show her the way. Out on the main road, she had to ask passersby where Ondal lived.

The first door had just closed behind her. It was the palace door.

The second door belonged to a thatched hut.

Inside, there was only an old blind woman sitting alone. The princess stepped forward, bowed, and asked after her son. The old woman did not answer right away. She reached out and touched her visitor's hands. Then she spoke. Her son was poor and lowly, she said, not the kind of man a noble person should come near. Yet this young woman carried a strangely sweet scent, and her hands were as soft as cotton. She had to be someone of high rank. Who had tricked her into finding her way here? Her son had been so hungry that he had gone into the forest to strip elm bark, and he had been gone a long time.

The princess turned back and walked toward the mountain. At its foot she met him, coming down out of the forest with a bundle of elm bark on his back.

She told him honestly what was in her heart.

The third door closed fastest of all three.

He panicked and brushed her off. This was not something a young woman should do, he said. She could not possibly be human. She had to be a fox spirit in human form. She must not press him. Then he walked straight on with his head down, and he did not look back even once.

So in a single day, she had been turned away three times. Her father drove her out. The old woman said this was no place for a noble person. And the young man ran off.

In the usual run of things, the third refusal is where a person turns back. She did something else.

She stayed. That night she slept right under the bamboo gate in front of his house. The next morning she went in again and told mother and son the whole story from beginning to end, hiding nothing.

Ondal hesitated, unsure what to do. His mother still refused firmly. Her son was too lowly, she said, to be a match for a noble person. Their house was too poor for a noble person to bear living in.

The princess gave a short reply, and it is the most memorable line in the whole tale. The ancients had a saying, she told them. A single measure of grain can still be pounded into rice, and a single foot of cloth can still be sewn into clothing. When two people are already of one heart, why should they wait for wealth before they live together?

Then she sold the gold bracelets. With the money she bought fields, a house, oxen, horses, household goods, and even people to help with the work. Before long, the blind woman's thatched hut had become a household with everything it needed.

One purchase got more careful instructions than all the rest: the horse.

She told her husband not to buy a horse from the traders in the market. He had to find one of the state's horses, one that was sick and thin and had already been cast off, and get that one instead.

She did not say why. She only told him to do it.

Ondal did exactly as she said. He led home a bony horse with a ragged coat, still stumbling as it walked. Anyone who saw it on that first day would probably have shaken their head.

From that day on, the princess cared for it. She fed it in the morning and fed it in the evening, every single day. For the first few days nothing seemed different. Then its ribs slowly faded from view. Then its coat began to shine. Then the four legs that had trembled began to stand truly firm, and no trace was left of the horse that had once been cast off.

The people of Goguryeo had a custom. Every spring, on the third day of the third month, the whole country gathered at Nangnang Hill for a great hunt. The wild boar and deer they caught were offered to Heaven and to the spirits of the mountains and rivers.

That day came. The king rode out to the hunt himself. His court followed him. The soldiers of the five divisions followed him too.

Among that great crowd of horses was a strange one that no one could place.

The hunt began. Wherever the riders galloped, the strange horse was already out in front. It was not one lucky run. It happened every time. When the game was counted at the end, its rider had far more than anyone else, and no one had been able to keep up with him.

The king sent for the rider and asked a perfectly ordinary question. What was his name?

The answer was just two syllables. Ondal.

The king stood stunned. He had said that line in his hall more times than he could count. He had said it in fun, to soothe a little girl who cried too much. Now it was standing right in front of him, in hunting clothes, still holding a horse by the reins.

Some time later, when the kingdom had to defend its border, Ondal asked to ride at the very front. When the deeds were weighed afterward, everyone put his name above all the rest.

The king praised him again and again, and then he said one sentence. "This is my son-in-law."

This time he was not joking. He had a full ceremony prepared to welcome the once-poor son-in-law, and he gave him a court rank called daehyeong. In later years, Ondal became a general whom all of Goguryeo remembered, and Koreans still speak of him today.

Looking back, it all began with a line said in fun.

A king had a saying that came easily to his lips, and whenever his daughter cried, he used it to soothe her. He said it so often that even he no longer heard what he was saying.

Everyone in the palace back then knew that line by heart. But only one person listened to it all the way to the end, and put it away the way one keeps a promise. That person was the girl who cried more than anyone else in the palace.