The legend of the bear who became human, Dangun's Gojoseon, and four centuries of Han China's commanderies before the Three Kingdoms rose.
Korea's story begins not with a king, but with a legend: a bear who wanted to become a woman.
Every country tells a story about where it came from. According to the Samguk Yusa, a collection of legends written in the 13th century, Hwanung, a son of the Lord of Heaven, came down to Mount Taebaek to live among people. A bear (곰, gom) and a tiger (호랑이, horangi) begged him to make them human. He gave them twenty cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort and told them to stay out of the sunlight for one hundred days. The tiger gave up. The bear endured, became a woman (웅녀, Ungnyeo), and gave birth to a son named Dangun (단군).
Dangun, the legend says, founded the kingdom of Gojoseon (고조선) in 2333 BCE. Historians treat that date as mythical, not documented fact. What is real is that a state called Joseon existed in the northern part of the peninsula and Manchuria by the 4th century BCE, and Chinese texts mention it.
A real king from far away. In 194 BCE a man named Wi Man, a refugee from the Chinese state of Yan, took the throne and founded what historians call Wiman Joseon. Later Chinese sources also claim a Chinese sage, Gija (Jizi), ruled Korea around 1122 BCE, but many modern scholars reject this because the archaeology does not support it.
The end of Gojoseon. In 108 BCE the Han emperor Wu conquered Wiman Joseon and set up four commanderies in the north. That is where Korea's long, complicated conversation with China begins.
The tiger and the bear are still everywhere in Korean culture. The tiger appears in folk paintings and was the mascot of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and the bear stands for patience.
For about four centuries, part of what is now North Korea was governed from China. After the Han dynasty conquered Wiman Joseon in 108 BCE, it set up four commanderies. Three of them faded within decades. The largest, Lelang (낙랑, Nangnang), lasted until 313 CE and became a busy meeting point of Chinese and local culture, with about 400,000 people recorded in a Han census of 2 CE.
But the Korean story did not stop there. In the south and north, new kingdoms grew up beside the commanderies:
This period is called the Three Kingdoms.
What Korea borrowed, and what it kept. The kingdoms borrowed heavily from China. Goguryeo adopted Buddhism in 372 CE, Baekje in 384, and Silla in 528. Chinese characters (한자, Hanja) became the written language of government, and Confucian ideas shaped how people thought about family, loyalty and study. Even today, a large share of Korean vocabulary is Sino-Korean, built from Chinese-origin roots.
But Koreans kept spoken Korean, their own customs, and their own political states. Roughly a thousand years later, King Sejong gave Korean its own alphabet, Hangul, so it could be written the way it was spoken.
| Korean | Romanization | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 곰 | gom | bear |
| 호랑이 | horangi | tiger |
| 단군 | Dangun | the legendary founder |
| 고조선 | Gojoseon | Old Joseon, the first kingdom |
| 중국 | Jungguk | China |
| 한자 | Hanja | Chinese characters |
| 불교 | bulgyo | Buddhism |
Sources: Gojoseon, Four Commanderies of Han, Three Kingdoms of Korea.