After hiking all morning we wanted to check out a park near our hostel where you were supposedly able to learn about the history of Jeju. The park turned out to be a little anticlimactic when we learned that the focus and reason for the entire park was three holes in the ground where the original gods of Jeju were thought to have sprang from many moons ago.
Fortunately, there was a 15 minute film in badly translated English that explained the legend of the three "demi-gods." The colorful and animated Disney-esque movie explained that three brothers, Go, Bu and Yang came out of the three holes and founded the Tamna kingdom with the help from three princesses who arrived by boat along with cattle and horses from a neighboring kingdom. The brothers divided the island kingdom into three sections by each shooting an arrow and taking the piece of land where the arrow landed.
You can actually visit the other special places on the island that have to do with this legend. For example, you can see the place where the three brothers shot the arrows up in the air, the hoof prints in the rocks where the first horses landed and the caves where the three brothers spent their honeymoon with the three princesses. We did not visit any of these places but a lot of the tour buses sure did.
The highlight of the visit was checking out the 250-year-old harubang at the entrance of the park. The harubang (which means 'grandfather') were statues carved out of lava rock (see above picture). These symbols were seen all over Jeju and kind of reminded me of the Easter Island carvings. The original harubang were carved around 1750 and placed outside the island's fortresses. Of the original carvings, 45 still exist and two were at the shrine that we visited. No one really knows their original purpose or significance but their images are everywhere: as telephone booths, as souvenirs, on T-shirts and on buildings and signs. Did we buy a tiny harubang to bring home? Of course!
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