《Hong Gildong Jeon》#3
There Is No Paradise in the Place You Fled To
Last time, we saw how Gildong tears apart the existing order inside Joseon, the country of his father.
In this episode, Gildong goes further: he starts building and running a country of his own.
So here’s one question.
Is there a paradise in the place you run away to?
My quick answer is “no.”
I’m genuinely curious whether you’ll reach the same conclusion as me.
Story summary
Hong Gildong crosses the sea with three thousand followers and settles in a place called “Jedo.”
The first thing he does, surprisingly, is to establish discipline and order for a functioning state.
He builds warehouses and a palace, pushes his soldiers to farm, opens trade with other countries, and teaches martial arts and military strategy.
In just three years, weapons and supplies pile up like mountains, and his forces become so strong that no one can challenge them.
One day, Gildong enters Mangdangsan to “gather medicine to coat arrowheads,” but he loses his way and arrives at Nakcheonhyeon.
There lives a wealthy man named Baek Yong who has no son, only one daughter.
She has read widely and writes well.
Her beauty is said to shame the moon and hide the flowers,
and her behavior is so proper that every word and gesture is refined.
The couple cherishes her and searches for the best son-in-law.
Then one day, during a violent storm with thunder and lightning, when no one can see a step ahead…
their daughter vanishes without a trace.
Baek Yong spends a fortune searching, but finds nothing. He starts roaming the streets like a man who has lost his mind, posting notices.
“Whoever tells me where my daughter is, I will make him my son-in-law and give him half my wealth.”
Meanwhile, Gildong is still searching for herbs in the mountains. As night falls, he gets lost and spots a distant light and noisy voices.
He approaches, relieved, and sees hundreds of figures celebrating. But up close…
they are not humans. They are beasts, yet shaped like humans. A very strange group.
Gildong hides and watches. Then he shoots the “commander” sitting in the highest seat, striking him in the chest.
The commander panics and runs. Gildong chases him, but night grows deep, so he leans against a pine tree and sleeps there.
The next day, he follows the blood trail and finds a huge house. He knocks, and a soldier comes out and questions him.
When Gildong says, “I’m from Joseon. I came to gather herbs and lost my way,” they actually welcome him.
“Our king was struck by an arrow during last night’s feast and is now at death’s door. If you know medicine, save him.”
Gildong goes in, examines the wound, and speaks with confidence.
“It’s not difficult. Take this once, and the wound will heal, all illnesses will vanish, and you will live forever.”
Then he gives the medicine, mixed into wine.
The king drinks it, flips over, and screams.
“I have never wronged you. Why are you trying to kill me!”
He calls his younger brothers, orders them to capture Gildong and avenge him… and dies on the spot.
The monsters rush in with swords. Gildong responds with a cold smile.
“His lifespan ended there. How could I have killed him?”
But Gildong has no proper sword in his hand, and the situation becomes dangerous. He leaps into the air to escape.
The monsters are ancient demon-spirits. They ride the wind, chase him, and use supernatural tricks.
Gildong calls upon the Six Ding and Six Jia, and divine generals descend from the sky, binding the Euldong crowd and forcing them to kneel.
Gildong snatches their swords, slaughters countless Euldong, and then goes inside, about to kill three women.
The women cry out.
“We are not demons. We were unlucky. We were kidnapped by these demon-spirits and could not find a chance to escape.”
Gildong asks who they are. One is Baek Yong’s daughter from Nakcheonhyeon, and the other two are daughters of a noble household.
Gildong brings the three women back and explains everything to Baek Yong.
Baek Yong is overjoyed to recover the daughter he loved more than anything. He throws a grand banquet with a fortune,
gathers the townspeople, and takes Gildong as his son-in-law.
Praise spreads everywhere.
The father of the other two daughters also wants to repay this debt, so he allows his two daughters to become Gildong’s concubines.
Until the age of twenty-two, Gildong had never known women. In a single day, he ends up with three ladies by his side.
The text pushes their beauty to the limit. A face that makes even the moon hide and flowers feel ashamed, and even moonlight over water cannot compare.
And every word and gesture follows proper ritual, so the closer he gets, the deeper the affection grows.
Baek Yong and his wife adore their son-in-law. Gildong brings his three wives and Baek Yong’s whole family back to Jedo and holds a lavish celebration.
About three years after arriving in Jedo, Gildong walks under the moon, reads the heavens, and realizes the day of his father’s death is near. He breaks down in grief.
He leads troops into the mountains, chooses an auspicious burial site, and orders ships prepared to wait at Seogang in Joseon.
He returns to Joseon, faces his father’s final moment, cries at the mourning house, and reunites with his mother.
Then he chooses a gravesite with his older brother, but the brother dislikes the place Gildong selected.
At that moment, Gildong strikes the ground with an axe, and five-colored energy rises as a pair of blue cranes fly up.
His brother deeply regrets it. In the end, Gildong loads his parents’ coffins onto a ship, crosses the far sea, brings them to Jedo, and buries them like royal tombs.
The brother returns home, and Gildong remains in Jedo to carry out the rites.
And finally.
Gildong decides to conquer the nearby state of Yuldoguk and raises a great army.
The battle unfolds through strategy and ambushes, and in the chaos of storm and thunder, the King of Yuldo loses his life.
The prince dies as well, and the ministers surrender, submitting the royal seal.
Gildong enters the capital, pacifies the people, opens the granaries for relief, and releases prisoners.
He takes the throne and brings peace.
As years pass, Gildong hands the throne to the crown prince and builds a pavilion on Wolyeongsan, where he practices the Way with the queen.
One day, five-colored clouds and thunder surround the mountain…
and Gildong disappears without a trace. People say,
“Our great king cultivated the Way and ascended to heaven in broad daylight.”
Commentary
It’s a very happy ending.
But do you remember the question I asked?
The moment Hong Gildong runs away, he builds warehouses on an island, makes people farm, opens trade, trains an army, and eventually establishes a nation.
Later he conquers Yuldoguk, becomes king, and in the end… he disappears like an immortal.
Anyone would call that “paradise.”
So it’s strange. Why did I say no?
Here’s the core point.
In Hong Gildong Jeon, Gildong wins with the sword.
But the deeper victory is his power to change meaning.
When the name changes, the genre changes.
Escape becomes pioneering. Crime becomes heroic legend. Looting becomes nation-building.
So here’s a question.
What did Gildong do that made people accept that kind of renaming?
Pay attention to his geomancy and astrology.
Gildong reads the day his father will die, and he selects the burial site.
Human communities have long had a habit of handing judgment to interpreters.
People who interpret scriptures, read the heavens, and choose lucky land.
A community delegates the meaning of the world to them. It’s how people endure anxiety.
Gildong is written as someone who can compress reality, someone who can extract patterns.
That ability has existed in human history under the name “insight.”
It means turning the concrete into language that persuades and makes sense to many people.
Reality is too complex, and often painful.
So when someone shows up and says this, people get pulled in.
“I’ll organize it for you. This is how the world works.”
Warehouses, supplies, trade, military strategy.
A full “system” completed in three years is less realism and more a fantasy about insight.
The author builds Gildong as that kind of person and says to the reader,
“Look. He knows everything.”
Now, the Euldong episode shows how that interpretive authority works on the ground.
Gildong shoots the demon king with an arrow, then mixes “medicine” into wine and makes him drink it.
The moment he drinks it, the king dies.
And Gildong says with a mocking tone,
“His lifespan ended there. How could I have killed him?”
Gildong doesn’t hide the action. He changes its meaning.
It’s no longer “I killed him.” It becomes “He was destined to die.”
And this story does not torture the reader with detailed arguments about how Gildong becomes “legitimate.”
It proves it through outcomes.
He saved a beauty.
He held a banquet.
People praised him.
The country became peaceful.
In other words, results become meaning.
It’s not that paradise existed first and people later called it paradise.
The interpretation called “paradise” comes first.
If you take one more step, this “renaming” is not only Gildong’s special skill. It’s also a repeating grammar of human history.
A group is pushed out of an old order, breaks away, or chooses to break away, and declares,
“This is our land.”
Once that declaration gains force, “those who are not us” are easily labeled as bad, and then come spoils, rules, and punishment.
And in the end, that same logic of declaration brings cracks and division.
I’m not saying this to attack any specific group.
The fact that this grammar already exists inside a Joseon story shows how universal this repetition is for humans.
And someone might even call this repetition “original sin.”
But is the “new order” truly new?
Or is it the same repetition with a new label?
And in the end, the reader never fully grasps how Gildong’s mind works.
Divine generals descend and bind enemies, demons ride the wind, he invokes the Six Ding and Six Jia.
This is closer to staging than explanation.
So Gildong remains an “unexplainable problem-solver” to the very end.
And strangely, that “unexplainability” becomes authority.
An immortal whose principles are fully understood would feel less like an immortal and more like a civil servant
Now we return to the first question.
Is there a paradise in the place you run away to?
My answer was “no” for a simple reason.
The sentence “Is there a paradise in the place you ran away to?” already labels that place as “escape.”
So what Gildong did was not “finding paradise in a place of escape.”
He made that place stop being a place of escape.
Inside the story, Gildong is an interpreter. And the author interprets that interpreter again.
The result is a striking fractal, where the same structure expands and repeats.