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영어

The love story of Toegye Yi Hwang and Korean geisha Doo Hyang from Danyang is beyond a typical love story but one that mellows with the grand nature of Danyang Palgyeong circa the end of the 17th century. The story is also said to shed light to the flip side of the great scholar Yi Hwang as a man of benevolence and generosity to others. Doo Hyang's burial close to a national road in Danyang would probably have drawn Yi's disciples and descendants who moved back and forth from Seoul, and people residing in the northern part of Gyeongsang province to pick up the many romantic episodes of Yi Hwang and Doo Hyang, and spread them through word-of-mouth.
The Story of Baesoon was dramatized with fictitious elements and recorded as a literature by his two disciples who shared the same vision of upholding and glorying Yi Hwang. The story passed on orally by Yi Hwang's descendants, disciples and the many who travelled to Poongi over the 200-year period. It went through the same cycle of dramatization into a fiction to considerable degree by one descendant of Yi Hwang followed by another 50 years of oral transmission only to be adapted into the Story of Baesoon by Dae Jang Jang, a commoner and one of the disciples of Yi Hwang at Sosu Confucius Academy, and recorded into literature.
Doo Hyang and Bae Soon, who are the main characters of the two stories, were real persons who lived in Danyang and Poongi but neither had engaged into any sort of direct relationship with Yi Hwang when he served as governor of both villages. In other words, both stories evolved out of putting together extraordinary woman and commoner unveiling themselves from Danyang and Poongi, each, and Toegye Yi Hwang, a great man accredited for his significant position in the history of Korea. Both stories are apparently not based on a true story but the nature of self-movement found in narrations allowed both to change in sync with the changing world on an ongoing basis even at this very moment.