The first wish of her heart was maternity, and she cried, “Give me a son.” Whan-ung, the Spirit King, passing on the wind, beheld her sitting there beside the stream. He circled round her, breathed upon her, and her cry was answered. She cradled her babe in moss beneath that same _pak-tal_ tree and it was there that in after years the wild people of the country found him sitting and made him their king.
This was the Tan-gun, “The Lord of the Pak-tal Tree.” He is also, but less widely, known as Wang-gŭm. At that time Korea and the territory immediately north was peopled by the “nine wild tribes” commonly called the _Ku-i_. Tradition names them respectively the Kyŭn, Pang, Whang, Făk, Chŭk, Hyŭn, P‘ung, Yang and U. These, we are told, were the aborigines, and were fond of drinking, dancing and singing. They dressed in a fabric of woven grass and their food was the natural fruits of the earth, such as nuts, roots, fruits and berries. In summer they lived beneath the trees and in winter they lived in a rudely covered hole in the ground. When the Tan-gun became their king he taught them the relation of king and subject, the rite of marriage, the art of cooking and the science of house building. He taught them to bind up the hair by tying a cloth about the head. He taught them to cut down trees and till fields.
The Tan-gun made P‘yŭng-yang the capital of his kingdom and there, tradition says, he reigned until the coming of Ki-ja, 1122 B.C. If any credence can be given this tradition it will be by supposing that the word Tan-gun refers to a line of native chieftains who may have antedated the coming of Ki-ja.
It is said that, upon the arrival of Ki-ja, the Tan-gun retired to Ku-wŭl San (in pure Korean A-sa-dal) in the present town of Mun-wha, Whang-hă Province, where he resumed his spirit form and disappeared forever from the earth. His wife was a woman of Pi-sŏ-ap, whose location is unknown. As to the size of the Tan-gun’s kingdom, it is generally believed that it extended from the vicinity of the present town of Mun-gyŭng on the south to the Heuk-yong River on the north, and from the Japan Sea on the east to Yo-ha (now Sŭng-gyŭng) on the west.
As to the events of the Tan-gun’s reign even tradition tells us very little. We learn that in 2265 B.C. the Tan-gun first offered sacrifice at Hyŭl-gu on the island of Kang-wha. For this purpose he built an altar on Mari San which remains to this day. We read that when the great Ha-u-si (The Great Yü), who drained off the waters which covered the interior of China, called to his court at To-san all the vassal kings, the Tan-gun sent his son, Pu-ru, as an envoy. This was supposed to be in 2187 B.C. Another work affirms that when Ki-ja came to Korea Pu-ru fled northward and founded the kingdom of North Pu-yŭ, which at a later date moved to Ka-yŭp-wŭn, and became Eastern Pu-yŭ. These stories show such enormous discrepancies in dates that they are alike incredible, and yet it may be that the latter story has some basis in fact, at any rate it gives us our only clue to the founding of the Kingdom of Pu-yŭ.