Topknots and Crockery Hats

Griffis’s origin legend begins long ago in China, centuries before Confucius, with a wise and learned man named Kija. He was the chief adviser at court, everyone honored him for his fairness and goodness, and he was always kind to boys and girls.

But when a great war broke out and a new family of rulers came to power, Kija refused to serve the new king and decided to move far to the east, where he meant to establish a new kingdom. The new king was sorry to see him go, for he respected his character and wisdom, but he allowed five thousand followers, to go with their master. Many ordinary folk wept to see them leave China, the flowery land, for a country they imagined as dark swamps and thick forests without familiar roads or houses, where the woods were full of wild beasts, above all huge bears and terrible man-eating tigers. People even said there were flying serpents with wings and leopards that stood upright holding lightning in their paws.

Across the great plains of Manchuria, Kija and his host of people, young and old, marched toward the rising sun until they crossed the Duck Green River, which we call the Yalu. A few days later they reached the Great Eastern River, the Taedong. The land there was very beautiful, and Kija decided to settle and build a city. The new country had been named Chosen, the Land of Morning Radiance, after the glowing clouds of sunrise, rosy and golden and every shade of red. As the sun rose and raced toward the west, where his homeland lay, Kija welcomed it as a good sign. The calm of his first day in his new country seemed to him a promise of lasting friendship between the new kingdom and the old empire, a sign that Heaven approved of his loyalty to the Chinese emperor, and a pledge of goodwill from the spirit of the Ever White Mountain.

Kija laid out a city to be the capital of his kingdom and began to build a wall around it. He named it Pyongyang. “Now that we have arrived safely, as if after a voyage, the city shall be shaped like a boat,” he said. “No wells shall be dug inside its walls, for that would be like boring holes in a boat and might make it sink. And outside, to the west, shall stand a stone pillar to which the boat city will be moored forever.”

Kija was ably helped by his wise men, who were skilled in writing, poetry, music, medicine and philosophy. Together they made eight great laws for the kingdom, about farming for the men and weaving for the women, the punishment of thieves and murderers, the sharing of the land in nine squares with the middle one farmed together for the state, simple living for everyone, marriage and the punishment of wicked people.

Kija built roads, set up weights and measures and laid down the rules of politeness. He taught the people to build good houses with roofs of thatch or tile and a warm floor heated by flues running underneath it, with a fire at one end and a chimney at the other, so that the smoke came out of the ground halfway up the house wall. Twice a day, at morning and at sunset, the people fed the kitchen fires, and the heat and smoke passed through the flues and warmed the rooms, so the houses were snug and comfortable. The narrator pictures a cloud of chimney smoke hanging over his imagined city morning and evening. It is in these flues and around the cooking pots that Tokgabi, the merry, sooty goblin, plays his naughtiest tricks.

In this exaggerated telling, the inhabitants of Kija’s new kingdom were always fighting, and many were badly hurt. So Kija had to find some way to make them peaceful. At first he tried gentle methods. He saw that the rough fellows let their long hair stream down their backs, that they were often shaggy and untidy, and that they hated combs and did not like to wash.

So Kija brought back the law of Tangun, the spirit of the mountain, who wore two topknots. He ordered every married man to tie his hair up in a knot on top of his head, and so the Korean topknot was made law. Younger men had to braid their hair and wear it in a plait down their backs. Until a man had a wife, he was only a boy and must hold his tongue in front of his elders, and if he was caught wearing a topknot before he was married, he was severely punished.

But the rough people misunderstood Kija’s good intentions. They used the topknot as a handle to grab when they fought in the streets, and the big, burly fellows dragged the smaller men around cruelly. They also used to whack each other over the head with clubs, and the streets were full of injured men. To stop these brawls, Kija invented a hat that would keep fighters at least a yard apart.

“I’ll settle their quarrels for them, once and for all,” said Kija. “I’ll make their fun cost each of them a good string of coins. Every time two bullies fight, they shall have a lot of crockery to pay for.”

So Kija had huge, heavy hats molded out of clay, four feet across and two feet high, weighing many pounds, and baked in ovens until they were as hard as stone. They looked like enormous porridge bowls turned upside down. Every bad-tempered fellow known for quarreling had to wear one of these heavy pottery hats, and whenever a crowd of men gathered, they looked like a field of walking mushrooms.

When the men fought now, they only cracked their crockery. That way Kija could easily find out who had broken the law and punish him, and then the fighters had to go to the potter and buy new hats, which was very costly, for a hat cost a good half year’s wages.

Kija’s wisdom proved right. The pottery hats protected the precious topknots well, and the men liked them. Quarrelsome fellows stopped pulling hair and bashing heads. Instead of punching a man or cracking his head, it became the custom to let off one’s temper by scolding and calling names, glaring fiercely or rolling one’s eyes, none of which drew any blood. The fellow who could pull the most frightful faces, grind his teeth most fiercely and look most like a demon was counted the bravest and the winner.

Within a few months a street quarrel had become a completely silent battle of ugly faces and dreadful gestures. What started out looking like a deadly fight usually turned into a noiseless duel. It gave the eyes and teeth a hard workout, but it all blew off like steam from a kettle, and in time a great calm settled over the land.

The crockery hats became all the fashion. Even the women wanted them, because they were so useful. Turned upside down, they made fine washbowls, and many a good housewife borrowed her husband’s second-best hat to do the family washing in. They also made good feed troughs and water basins for horses and cattle, and donkeys ate their beans out of them.

The women were not allowed to wear crockery bonnets, but they were pleased with the way Kija treated them. He took away the rough men’s clubs, which were no longer needed, and gave them to the wives and daughters to pound the clothes with on washing day and to iron them. The tale credits this invention with the fine gloss on the men’s starched clothes, especially the father’s long white coat. By turning head-cracking sticks into starch polishers, Kija also turned ruffians into gentlemen, or so the narrator’s explanation claims.

Happily, too, the men grew more refined and were kinder to their wives and daughters, since they saw how shining their clothes were. When hot weather came and the gentlemen complained of the heat and worried that sweat would spoil their fine clothes, Kija let them make undersuits of bamboo strips as fine as thread or wire. So a Korean gentleman wore his outer clothes on a frame hung from his shoulders, like a hoop skirt. Wearing bamboo underclothes was like taking off your flesh and sitting in your bones.

As manners improved and the men found these cane garments so comfortable, they gave up their heavy crockery hats. Instead they wore little horsehair cages over their topknots, and outdoors they put on wide “roofs” of straw, reed, basketwork or shiny black lacquered paper, depending on their rank. And that is how Korea came to be the land of hats.

About this story

“Topknots and Crockery Hats” is retold from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales (1922). Kija, or Gija in modern spelling, is a figure from ancient Chinese and Korean tradition, said to have brought Chinese learning to the region around Pyongyang; this fantastical account does not document the origins of Korean institutions or clothing.

The story is a playful “how it came to be” tale. Old Korea really was famous among visitors as a land of hats, with different styles for different ranks and occasions, including the tall black horsehair gat and huge round mourning hats of straw.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Best for all ages — to stop people fighting in the streets, wise old Kija makes every brawler wear a heavy hat made of pottery.

Does a broken hat prove guilt?

The first rule gives bullies a new handle: the topknot. The second makes fighting expensive, but a cracked hat proves damage, not who began a quarrel. A smaller person attacked by a bully could pay the same enormous replacement cost. The narrator praises the result; a reader can still test whether the rule distributes its burden fairly.

The closing claim that men become kinder because women polish their clothes also deserves a question. Respect should not depend on another person’s domestic work. The exaggerated origin story need not become a rule for families today.

Test the invention

Draw the topknot rule and the pottery-hat rule. Under each, write its intended effect and one unintended consequence. Design a fairer response to the bullying that protects the person attacked, then explain what evidence a judge would need beyond a broken hat.

Talk about it

• Why did Kija’s first idea, the topknot, cause more trouble instead of less?
• How did the crockery hats help to stop the fighting?
• What else were the hats good for?

Related stories

• Tokgabi and His Pranks — the goblin who lives in the warm flues Kija taught people to build
• The Mirror That Made Trouble — more topknots, hats and family uproar in old Korea
• The Voice of the Bell — another legend of a founding king and his city