A recent post from Brian in Jeollanam-do highlighted this article from the JoongAng Daily on tigers in Korea and the efforts made to add them to the "International Tiger Studbook" mating registry at Leipzig Zoo. Brian's post also mentions the Leopard Cat, subspecies Prionailurus bengalensis euptailurus, an indigenous wildcat listed as 'vulnerable' - one step up from 'endangered' - on the Korean peninsula, though its geographic range extends from Siberia down into Indonesia. Known as the 삵 (Salg) or 살쾡이 in Korean, an image search on Google brought up a few matches that feature the 삵 on movie posters for the documentary "어느 날 그 길에서" (One Day on the Road).
"어느 날 그 길에서"
You can see a preview clip from the movie on YouTube here and read an article describing the documentary (in Korean) here courtesy of Green Asia (녹색아시아). For those of you more interested in living examples of the 삵 there's a 2007 piece from dongA.com that talks about the population living out by Jinju and OhMyNews ran an article on the subject earlier this year. The latter includes pictures of a 삵 with its prey at Changwon Protected Reservoir (창원 주남저수지). A bird sanctuary would be a good place to find these animals, as there's a much better chance of maintaining a stable food web there over, say, somewhere frequently disturbed by construction.
Korea Night at Washington State University, Spring 2007
Returning to tigers though, the JoongAng Daily article also features a section on The mythical tigers of Korean folktales but, apart from a mention of using "Once upon a time when tigers used to smoke" (옛날 옛날 호랑이가 담배피우던 시절에...) in local oral traditions, there really wasn't much on the subject. My copy of Folk Tales From Korea by Jeong Inseop includes 96 stories, of which 22 feature tigers in one way or another. One of the more famous from among these is one we covered in an intermediate (English) class today, The Tiger and the Persimmon, which is brief enough to include below.
One night a tiger came down to a village. It crept stealthily into the garden of a house and listened at the window. It heard a child crying, then came the voice of its mother scolding it. 'Stop crying this very minute! A tiger is here!' But the child took no notice and went on crying, so the tiger said to himself, 'The child is not the least bit afraid of me. He must be a real hero.' In response [to the baby's cries] the mother said, 'This is a dried persimmon.' At this, the child stopped crying immediately and the tiger became very frightened, saying to himself, 'This persimmon must be a terrible creature.' It was then that the tiger gave up its plan of carrying off the child.
Instead of carrying off the baby, the tiger went to the outhouse to get an ox instead. Inside, however, was a thief who mistook the tiger for an ox and got on its back. The tiger was terrified and ran off as fast as it could go. 'This must be the terrible persimmon attacking me!' it thought. The thief still rode on its back and whipped it up so that he might get away before the villagers saw him stealing an ox.
When it grew light the thief saw he was riding on a tiger so leapt off, but the tiger just raced on to the mountains without looking back.
- Told by Ma Haeseong; Gaeseong (1925)
