Six Flying Dragons Watch: Episode 1

As everyone knows, Sageuks are not my favourite genre. Nonetheless, there are two epic Sageuks that are considered some of the finest Korean dramas ever made: Six Flying Dragons and Tree With Deep Roots. The first is a 50 episode epic about the Three Kingdoms uniting to become Joseon and the second a shorter, but no less insightful, discussion about the creation of the stunningly logical Korean alphabet.

Well, over the next year I’ve decided to watch these two masterpieces at one episode a week. And so I’ll be creating Open Threads this week and going forward to discuss each episode if anybody wants to join me.

In many ways, Six Flying Dragons is seen as a prequel to Tree With Deep Roots, which was made first. And so we’re going to watch it in order of historical events instead of when the dramas were made.

Episode 1

The first episode doesn’t give us much time to acclimate. The writers are producing a story for a Korean audience who clearly know the basics of the historical time period it’s fictionalising. Set originally in Goryeo at the twilight of the kingdom, it is the story of six main characters in the establishment of Joseon – our eponymous Six Flying Dragons. These are: Lee Bang-won (Yoo Ah-in), Jung Do-jeon (Kim Myung-min), Lee Seong-gye (Chun Ho-jin), Boon Yi (Shin Se-kyung), Ddang Sae (Byun Yo Han) and Moo Hyul (Yoon Kyun-sang).

As you can see, Six Flying Dragons is worth watching for the cast alone (and not just the adult cast – the child actors are extraordinary).

There is so much complex history behind Six Flying Dragons that for these (brief) posts I’m going to be drawing on a multitude of other sources. One of them is this repository for information about the history of the show, including the epic poem from which the imagery of Six Flying Dragons emerges. This is the first literary work written in Hangul in history and was commissioned by King Sejong the Great. It mentions both Six Flying Dragons and A Tree With Deep Roots.

While Lee Bang-won, Lee Seong-gye and Jung Do-jeon are historical figures, the other three are fictional.

That tumblr has, among other things, a very helpful timeline of Korean history and judging by it our story starts around 1375 when tensions between Goryeo and Ming were rising and some ministers wanted to re-establish relations with the crumbling Yuan Empire as a buffer.

Six Flying Dragons starts with the childhood of Lee Bang-won, the son of general Lee Seong-Gye, in the Northern Frontier. It soon shifts to the capital where the young idealistic but somewhat hot-headed boy is caught up in events that centre around minister Lee In-Gyeom (architect of the somewhat astonishing breastfeeding pig scene that is one of the most iconic of this drama).

The first episode uses Lee In-Gyeom to personify the decadence and mercurial self-interest that had decayed Goryeo’s social institutions. After a young Bang-won witnesses first hand the devastating impact the greed of ministers like In-Gyeom are having on the poor, he looks to his upright father to rectify matters only to discover he is socially powerless away from the battlefield.

It’s a devastating blow to the young boy’s world and the episode ends with him witnessing his father’s impotence in the face of injustice.

Meanwhile, some beggar children he has befriended (who will grow up to be two of the other dragons) are on a quest to find and save their mother whom they believe has been taken by Lee In-Gyeom to feed his piglets so the meat would be sweeter. Yes, you read that right. You have to see it to believe it.

Whether Goryeo in this period had in fact slid into this level of barbarism and decadence is impossible to know. But the image of newborns dying of starvation because their mothers were kidnapped and forced to feed piglets just so nobles can have better tasting pork is a powerful one. And it’s easy to see how our young dragons might decide this is a Kingdom whose time has past.

But while the first episode is already a powerhouse of storytelling and acting, it is extremely confusing for an English language viewer going in cold. A bit of reading about the bones of the story will help (bearing in mind this story is fictionalised and not an accurate retelling).