Name: 11 Timeless Stories from Korea | The Classics
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T16:51:22.000Z
Duration: 31 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Here are some great big story classics all about Korea.

From century old delicacies to the ultimate hangover cure, these tales capture Korea's rich culture.

In Chengju, South Korea, there is a family carrying on a generations long tradition of making yuck, an old school Korean treatment that is still popular today.

Yat dates back more than a thousand years to the Goryeo Dynasty.

Everyone loves sauce, but in Korea, there is one sauce that goes on everything.

And in Korea, no one makes it better than the people in this small town.

She's been making gochujang for 40 years.

Gochujang gets its taste from fermented soybean bricks.

Sunchang Village has a naturally humid climate that is perfect for fermenting the beans.

But SEO Young soon likes to let hers ferment a little bit longer.

SEO Young soon doesn't want her town's famous sauce to be forgotten.

So she offers workshops to visitors in the hopes they will learn how to make her special sauce and continue the gojujang tradition.

For two weeks each year, these giant, colorful lanterns float along Korea's Namgang river, turning it into a kaleidoscope of light and color.

The Jinju Namgang Lantern Festival takes place in Jinju, South Korea annually.

Each autumn season, a variety of colorful lanterns depicting national treasures and the cultural heritage of culture Korea float along the Namgang river and visitors can take boat rides for a closer look.

In addition to the vibrant lanterns, there are live performances of music, fountain displays, and

of course, no festival is complete without fireworks.

The origin of this lantern festival dates back to the 1500s, when the people of Jinju would light lanterns wishing for the safe return of their family members during the Japanese invasion.

Today, the festival continues in memory of those soldiers who died serving their country.

Visitors to the festival are welcome to write their own wishes on lanterns and either hang them in the exhibit tunnel or float them down the river.

For centuries, Koreans have believed in the medicinal properties of a folk remedy called jugyom, or in English, bamboo salt.

Bamboo salt is ubiquitous in South Korea.

It is made by repeatedly roasting salt in stalks of bamboo.

Its adherents claim it combats disease, indigestion and pain.

But what's certain is it's not easy to make.

The definitive method was fashioned in the early 20th century by a famed medicine man named Kim Il Hoon.

His son Kim Yun Se established a bamboo salt company that preserved and industrialized the family's salt making method.

For Kim, the three year process is worth every minute producing.

It is a way to honor both this uniquely Korean remedy and his father's legacy.

It just like runs through my blood, just like being Korean does.

It's never been enough for me to just make hanji.

My life mission is to make and promote hanji across the world.

Hanji is, as an umbrella term, just Korean paper.

But the kind of Hanji that I'm interested in is made according to the tradition and made by hand and made from scratch.

I was born in New York City to Korean immigrant parents who taught me Korean in the household.

Growing up, I loved making music, and so I always had that proclivity towards the arts.

But I didn't know anything about paper making until I went to graduate school for book arts.

When I was looking for information on hanji, there was very little, at least in English.

So it became very clear that if I wanted to learn more about hanji, I would have to go directly to Korea.

The paper mulberry trees that grows in Korea has to withstand the Korean monsoon season, where it's really hot and humid in the summer, and

So this tree is incredibly resilient and really strong.

Not only does that tree have to withstand that climate, the people do too.

So bringing those two things together creates a product that's totally different from any other place.

And a lot of them just took one look at me and said, you're a woman, you can't do this.

Or they would say you're not strong enough.

That was just so far out of what they knew that they didn't believe me until they saw me work.

I've never thought about it because it's just what I've been driven to do.

But I know from the outside it looks like I have a lot of audacity for trying to do something that only men traditionally do and even to this day do.

When I came back from Korea, I was doing all this weaving, which is a Korean tradition called jisung.

You have to cut big sheets of paper into narrow strips, and

then out of these cords, you can then weave like basketry.

I think that the way that you keep traditional live is to just keep evolving it.

The most exciting work I've been doing with the weaving is making ducks, and

those are based on Korean wedding ducks that are given to bride and groom to promote marital fidelity and fertility.

People were very surprised when I came to them saying, oh, I want to learn how to make hanji.

And you also have to know when to recognize when that someone maybe will give you a chance, even if you are a very strange bird.

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11 Timeless Stories from Korea | The Classics

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