Four rites, and a world of roses and limousines

To experience a traditional rite now, the notes write, one has to go to Gyeongbokgung or a folk village. A coming-of-age day brings red roses and perfume; a wedding, a white dress and a veil; a funeral, a coffin carried in a limousine. On an ancestral-rite day the strict old rules are not always kept, food the dead person liked may be set out, and Christian families may skip the rite altogether. That is not simply a bad change, they say, but it is a pity when the old rites slip out of ordinary life. A wedding may still keep a ham or a pebaek, yet a ceremony that follows the traditional form from start to finish is, they write, no longer common.

So they turn to two things they have actually seen: Im Kwon-taek’s 1996 film Festival, and a traditional wedding they once watched. Korea’s traditional rites, they write, can be folded into four characters, gwan-hon-sang-je: coming of age, marriage, the funeral, and the ancestral offering — the four passages a person goes through. The capping, or gwan, is the tying up of the hair as one becomes an adult; hon is the wedding; sang is the mourning for the dead; je is the offering.

Capping, a wooden goose, and dates in a skirt

The coming-of-age rite, they write, was held on an auspicious day in the first lunar month, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and before marriage. A young man put up a topknot, put on a gat, and received an adult courtesy name. A young woman put up her hair and set a pin; that rite is also called gyerye, from the character for putting the hair up, and a woman, they add, was taken as a full adult only when she married. After the rite one was honored as an adult, and given the right to speak down to anyone who had not yet put on a gat.

Love matches were rare; a house agreed a marriage, then came the steps: discussing it (uihon), sending the four pillars of the birth hour so that a match could be read (napchae), sending thanks-gifts from the groom’s house (napkye), and the groom going to the bride’s house for the ceremony and bringing her home (chinyong). Friends of the groom carry the ham, the notes write, sometimes with blue-and-red lanterns and in comic dress — today a dried squid over the face is well known — and may even bargain at the bride’s gate. A pair of wooden geese, famous for living in harmony, is set on the wedding table. Red yonji and gonji on the bride’s cheeks and brow are meant to drive off spirits. Dates and chestnuts thrown into her skirt at pebaek wish long life and many children; nowadays, they add, the wish is for children of either sex, healthy and long-lived. Pebaek itself, they write, was originally not done at the end of the wedding, but at dawn after the first night, when the bride greeted her parents-in-law. The characters for date and chestnut can also be read, they say, as “rise early,” and as a trembling caution before the husband’s family.

A funeral on film, and a wedding at the Folk Village

A funeral, they write, has many steps: calling the soul just after death, laying out the body and putting on mourning clothes, the departure for the burial ground, the burial itself, bringing the soul back to the house, and later rites to comfort it — and in practice still more. An ancestral offering is made on the death anniversary or at a festival; the table follows strict rules such as red foods to the east and white to the west, and fish and meat toward the east or west as the old mnemonic has them. In the traditional way, they write, a family might hold the rite three or four times a year, or more, as a way of showing that the living have not forgotten the dead.

In Festival, the aged mother of the well-known writer Yi Jun-seop has died after more than five years of dementia. She is eighty-seven, and her death, the notes write, does not make the mourners simply sad; people speak of a “good death” after a full life, and the mood can even be warm. Unlike a modern funeral in a black suit with only a hemp sleeve, everyone here wears hemp and a hood, and the film shows the rite from the first greeting of guests and the preparation of the body through to the burial. The flower-decked bier, they add, is the last vehicle into the next world, later often replaced by a limousine. At the Korean Folk Village the writer once watched a wedding in the open, the bride in a bridal robe, a hairpin, and a jokduri on her head. The village, they write, skips the early agreement and plays only the main and later rites: the groom’s arrival, the offering of the goose to the bride’s parents, the couple’s bows to each other, and the bride’s setting out for the groom’s house. The writer had expected to be bored, then found the bows, in a robe as splendid as a white dress, unexpectedly solemn. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of Korean coming-of-age, wedding, funeral, and ancestral rites, including Im Kwon-taek’s 1996 film Festival

Last updated: 14 November 2026