Janghwa Hongnyeon jeon

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Korean spelling
Korean alphabet : 장화홍련 전
Hanja : 薔 花 紅蓮 傳
Revised Romanization : Janghwa Hongnyeon jeon
McCune-Reischauer : Changhwa Hongnyŏn chŏn

Janghwa Hongnyeon jeon ( The Tale of Rose and Lotus ) is a Korean folk tale from the Joseon Dynasty .

action

Once upon a time there was a father who had two daughters, Rose and Lotus. However, the mother died shortly after the birth. He mourned her very much and was therefore unable to remarry for several years. Because of this, the girls grew up without a mother. Suddenly, however, he saw that the daughters need a mother. The father then married a woman with a son. Still, he was unhappy and could not pay enough attention to his wife. Stories about his late wife made his wife very jealous and she decided to get rid of the girls.

One night she caught a rat, skinned it, and put it in Rose's bed. The next morning she declared the girl to be insane. The father sent the girl, accompanied by the stepmother, to relatives in order to avoid a scandal. When they were both far enough away from the house, she became angry with Rose's alleged wrongdoing and threatened to kill her. Rose threw herself into the river and drowned.

That night Lotus dreamed of Rose, who appeared as a ghost in a dream to warn her about the stepmother. When Lotus asked her stepmother what happened, she replied that Rose brought shame on the family and drowned herself. Lotus found the river and saw her sister's spirit in it. She became so upset that she decided to give in to her fate and drown herself too.

Some time later the province in which the family lived got a new governor. He learned that all previous governors had died when two ghosts came upon them. But he wasn't afraid. One night he woke up and saw the two sisters, but instead of losing his mind and dying like his predecessors, he spoke to them. The sisters revealed the truth to him, and he visited the girls' parents the next morning. The stepmother showed him the dead rat, but he did not realize what was really going on and let the parents go.

That night the girls came back to the governor and told him to take a closer look. He did so the next morning and saw the stepmother's lies. He had the stepmother and her son killed and released the father.

The father found the river and saw the girls floating upside down in the water. They looked like they were sleeping and not dead. He buried her and mourned her and his own naivety. A few years later he married a very nice woman. One night he dreamed about the daughters who tell him that they will come back. The next morning his third wife brought him two flowers, a rose, and a lotus. Nine months later, she gave birth to two girls who looked exactly like the dead sisters. The two girls were also named Rose and Lotus, and they all lived happily ever after.

Film adaptations

The plot has already been filmed several times and served as the basis for Kim Jee-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters .