Revision as of 00:42, 2 November 2014

Tomb (in South Korea) of Suriratna, the Princess of the Indian kingdom Ayuta (Ayodhya) and queen of Gaya (in South Korea). The stones used at the bottom, as well as the stone tablet, are distinctly Indian. They are said to have been taken from India to Korea by the queen herself. Photo: Animesh

This article will be further updated shortly

Suri Ratna Mishr @ Hurh Hwang-ok

1st century A.D. Ayodhya: the royal dream

Kosal/ Ayodhya: Princess Suriratna offers prayers. (Animation by: SNSD TV )

Some Indian coast: Princess Suriratna enters the boat bound for Korea. Her entourage includes camels, c. A.D. 48. (Note the Mughal-style, 15th – 17th century monuments in the background.) (Animation by S.Korea’s SNSD TV)

The boat to Korea sails through the monsoon rains. That it had red sails and a red flag has been mentioned in Korean chronicles. Animation by: SNSD TV

Gaya, Korea: The Indian princess meets the King of Gaya. King Suro tells Suri Ratna that he knew that she would sail across the seas to marry him, because of which he did not marry any of the noble ladies who had been suggested to him.Animation by: SNSD TV

The newly-wed couple enters the royal palace in Gaya (Korea). Animation by: SNSD TV

They rule the kingdom of Gaya and live happily ever after. Animation by: SNSD TV

King Suro. Animation by: SNSD TV

The Mishr(a) clan ruled the Kingdom of Kosal(a) (the present Ayodhya area of India) in the 1st century A.D.

In A.D. 48, in the month of May, King Mishr and his wife both had dream in which Lord Sange Jae told them that Suro, the King-designate of Geumgwan Gaya (in Korea) was single and was looking for a wife.

(Buddhism came to Korea in A.D. 372. Therefore, it is so heart-warming for Indians to note that a kingdom founded more than three hundred years before had the same name as the holiest Buddhist town in the world.)

Korean chronicles say that Lord Sange Jae told the king and queen of Ayuta, in identical dreams on the same night, that Kim Suro had been chosen to become the king of Gaya because he was a holy and saintly man. ‘In governing the new country he needs a queen consort,’ Lord Sange Jae said, ‘therefore, I urge you to send your princess to marry him.’

Sange/ Singhe/ Sengge Simha/ all mean the Lion God, which, Parvez Dewan argues, would mean Lord Nara Simha.

Ayodhya was the capital of the Kosala Kingdom.

Meanwhile in Gaya, Korea…

Around the same time an oracle asked the King-designate of Korea’s Gaya (or Kaya) kingdom to await the coming of a princess from ‘Ayuta.’

At the time, indeed ‘since creation itself’ the Kimhae region, which is in the southern part of Korea, had never been welded together into one nation or kingdom. It was ruled by nine chieftains. In A.D. 42, during the spring festival, a golden bowl with six golden bowls, came down from heaven. Each egg hatched into a prince. One of the boys was given the title Suro and proclaimed king; the other five were made chiefs of the Gaya/ Kaya tribes that lived nearby.

In A.D. 42 King Kim Suro (or Sureung) founded a kingdom that he named Karak (in which case he must have been born fully formed), with its capital at Gimhae city. (According to some it was founded in 57 B.C.)

Back in Ayuta, King Mishr asked his daughter Princess Suri Ratna (the ‘brown gemstone’ or ‘the auspicious gem’) to set sail for Korea. This would not have been easy because India’s Ayodhya is a thousand kilometres from the nearest seashore. So, King Mishr sent a retinue of some nobles and twenty servants to accompany his daughter. As gifts for the Korean king he sent gold, jewels, silk brocade, silver and tableware.

The journey by sea took three months. The boat had red sails and a red flag, Korean chronicles inform us. During the sea voyage, by when Suri Ratna had been sailing for two months, she came upon the Beondo tree, which bore fruit—a peach called Beondo—only once in 3000 years. The princess and her companions ate steamed dates of the sea and peaches during their journey.

The Indian princess Suri [Sri] Ratna reached Korea on 27 July, 48 A.D. Korean chronicles quote her as telling her husband that she was 16 [not 28, as recorded by some]. Therefore, she must have been born in A.D. 32. (She died in A.D. 189, at age 157. The king died a year later.)

A rival Korean king and ‘other whimsical elements’ in the Korean court tried their best to prevent the divinely ordained couple from marrying. The courtiers wanted the king to marry one of ladies shortlisted by them instead. Suro, on the other hand, knew that God had chosen a queen for him.

One day, acting on mystical premonition, the king asked Yuch'ŏn-gan to go to the southern island of Mangsan-do, first by horse and then by boat. While they were on the shores of the island, Yuch'ŏn-gan and his sailors from Gaya saw a boat with red sails. Yuch'ŏn-gan guided the boat to the shore.

When the boat reached the shores, Sin'gwigan, an official, mounted a horse and rushed to tell the King that the boat had arrived. Suro was delighted. He asked the aforesaid heads of the nine main clans to receive the guests from Ayuta and bring them to his palace.

However, the chaste Princess Suri Ratna refused to be escorted by people whom she did not know. Besides, she said, it would be unbecoming for her to enter the palace without the appropriate rituals.

The king admired the princess’ chaste insistence and propriety. He got a tent pitched half way up a hill close to his own palace. That is where the princess stayed. Among the nobles and servants in her retinue were Sin Po/ Sinbo and his wife Mojong, and Cho Kuang/ Chongwang and his wife Moryang/ Morang. [Later, these two couples stayed on in Gaya and King Suro allotted them a house each, to help them settle down.]

The king gave Korean costumes to all members of Suri Ratna’s entourage to wear and embroidered quilts and pillows for the beds that they would sleep on.

The Samguk Yusa records that before her wedding rituals began, Suri Ratna went to the top of the hill that her tent was on, changed her lower garment, which was made of silk brocade, and gave the garment that she had removed as an offering to the mountain spirit. (In both India and Thailand the lower garment would have been an unstitched garment wrapped around the waist and touching the feet. The Samguk Yusa variously records that this garment was a skirt or pajamas, neither of which was unlikely in the 1st century A.D.

The blessings of a Buddhist pagoda built by Lord Buddha himself, thus, ensured that the predictions made to the families of Suri Ratna and Suro came true and King Kim Suro married the Indian princess.

During the celebrations Suri Ratna’s retinue was housed in a 20-room guest house.

On the wedding night, when the princess of Ayuta and the king of Gaya were finally together, she said to her husband, ‘I am the princess of Ayuta. My surname [in the Korean language] is Hurh [or Huh, Hso, Ho, Hur or Heo] and my given name is Hwang-ok [yellow jade].’

This would prove the princess’ Indian-origin because Suri Ratna means ‘the sun-like or golden gemstone’ and Sri Ratna ‘the auspicious gemstone.’ In both Sanskrit and Korean the princess’ name refers to a gem that is yellow or golden. Clearly, the Korean name that she adopted was a translation of her Sanskrit name—Indian or Thai (the Thais have wonderful and complex, literary Sanskrit names to this day, even as the Indians had abandoned Sanskrit names for several centuries).

The young bridge added, ‘I am 16’ [not 28, as recorded on some websites]. She also told her husband about the prophecy that brought her to Gaya.

Hwang-ok recounted the stormy sea journey, during which she found the Beonda peach, which was the sacred fruit of love.

King Suro replied, ‘My life has been uniquely spiritual from the day I was born. Therefore, I always knew of your coming from a distant land. Which is why I never considered marrying any of the noble ladies proposed by my courtiers. I am lucky that such a graceful princess is now my queen.’

Ratna is renowned in Korea as Queen Huh (or Hur, Ho, Hsu, Heo or Hurh) Hwang-ok (yellow jade). Hurh does sound like a Koreanisation of Mishr.

After the king and queen had been together for two nights and one day, some of the Queen's escorts decided to return home, King Suro gifted them 1,200 yards of hempen cloth and ten bags of rice each.

The royal couple entered the royal palace on the first day of the eighth month. They came in ornate palanquins, while the courtiers came in carriages and on horses. The gifts that Hwang-ok had brought from Ayuta followed in several wagons.

The queen began to live in the inner palace. The trousseau and valuable that she had brought from Ayuta were placed in a store, for her to use whenever she wanted.

Before their first child [Prince Kodung] was conceived, both king and queen had an identical dream in which they saw a bear. The queen conceived thereafter.

These facts have been recorded on four pages of the Garakguk-gi (A shronicle of the Karak or Garak kingdom) section of the voluminous Samguk Yusa ("The Heritage History of the Three Kingdoms"), written in the 1200s. These four pages are an account of the marriage of Kim Su-ro.

A short animated Korean version of the love story can be seen on youtube

King Kim Suro founded the Gaya Kingdom (57 B.C./ A.D.42 – A.D. 668) in the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula. Korea’s Gaya was where Gimhae/ Kimhae in the South Gyeongsang Province now is.

Where was Queen Heo/ Huh’s Ayuta?

Samguk Yusa mentions that the princess was from a far-off kingdom called Ayuta (or Ajutuo) in the language of that country and Ch'un-ch'uk in Korean.

The Samguk Yusa was translated into English by Professor Ha Tae-Hung. Grafton K. Mintz (1925–1983), an American journalist who had settled in Korea, edited the translation. Mintz speculated that Ayuta (or Ajutuo) was the same as Thailand’s Ayutthaya. While his Mintz’s reasoning is not known, Indian author Parvez Dewan feels that arguments in favour of Thailand’s Ayutthaya are:

i) There is a direct sea route between Thailand’s Ayutthaya and Korea; India’s Ayodhya is landlocked and about a thousand kilometres from the nearest seashore in the Bay of Bengal [Kalingodra, or the sea of Kalinga in Oriya] and about 1200 km from Nanigaina [Puri], the likely port in Kalinga [Ho-Ling, in Chinese];

ii) Suri Ratna is a very Malay-Thai-Balinese sounding name;

iii) Racially the Thais are closer to Korea.

However,, Parvez Dewan points out, the Thai Ayutthaya was established in A.D. 1351, around a century after the 'Samguk Yusa’ was written. The chronicle makes it clear that it is referring to a very old event and from it the year A.D. 48 has been derived, when the Kingdom of Funan existed in Thailand. True, Funan was influenced by Indian culture but it was more than thirteen hundred years away from setting up an Ayodhya. In A.D. 48 the only Ayodhya was in India. The Koreans, especially the Karaks, universally accept the Indian Ayodhya as the land of Princess Suri Ratna. Therefore, the matter should rest there.

The Karak clan

The Karak clan of South Korea traces its ancestry to Hwang-ok (Suri Ratna) and are her descendants. Kim Suro and Heo/ Hurh started the Karak clan in A.D. 48. The Indo-Korean royal couple had ten sons and two daughters.

After the birth of the tenth child, Queen Hwang-ok told her husband, ‘I left the land of my ancestors for Gaya in order to fulfil the divine prophecy and serve you. However, it saddens me to think that the [sur]name of my family, Hurh [or Heo or Huh or Hoon etc.] will not be inherited by any of our children.’

Incidentally, Mishr and Hoon are both Brahmin castes of India.

The king was moved by the sadness of his queen at the thought of her noble surname vanishing with him. So, according to the text on Queen Hwang-ok’s tomb, the king chose two of the sons, including the eldest, Kŏdǔng, to adopt their mother's family name, as translated into Korean: Huh/ Hoon/ Hurh.

The Kim clan of Gimhae are descendants of the other eight sons.

Kim means ‘gold’ in Korean. So does ‘suri’ (sun-like) in Sanskrit.

However, some genealogies say that the king made five, i.e. one half, of his sons use their mother’s surname. Indeed, there are five branches of the Hurh clan: Kimhae (or Gimhae), Hayang, Taein, Hansan and Yangcheon.

Of the two daughters, one married a Talhae and the other a Silla, both being noble clans. (By A.D. 512 the Sillas would conquer all of Gaya/ Kaya.)

The First Lady of S Korea Mrs. Kim Yoon-ok; former President Kim Dae-jung; former President Kim Young-sam and former PM Kim Jong-pil belong to this clan. Uk Heo who co-authored South Korea's Rise: Economic Development, Power and Foreign Relations (Cambridge University Press), too, is a descendant.

Indeed, almost all Koreans with the surnames Kim and Huh/ Hoon/ Heo from Gimhae and Lee from Incheon belong to the Karak clan and are descendants of Suri Ratna. This clan of more than 60 lakh (6 million) people accounts for more than a tenth of Korea’s population of 5 crore (50 million) in 2014.

Till the early 1900s the Kimhae Kims and the Kimhae Heos did not inter-marry, as is the Indo-Korean tradition of not marrying within the clan. To inter-marry is almost like committing incest. As recently as in 1961, archaeologist-ethnographer Kim Byung-mo started dating a college student Ho Mi-kyong in 1961.

In 2012 when the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited South Korea, his wife Gursharan Kaur asked Indian Ambassador Vishnu Prakash how many Indians lived in Korea. Prakash assumed that Mrs Kaur meant PIOs/ OCIs and NRIs. So, he said that there was a community of about seven to eight thousand Indians. But Korean President Lee Myung-Bak's wife, Kim Yoon-ok, corrected him by saying he was ill-informed and the number was 5 million (50 lakh) and that she (Kim Yoon-ok) herself was one of them.

Archaeologist-ethnographer Kim Byung-mo would attribute the darkness of his ski to his Indian genes.

In India it is a matter of great happiness that the Indians and more than 10% of Koreans share the same blood and genes--and that the Indians and all Koreans share the same liberal democratic values.

Monuments…

…in Ayodhya

On the 6th March 2001 the Karak Clan Society built a monument at Ayodhya on the west bank of River Saryu, in cooperation with the state government of Uttar Pradesh. he North Korean ambassador to India was among those present. Since then members of the Karak Clan Society, and often Government officials from Gimhae City (South Korea), have visited the site every March to celebrate the Queen’s anniversary. Often a traditional Korean dancing team has participated in the ceremony.

In 2014 India’s Ministry of Tourism gave the government of Uttar Pradesh a grant, with the request to build a Korean-style monument within the same site in order to strengthen India’s ties with S. Korea and give the Karak Clan a sense of belonging in Ayodhya.

…in Korea

Queen Huh's tomb located in Gimhae, South Korea, has an Indian-style stupa (pagoda) in front, built with stones that the queen is believed to have brought from Ayodhya. Indeed, during the sea journey when the sea got very stormy, the princess’ servants arranged the stones into a pagoda to propitiate the god of the ocean. (Others say that Suri Ratna’s father had got the stone stupa/ pagoda placed on the boat to serve as ballast and keep the ship from tumbling over of the sea got too rough.)

Indeed, the architecture of the pagoda is very different from contemporary Korean pagodas and lacks their finesse. The stones are very Indian-looking. Koreans find these rough but very durable brown rocks ‘strange;’ Indians, on the other hand, are reminded of temples at home.

Twin-fishes (ssang-o) have been engraved on the tomb’s gate. The Korean managers of the tomb do not know what these fish signify, apart from being ssang-o sin (the twin-fish deity).

King Jilji built the temple, called Wanghusa ("the temple of the Queen") in A.D. 452. Buddhism had not reached Korea by then.

Efforts by Indian envoys

India’s Ambassador to S. Korea (2005 and 2008), N. Parthasarathi, first heard the story when President Roh Moo-hyun visited India in 2004.