Spring, 1836. Maje, Namyangju.
Dasan Jeong Yak-yong, then seventy-four, decided the last task he would undertake before closing his eyes.
It was to choose someone to whom he could pass on the writings of his whole life.
Many people could recite his words, but few lived by them.
So Dasan tore five pages from a book of five hundred volumes and scattered them throughout the village, and he wrote that he would bequeath everything he had left to whoever solved all five.
Of course, this is not real history.
It is the beginning of <Dasan's Last Disciple>, an immersive experience that RealWorld presented together with Namyangju City at the 40th Dasan Jeong Yak-yong Cultural Festival, held from October 17 to 18.
For the two days of the festival, five test sheets, two hundred years old, were posted again throughout Maje.
Dasan's torn pages scattered across Maje
Maje is where Dasan was born.
It is also where he returned after eighteen years of exile and lived for another eighteen years until the end of his life.
The Jeong Yak-yong Historic Site and Dasan Ecological Park, where the festival was held, are both in this village.
Spaces that honor a historical figure usually welcome visitors in similar ways.
You tour the birthplace, read the information boards listing achievements, and take a photo.
Even in a village where Dasan's story remains most fully, going any further is not easy.
<Dasan's Last Disciple> treats the posters pasted around the village not as guide materials, but as pages Dasan tore up.
Participants converse with Dasan, visit six locations in turn, and must solve the problems left at each place to pass Dasan's test.
Dasan's real achievements and records reborn as problems!
All the problems in the first set are drawn from Dasan's actual achievements and records.
The first page, posted in front of the Dasan Culture Center, is a story about the geojungi (crane).
There is a stone that takes eight people hanging from ropes to lift by hand, and each time you add a pulley, the number of people needed is halved.
Look at three pictures showing different numbers of pulleys and count how many people each requires.
When you get the answer, Dasan leaves a single remark:
The king said he was saving money, but what he was actually saving was people.
On the second page at the Jeong Yak-yong Historic Site lies a military-cloth tax ledger from a county in the late Joseon period.
The clerk levied the military-cloth tax on all nine people, and among them are a three-year-old child and a man who died three years earlier.
Participants read three lines of the collection regulations and calculate how much should have been collected according to the law.
Once the calculation is finished, it becomes clear how much more the clerk actually collected, and the story continues that Dasan wrote the Mongmin Simseo after seeing ledgers like this.
Beyond these, at Yeoyudang you look for the meaning behind the house's name, and on Munhwa-ui Geori you load cargo onto boats, as was done with the floating bridges Jeongjo laid during his procession to Hwaseong.
You can solve these even if you know nothing about Dasan or cannot read Chinese characters.
All the information needed is written on the posters, and if you follow the rules step by step, the answer comes out.
Find Dasan at the festival site!
The fifth page has no problem.
The poster says only that Dasan is walking through this village now,
along with three features of his appearance.
Participants must find, around the Ecological Park Farm Market area, the person wearing a black gat, wearing glasses, and holding a folding fan.
When you find him and call him "Teacher," the actor opens the fan and shows the number written inside.
The actor's only line is: "You found me well. Take this number."
For this page, participants who had been looking only at posters and screens have to lift their heads and scan the festival crowd.
Many families took photos as they walked away with Dasan, who had opened his fan.
The one character Dasan wrote first in his will
Each time you solve a page, one character that had been erased from Dasan's writing is brought back.
Machine 機 (gi)
People 民 (min)
Careful 愼 (sin)
Cross 渡 (do)
Teacher 師 (sa)
On the sixth and final page, participants return these five characters to the blanks in Dasan's will.
The puzzle is built so that inserting the characters in the order you obtained them is wrong,
so you can find the right places only by reading the text of the will.
The character that goes in the first blank is 'people' (民, 백성).
Once you see that the people, not the geojungi or the floating bridges, come first,
you realize that all the earlier problems were telling the same story.
The last blank is 'teacher' (師, 스승). The participant who fills that blank becomes Dasan's last disciple.
To participants who showed the completion screen at the information desk,
we gave a Dasan Jeong Yak-yong sticker as a gift.
Where in your village will the next test sheet be posted?
Birthplaces, historic sites, memorial halls, and festivals honoring historical figures already hold plenty of stories.
What is needed is to turn those stories into something visitors can work through themselves and experience.
If there is a figure or scene from your region you would like to bring out, let RealWorld know.
We will create a test sheet suited to that place together with you.
Thank you :)