Before Joseon: What Goryeo and Silla Kings Ate

Most writing about Korean royal food stops at Joseon, because that is where the records are thickest. Go back further and the picture changes completely: a Buddhist kingdom where the king himself gave up meat, a foreign occupation that put it back on the table, and a stretch of centuries where the most valuable thing at court was not beef but tea.

This is the second piece in a series on what Korea’s powerful have eaten. The first covered the Joseon kings and their food.

What is the oldest Korean food record we have?

A wedding present list. In the second month of 683, King Sinmun of Silla sent gifts to the family of his bride, the daughter of an official named Kim Heum-un. The Samguk Sagi records what went:

That single line is the reason anyone can say Korean fermented seasoning is more than 1,300 years old. Soy sauce, bean paste and jeotgal were not folk improvisations at that point - they were formal enough, and valuable enough, to be counted out in carts as a royal betrothal gift.

The Three Kingdoms period otherwise leaves very little. There is no menu, no cookbook, barely a dish name. That absence is itself worth saying out loud, because a lot of what circulates online about ancient Korean cuisine is reconstruction presented as record.

Why did Goryeo kings ban butchery?

Because Goryeo was a Buddhist state and took the precept against killing seriously at the top.

The 968 entry is the striking one. King Gwangjong banned slaughter and ordered that even the king’s own meat dish be bought at the market rather than butchered in the palace. King Seongjong cut meat from the royal table entirely in 989. King Munjong banned slaughter nationwide for three years in 1066.

In 1123 a Song envoy named Xu Jing spent about a month in the Goryeo capital and wrote it up. His account of Korean butchery is not flattering:

What did they eat instead? Honey pastry and very expensive tea

With meat off the ancestral table, Buddhist Goryeo built its ceremonial food around yumilgwa - wheat flour kneaded with honey and sesame oil, fried, then steeped in more honey. It was a meat substitute in the ritual sense: what you put on an altar when you cannot put a slaughtered animal there.

It got out of hand. Yumilgwa ate through grain, honey and oil at a rate that moved prices, and the court banned it in 1192, again in 1310 for all public and private banquets, and again in 1353. Three royal bans in 160 years is a strong review. In 1296 King Chungnyeol took yumilgwa to a Yuan court wedding banquet, where it went over very well.

Tea was the other luxury. The court ran a dabang, an office for royal tea, down to a corps of soldiers whose job was transporting it - a posting that carried exemption from regular military service, so hundreds applied and the court had to select. The prestige leaf was noewon tea, and a 1049 schedule of official gifts valued it at roughly 1,600 times ordinary tea. Tea was offered to the king at the Yeondeunghoe lantern festival and exchanged between king and officials at the Palgwanhoe.

How the Mongols put meat back on the table

After Goryeo made peace with the Mongols in 1260, the traffic between the two courts became constant: Mongol princesses married into the Goryeo royal house with their entire households, Yuan officials were posted in, garrisons settled.

The food changed with them. Kublai Khan sent King Wonjong 500 sheep in 1263. In 1297 the Yuan empress dowager sent King Chungnyeol 50 sheep, 10 swans and Mongol court liquor for his birthday. And the Goryeo historians noticed things they found strange enough to write down - such as Princess Jeguk Daejang, Chungnyeol’s Mongol wife, weeping at news of her mother’s death while continuing to eat meat as usual. Mourning without fasting was not how Goryeo did it.

Yuan cookbooks came too. Food historians have traced large sections of the Yuan compendium Jujia Biyong - its chapters of roasting and boiling methods for lamb, beef, horse, venison - straight into the later Korean manual Sallim Gyeongje. The techniques survived; the lamb mostly became beef and pork.

Is soju Mongolian? The honest answer

Probably, but the paperwork is missing.

The chain usually runs like this: Mongol armies campaigning in the Islamic world in the 1250s picked up distilling, and the technique reached Goryeo around the 1270s. The old Korean names support it - aragil and arangju and araegi, all tracking back through Mongolian arkhi to Arabic araq. Joseon scholars believed it themselves. The Jibong Yuseol says soju came out of Mongolia, and Heo Jun’s Dongui Bogam says the method was first known in the Yuan period.

The three regions famous for distilled soju - Kaesong, Andong and Jeju - were all places with a Mongol presence. Jeju in particular was under direct Yuan administration for roughly 130 years after 1273.

What the Goryeosa does record is Koreans getting into trouble with it. In 1376 an official named Kim Jin was appointed commander in Gyeongsang province and spent his nights drinking soju with entertainers; his troops nicknamed his circle the sojudo, the soju crowd. When Japanese raiders burned the Happo garrison the following year, the soldiers reportedly refused to advance, saying the soju crowd could go fight. The defeat was total and Kim Jin fled alone on horseback. He was stripped of rank and exiled; General Choe Yeong later blocked his return.

Dumplings, and a song about a dumpling shop

The first Korean dumpling record is a discipline note. The Goryeosa records that during the reign of King Chunghye someone was punished for sneaking into the royal kitchen and eating the dumplings - which tells you what dumplings were worth at court.

The more famous appearance is Ssanghwajeom, a Goryeo song performed before King Chungnyeol in 1279. The title means “dumpling shop,” and the first verse is set in one run by a hoehoeabi - a Muslim man. That is not a literary invention: there was a Muslim community in the Goryeo capital, beginning with a party of around a hundred traders who arrived in 1024, and Central Asian men who came with the Mongol princesses’ retinues founded Korean clan lines that still exist.

Where to eat Goryeo in Seoul

Kaesong, the Goryeo capital, is in North Korea. But its cooking came south with refugees after 1945, and Seoul is where it survives.

Gaeseong Mandu Koong is the one to book a trip around. Kaesong dumplings, an eight-hour broth, and joraengi tteokguk - the rice cake pinched in the middle like an hourglass, at 19,000 won. There is a story that Kaesong people shaped it that way to symbolise strangling the founder of Joseon, who had destroyed their dynasty. It is a good story. It is also not in any Joseon-era source; the earliest written version appears in a food book from 1940, so treat it as folklore rather than history. Cash only, no parking, expect a queue.

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Jaha Sonmandu in Buam-dong is worth the hill for pyeonsu at 12,000 won - a flat square dumpling eaten in summer, a Kaesong form you will not find in most dumpling houses. Closed Mondays.

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Balwoo Gongyang is on the fifth floor of the temple stay centre opposite Jogyesa, and it is the direct answer to “what did a Buddhist kingdom eat.” Courses run 36,000 won for a weekday lunch up to 120,000 won by advance reservation. Closed Sundays. It held a Michelin star in the past; it is not in the 2026 star list, which is worth knowing before you quote a guidebook at someone.

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Baekgom Makgeolli near Gwanghwamun carries roughly 200 Korean traditional liquors, about 110 of them distilled. If the point of your evening is to taste the thing the Mongols are supposed to have brought, this is the widest shelf in central Seoul.

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🏆 Kaesong, temple and traditional-liquor addresses, with prices and closing days checked from restaurant listings in September 2026

Maji in Seochon is the cheaper way into temple food - a bowl from 11,000 won, a nine-section gujeolpan course at 45,000 won by reservation. Like all temple cooking it leaves out the five pungent vegetables, so no garlic and no onion, which is a genuinely different flavour from ordinary Korean food rather than a small adjustment. Hwangsaengga Kalguksu in Samcheong-dong is not a Kaesong restaurant, but its suyuk - plain boiled beef, sliced - is the surviving form of exactly the boiling methods that came across in those Yuan cookbooks.

📍 Yongsusan 📍 Hwangsaengga 📍 Maji

Four stories about ancient Korean food that are not true

This subject attracts invented history more than most, partly because the real records are so thin. Four to retire:

Bulgogi descends from Goguryeo maekjeok. The Chinese source usually cited says maekjeok was food of the Di people and mentions no Goguryeo, no marinade, no garlic, no soy sauce and no skewer. Korean food historians have publicly called this one out as a modern invention.

Sundae came from Genghis Khan’s field rations. Mongolian gedes is a general term for offal dishes, and the actual Mongol campaign ration was borts, dried meat. A stuffed-intestine dish appears in the Chinese Qimin Yaoshu around the sixth century, and the first Korean record is from 1830.

Joraengi tteok was shaped to strangle Yi Seong-gye. First appears in print in 1940. No Joseon source mentions it.

Tea arrived in Korea in 828. Tea was already present under Queen Seondeok in the seventh century. What the 828 record describes is an envoy bringing back seeds, which were planted on Jirisan - the start of cultivation, not of tea.

Next in this series: the presidents of the Republic of Korea, from a Blue House that served nothing but knife-cut noodles to a first cabinet meeting held over gimbap. After that, the state banquets Korea has put in front of visiting heads of state.

For the dynasty that follows this one, see what Joseon kings actually ate. For the drinking side of the story, our guide to makgeolli and traditional Korean liquor covers what is in the bottle, and Seoul’s traditional tea houses picks up where the Goryeo tea office left off.