South Korea’s national animal is the tiger, horangi (호랑이) in Korean, and specifically the Siberian or Amur tiger that once lived across the whole Korean Peninsula. It is a traditional symbol rather than one fixed by law: no statute names it, but it has stood for Korea since the Dangun founding myth recorded in the thirteenth-century Samguk yusa, filled Joseon-era folk paintings, and was chosen as the mascot of the 1988 Seoul Olympics (Hodori) and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics (Soohorang). The animal itself no longer lives wild in South Korea: the last one recorded in the south was caught on Daedeoksan near Gyeongju in 1922, and today the country’s tigers live in zoos and in the Tiger Forest at the Baekdudaegan National Arboretum.
Never Legislated: How the Horangi Became Korea’s Animal
South Korea has official national symbols set in law, such as the Taegukgi flag, and many others that are simply accepted by custom. The tiger belongs to the second group. Nobody voted it in and no decree adopted it; it became the national animal because it already filled the role in Korean storytelling, art and religion long before the Republic of Korea was founded in 1948. After the division of the peninsula, South Korea kept such traditional symbols as part of its identity, and English-language references describe the Siberian tiger as a national symbol of the Korean people because of its deep place in traditional culture.
Two images explain why it was the tiger and not another animal. The first is the guardian: in Korean folklore the tiger drives away evil spirits and brings good fortune, and among people living in the forested mountains it was the Mountain Spirit, the king of the mountain animals. The second is the beast to be feared. Tigers did kill people in Korea, and folklore held that a person killed by one became a vengeful ghost, a changgwi (창귀), who had to find the next victim before he could rest. The tiger was protector and threat at once, and that double nature runs through every later use of the symbol.
The Samguk Yusa and the Tiger That Left the Cave
The oldest written appearance of the tiger in Korea’s national story comes in the Samguk yusa, compiled in the thirteenth century, which preserves the myth of Dangun, legendary founder of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom, traditionally dated to 2333 BC. In it, the heavenly prince Hwanung descends with 3,000 followers to found a City of God on a sacred mountain. A tiger and a bear pray to him to become human. He gives them a bundle of mugwort and twenty cloves of garlic and tells them to eat only that and stay out of the sunlight for 100 days.
The tiger gives up after about twenty days and leaves the cave. The bear endures, becomes a woman, Ungnyeo, and gives birth to Dangun. On one reading, the bear and the tiger stand for two tribes competing for the favour of the heavenly prince. The tiger therefore sits at the beginning of the Korean story, not as an ancestor but as the impatient rival, and the founding is still marked every 3 October as Gaecheonjeol, National Foundation Day.
Joseon’s Tiger Hunters and the Kkachi Horangi Paintings
Under the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) the tiger was both a real problem and a favourite subject for artists. As river meadows and lowland forest were cleared for rice fields, tigers lost habitat and prey and attacks on people grew more frequent. The state answered with organised hunting. The Gyeongguk daejeon, the dynasty’s legal code, rewarded anyone who killed a tiger or leopard with honours comparable to military merit, and regions had to send tiger and leopard skins to the court as tribute. By the seventeenth century the hides could no longer be collected, so a cash payment was substituted, and in 1724 even that was abolished on the grounds that it made no sense to charge for animals that could no longer be caught. The state was effectively admitting that tigers had become hard to find across most of the peninsula.
At the same time, folk painters made the tiger a household image. Kkachi horangi (magpie and tiger) paintings, a staple of Joseon minhwa folk art, show a magpie on a pine branch above a tiger with a comic, slightly foolish face. Because the paintings were believed to keep evil away, families hung them in the house in the first month of the lunar year. They are also read as satire: the clumsy tiger stands for the aristocratic yangban class and its authority, while the poised magpie stands for ordinary people.
1910–1945: The Hunts That Ended Korea’s Wild Tigers
The final collapse came under Japanese colonial rule. The colonial government ran a campaign to eliminate “harmful beasts”, and the officially confirmed kills alone, as recorded in Korean sources, came to 97 tigers, 625 leopards, about 1,100 Asiatic black bears and about 1,350 wolves; the real totals are thought to have been higher. In southern Korea, the last recorded tiger was caught on Daedeoksan near Gyeongju in 1922.
Colonial police figures show how far the tiger had already declined. In 1928, according to the Japanese Police Bureau in Korea, tigers killed one person, while leopards killed three, wild boars four and wolves 48. The animal that had dominated Korean folklore had become a rarity. Tracks and sightings suggest an unknown number may survive in the forests around Baekdu Mountain on the border between North Korea and China, but none has been confirmed in South Korea for a century. Our guide to the geography of the Korean Peninsula shows the mountain spine, the Baekdudaegan, along which the tiger once ranged from Baekdu in the north to Jirisan in the south.
Hodori in 1988 and Soohorang in 2018
Modern South Korea put the tiger in front of the world twice through the Olympic movement. For the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the organisers chose a friendly cartoon tiger cub, picked from 2,295 entries. The designer Kim Hyun worked on it from mid-March to mid-June 1983. The name joins ho, from horangi, with dori, a diminutive for boys, and Hodori wears a farmers’-music sangmo hat whose long ribbon traces the letter S for Seoul. A female version, Hosuni, went with him, and in the run-up to the Games the government declared the 15th of every month “Hodori Day” for cultural events. Hodori went on to appear on stationery, snacks and even bank passbooks.
Thirty years later the PyeongChang organising committee, in Gangwon Province, picked another tiger. After a national contest announced on 27 June 2014, Soohorang, a white tiger, was approved by the International Olympic Committee on 2 June 2016. His name combines sooho, “protection”, with rang, from horangi and from the last syllable of “Jeongseon Arirang”, a folk song of Gangwon. The white tiger, baekho, is a sacred guardian in Korean tradition, and its colour suited the snow and ice of a Winter Games. The tiger also stands for Korea University and the Gwangju-based baseball club Kia Tigers, and Seoul’s city mascot from 1994, Wangbeomi, was a tiger presented as the child of Hodori and Hosuni.
Panthera tigris altaica: The Animal Behind the Emblem
Korea’s tiger was never a separate species. The scientific name Felis tigris altaicus, proposed by Coenraad Jacob Temminck in 1844, was based on long-haired skins sold in Japan that most likely came from Korea. In 1904 Emil Brass described a Korean tiger skin as a separate subspecies, coreensis, but a 2012 genetic study at Seoul National University of tiger specimens taken from Korea in the early 1900s found them to belong to the same population as the Amur tiger. Today the Siberian tiger is treated as a population of the mainland subspecies Panthera tigris tigris, still widely known by the old name altaica.
Its size matched its reputation. In the 1980s wild males were given as 180 to 306 kg and females 100 to 167 kg, though a 2005 study found contemporary wild males averaging about 176 kg, lighter than their historical counterparts. Its winter coat is long, with fur up to 11 cm on the top of the neck. It hunts Manchurian wapiti, sika and roe deer, wild boar and gorals, and occasionally bears. Females need a home range of up to 450 km², males more, which explains why the animal could not survive once Korea’s mountains were hunted out and cleared. The tiger as a species has been listed as Endangered by the IUCN since 1986. The main wild population lives in Russia’s Primorsky Krai, where an estimate in 2022 put the number at about 756, including 200 cubs. South Korea’s national animal shares its stripes with India’s, as our page on the national animal of India explains.
Tiger Forest at the Baekdudaegan National Arboretum
The place in South Korea that comes closest to returning the tiger to its mountains is the Baekdudaegan National Arboretum in Bonghwa County, North Gyeongsang Province, run by the Korea Forest Service. The arboretum covers 5,179 hectares on the Baekdudaegan ridge, and its Tiger Forest recreates mountain habitat for Siberian tigers. Two tigers that came to Korea from China under a friendship project were moved there on 25 January 2017, the enclosure opened to visitors on 4 May 2018, and more tigers have joined since, including animals transferred from the Everland zoo.
The tigers in Bonghwa are a display and conservation project rather than a wild population, and they live in a country where the last wild tiger died before living memory. Yet they sit on the same ridge line that once carried tigers the length of the peninsula, a line now cut by the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and they give South Koreans the chance to see the animal on its own mountains rather than only in paintings, on mascots and in the opening line of the Dangun story.