Cheongbaegun - An Official Ends Up as a Hermit

Cheongbaegun is a classical Korean novel in Hangeul and is housed at the Jangseogak Archives. It consists of ten volumes in ten books, each page including ten columns of twenty-two or twenty-three syllables each. The title Cheongbaegun is a combination of the word cheongun (青雲), which means “road to an official position,” and baegun (白雲), which means “life in retirement.” Cheongbaegun tells the story of a man who, lured by alcohol and women, loses his true nature but somehow experiences a new awakening and manages to embrace the right path again. At some points this novel shows the influence of another literary work, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Ch. Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義). Cheongbaegun takes the contents of the war-themed Romance of the Three Kingdoms and adapts it to a plot connected to feelings typical of family dynamics, like love and jealousy.