A Korean Register of a Wider East Asian Figure

Yongwang belongs to a family of East Asian dragon-king sea deities that also includes the Chinese Dragon Kings of the Four Seas and figures within Japanese Shinto and Ryukyuan tradition, and Korean Muism's version reflects the same broader East Asian cosmological pattern, a dragon ruling the waters from an undersea palace and commanding weather and fortune connected to water, while developing its own specifically Korean ritual practice through the mudang-led gut ceremony rather than through the more institutional Daoist or Buddhist temple cult found in some neighbouring traditions. Kendall's ethnographic work on Korean shamanism documents Yongwang worship as remaining genuinely active in coastal Korea into the present day, standing alongside figures such as Sanshin and the household gasin as one of the deities most likely to still receive an actual living gut ceremony rather than surviving only as historical folklore, precisely because the practical concerns Yongwang addresses, safety and success at sea, remain immediate and real for the fishing communities that continue to honour him.