12 timestamped notes explaining the Korean cultural context in this episode — customs, idioms, food, honorifics, and history, at the moment each appears on screen. These notes discuss events across the whole episode. To see them revealed scene-by-scene as you watch, use the episode page to find an airing.
In Joseon royal households, a child's formal name was often given later in life. Until then, they were called by an 아명 (amyeong), a tender nickname chosen by the king or a parent. Here the king named the princess 생강 (Saenggang, 'ginger') after the ginger-tree blossoms she described from her home village — a small, warm gesture that quietly shows his affection.
An 액막이 (aengmagi) is a traditional rite or talisman meant to deflect misfortune or a fated calamity before it can land. They range from a shaman ceremony to a simple charm hung above a door. The princess is saying she deliberately left her body open to the ghost as a calculated way to let the crisis pass through — using a spirit ward's own logic against itself.
A 귀매 (gwimae) is a predatory supernatural entity in Korean folk belief — not a ghost that simply haunts, but one that actively consumes the souls or life-force of the living. The revelation that the princess's mother's soul has been utterly destroyed, not merely trapped, carries real weight: in this tradition, soul-destruction means no afterlife, no reincarnation, nothing left.
구천's line about suffering through 'babysitting' the princess uses very coarse, colloquial Korean — '똥줄 빠질 지경' literally means 'to the point my intestines are about to fall out,' a crude idiom for being scared half to death. The roughness signals both frustration and the informal, unguarded register he defaults to when genuinely stressed.
Throughout Joseon history, 독살 (dokssal), death by poison, was the favoured tool for removing royal rivals because it could be disguised as illness or — as the show plays on — blamed on a supernatural curse. The queen dowager is publicly naming what everyone around the throne feared to say, and doing so in a room full of royal relatives makes it a direct political challenge to the king.
A 승은상궁 (seung'eun sanggung) was a palace lady who had slept with the king. If she became pregnant, her child could theoretically be recognised as a royal heir, making her a political threat to the queen and existing princes. Accusing the queen dowager of murdering a pregnant 승은상궁 is one of the gravest charges imaginable at court — it alleges both murder and the deliberate erasure of the royal bloodline.
The king rattles off three real government medical offices: 전의감 (Jeonuigam) handled royal and official medicine, 혜민서 (Hyeminseo) provided care for commoners, and 활인서 (Hwarinseo) ran isolation wards for the sick and destitute. Mentioning all three at once shows a ruler activating the full institutional machinery — it signals the epidemic is serious enough to threaten the capital.
A 여제 (yeoje) was an official Joseon state ceremony held to comfort the souls of people who died without proper burial rites — plague victims, the abandoned, those who perished away from home. The court believed unquiet 여귀 (wandering spirits) could spread disease further, so the rite was both spiritual and, in its way, a public-health measure. 구천's objection is that a 여제 is meant to console, not expel — the king is getting the purpose wrong.
In Korean shamanistic practice, rooster blood — specifically from a red-feathered cock — is believed to repel malevolent spirits because the rooster's crow heralds dawn and yang energy. Smearing it around a room or on a talisman paper (축경) is a field-expedient barrier when a full ritual isn't possible. 구천 is giving the princess a quick, practical ghost-warding kit.
The king reveals that the ability to hear ghosts is not random — it runs through a specific maternal line in the royal family like a recessive trait. This mirrors real Korean folk belief that certain shamanic gifts (신기, singi) are inherited, not chosen, and can skip generations. It reframes the princess's 'curse' as something the king always knew about and deliberately kept secret.
The 연못 귀신 (yeonnot gwisin), the pond ghost, has been the official explanation for every royal death in this drama. The crown prince now turns the lie back on his father: if the king is the true source of all those deaths, then the king himself is the pond ghost. By vowing to become the real pond ghost in death, he is accepting the curse's identity and making it literal — a devastating piece of dramatic irony.
A 박수무당 (baksumudang) is a male shaman — rarer and often considered especially powerful in Korean folk tradition, where most mudang (무당) are women. During a 굿 (gut) ceremony he addresses the crown prince's ghost as 성주신 (seongju-sin), the guardian deity of a household, cleverly trying to redirect the spirit's destructive energy into a protective role by giving it an honoured title and ritual food.