DONJI-RI, South Korea — This hamlet of cinder-block huts with blue and red roofs slumbered in a drowsy repose. Weeds with yellow flowers grew in the corners of dusty front yards and through cracks in the pavement of deserted alleys. The town’s only “hagwon,” a private cram school, stood empty, because so many families with school-age children had moved away.
In those respects, Donji-ri, on Jindo — an island just southwest of the Korean Peninsula, near where a deadly ferry sinking occurred in April — was typical of rural towns in South Korea. The occasional motorist driving through the vales and green rice paddies of Jindo could easily miss this village of 300 homes — except for one major attention-grabber.
Carved into a hillside is a sign in white letters that motorists can see from hundreds of yards away: “Homecoming White Dog Village.”
Jindo, at least before the ferry disaster, was known largely for one thing: its dogs. And Donji-ri is the most dog-famous village on the island.
Called Jindo dogs, they are South Korea’s most celebrated canine breed, famous for their loyalty and homing instinct. Islanders tell different stories about the dogs’ origins. Some say the animals arrived with Mongolian invaders centuries ago. Others say their ancestors kept domesticated wolves. They all remember that their grandfathers used the dogs, distinctive for their perked ears and tails, to catch mice at home and to chase pheasants and deer on the hills.
Designated a national treasure in 1962, Jindo dogs recently found a powerful sponsor in President Park Geun-hye, who was given a couple of white ones by her neighbors in Seoul when she moved into the presidential Blue House early last year. In January, she praised the dogs’ companionship during a nationally televised news conference. She later urged public servants to learn from “the spirit of the Jindo dog.”
“Dogs are the pride of our island,” said Lee Seong-kyo, a Jindo official who runs a “Jindo dog theme park,” which houses a dog museum, a canine hospital and a training center. Each year on May 3, designated by the local government as Jindo Dog Day, the island hosts a Jindo dog contest. (This year, the show was canceled because of the ferry disaster.)
Jindo dogs are not just an obsession, though. They also provide a livelihood for many residents.
The island’s former mainstays, rice and other farms, have been driven out of business by cheap imports and the rising cost of local labor. As its human population plunged to 28,000 from around 100,000 in the 1970s, Jindo turned to its canine population, hoping to cash in on a pet-dog boom in South Korea.
Virtually every family on this island raises dogs; 30,000 to 50,000 puppies arrive every year, and go for as much as $1,000 apiece. No Jindo dog can leave the island without a government permit. To protect the local breed, the government controls other types of dogs entering the island and implants microchips in the shoulders of Jindo dogs that meet its detailed criteria on the shapes of ears, tail, head and legs.
But nowhere on the island is pride in the dogs more fierce than in Donji-ri.
It is an obsession that traces to one dead white dog. As the story goes, back in 1993, an old woman named Park Bok-dan was living alone with a 5-year-old dog named Baekgu, or “a white dog.” Ms. Park considered the dog a hassle, though, in that she produced litter after litter, as many as 12 puppies at a time.
Fed up, Ms. Park sold Baekgu. The last thing she heard from the dog trader was that he, too, had sold her, to a family in Daejeon, a city 186 miles north. (A bridge connects Jindo to the mainland.)
“Then, one October night seven months later, Mother was awakened by a whining and scratching sound at her door,” said Ms. Park’s son, Lee Ki-seo, 58, who keeps a photograph of his late mother with the white dog on his living-room wall. “Baekgu was there, grown thin after a long trip. Mother never parted from it again until it died.”
Up to that point, it was one of those dogs-returning-to-their-old-home stories, not unprecedented on this island famed for its canine exports.
Yet, Baekgu went on to become a legend after an upstart computer company called Sejin saw in her story a perfect symbol of the corporation’s loyalty to its customers. Sejin approached Ms. Park and Mr. Lee for a deal, and its commercial soon hit prime-time television.
With “You Needed Me” as the background music, the hugely popular commercial showed the “real-life story” of Baekgu making a cross-country journey to return to her old owner. It ended with the company’s slogan: “Once master, forever master.”
Journalists began trekking to the village to meet the dog. Baekgu was featured in children’s books, cartoons, even computer games. Poets sang her name. A national classical music institute went so far as to stage an opera in the dog’s honor.
Baekgu died in 2000 at the age of 12. Around that time, Sejin went bankrupt. Ms. Park died three years ago, at 89.
But this village was determined not to forget the dog that had put its name on the national map. Villagers buried Baekgu at the main entrance to the town and memorialized the grave with a tombstone, a bronze statue and a stone monument that said, “Growing children should learn from the loyal white dog.” Work is underway to build a park in the dog’s honor.
“Baekgu was too good not to remember,” said Park Gang-yul, 56, the head of an association of villagers who kept track of Baekgu’s descendants by issuing lineage certificates for their owners.
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