Mireuksa Temple Site is considered the largest Baekje-era Buddhist temple complex in East Asia. Its founding legend goes like this: King Mu of Baekje and his queen, traveling toward Sajasa Temple, witnessed a vision of the Maitreya Buddha triad rising from a pond, and built Mireuksa to enshrine it. For centuries, that queen was believed to be Princess Seonhwa of the rival kingdom of Silla. A hyangga (native Korean poem) called "Seodongyo" backs up the story: as a boy, the future King Mu — then known by his childhood name, Seodong — supposedly slipped into the Silla capital and spread a song among children claiming that "Princess Seonhwa secretly meets with Seodong every night." The rumor got the princess banished from the palace, and Seodong ended up marrying her — or so the legend goes.
But the temple itself turned out to hold evidence that upends the old story. The stone pagoda, a designated National Treasure (officially the "Stone Pagoda at Mireuksa Temple Site, Iksan"), was found in a 1998 structural inspection to be filled with deteriorating concrete and structurally unsound, triggering a full dismantling and restoration project beginning in 2001. In January 2009, during that dismantling, workers discovered a gilt-bronze reliquary inscription inside the pagoda — and what it recorded was unexpected: at the time the pagoda was built, King Mu's queen wasn't Princess Seonhwa at all, but Lady Sataek, a woman from a powerful Baekje aristocratic family. A romance with a Silla princess, passed down orally for over a millennium, was thrown into question by the very temple built, according to legend, in that romance's honor. Restoration work continued after the discovery, and in April 2019 — twenty years after the decision to dismantle it — the pagoda was finally re-erected. Standing at Mireuksa today, it's worth knowing that the tension between legend and archaeological fact is sitting right there on the ruins.