In Korean mythology

Korean mythology

Korean mythology consists of national legends and folk-tales which come from all over the Korean Peninsula. Even within the same ethnic group, myths tend to have slightly different variations...

 and history, Asadal was the capital city of Gojoseon

Gojoseon

Gojoseon was an ancient Korean kingdom. Go , meaning "ancient," distinguishes it from the later Joseon Dynasty; Joseon, as it is called in contemporaneous writings, is also romanized as Chosŏn....

. It is thought that Asadal was located in Manchuria

Manchuria

Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...

, Hwanghae

Hwanghae

Hwanghae was one of the Eight Provinces of Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. Hwanghae was located in the northwest of Korea. The provincial capital was Haeju.The regional name for the province was Haesŏ .-History:...

, or Pyongyang

Pyongyang

Pyongyang is the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, and the largest city in the country. Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River and, according to preliminary results from the 2008 population census, has a population of 3,255,388. The city was...

. The first Korean historical work to mention it is the Samguk Yusa

Samguk Yusa

Samguk Yusa, or Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, is a collection of legends, folktales, and historical accounts relating to the Three Kingdoms of Korea , as well as to other periods and states before, during, and after the Three Kingdoms period.The text was written in Classical Chinese, which was...

, which cites the Chinese Book of Wei

Book of Wei

The Book of Wei is a classic Chinese historical writing compiled by Wei Shou from 551 to 554, and serves as an important historical text describing the Northern Wei and Eastern Wei from 386 to 550....

. The Samguk Yusa also cites the Go Gi to the effect that Dangun's capital was located in Pyongyang. But recent studies show that there were more than one city named Pyongyang, situated in the north deep in Manchuria. The Pyongyang that is North Korea's capital today is actually the Southern counterpart, as it was common at the time for an emperor to manage two capitals and rule in two palaces. Therefore, it is thought that the true Asadal is located in Manchuria, now renamed and disguised as a city with Chinese name.

Word for word, Asadal can be broken up as asa and dal. Asa is a hypothetical Altaic

Altaic languages

Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...

 root for "morning," and the Japanese language

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 still uses an identical form to mean "morning." It may be cognate with a common Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

 word for "morning" (Middle Korean achɔm; Modern Korean achim). Dal may be the result of reading Chinese characters

Hanja

Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...

 in the Korean way, and the original Chinese pronunciation at the time Asadal was recorded in ancient historical texts could have been "Da," a transcription of the Korean word sdah or ddang meaning "land." If such is the case, "Asadal" would mean "Morning Land."
However, if "dal" is used much like the Goguryeo

Goguryeo

Goguryeo or Koguryŏ was an ancient Korean kingdom located in present day northern and central parts of the Korean Peninsula, southern Manchuria, and southern Russian Maritime province....

city name suffix "-dal" used for mountains and cities founded on plateaus/mountains, then "Asadal" means "Morning Mountain."

Other sources

• Lee, Peter H & Wm. Theodore De Bary. Sources of Korean Tradition, page 5-6. Columbia University Press, 1997.