MORNING CALM TALES Colorful hues of springtime in Korea

Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival in what is now Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province, published in The Korea Times April 11, 2008. Korea Times Archive

By Jeffrey Miller

• Published Mar 24, 2026 2:38 PM KST
• Updated Mar 24, 2026 3:09 PM KST

My first spring in Korea, way back in 1991, began with a sky that looked wrong.

The daylight had turned a dull yellow, as if someone had drawn a thin veil across the sun. Seoul seemed muted, the distant buildings fading into haze.

“Yellow spring,” someone told me.

At first, I thought it had to do with all the yellow flowers — forsythia — which I saw blooming around my home in Jamsil, as well as Deoksu Palace. But soon enough, I learned it meant the seasonal dust storms that drifted across the peninsula from the deserts of northern China and Mongolia.

These days, everyone seems to know when "hwangsa" or "yellow dust" is coming. There are forecasts and smartphone alerts, advisories and people wearing masks.

But in the early 1990s, there were no warnings.

One morning, the sky simply looked different.

Standing there beneath that strange yellow sky, I suddenly thought of a line from T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:"

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes …”

Eliot was writing about the air pollution of London, of course. But that morning in Korea, it felt as if the same yellow fog had wandered halfway around the world.

By the afternoon, my eyes were burning and watering. In the evening, they were red enough that a coworker suggested I visit an eye doctor.

That is how I ended up sitting in a small ophthalmology clinic in Gangnam the next day, blinking under a bright lamp while the doctor leaned close to examine my eyes. Whatever he said has long since been lost to time. He put in a few drops, then positioned my chin inside a metal contraption where a lamp glowed beneath my eyes for several minutes. Afterward, he prescribed more drops and sent me back out into the yellow afternoon.

If you have never experienced one of those dust days, it is hard to explain. The air feels dry and gritty. When the wind blows, you can almost taste the air. The horizon blurs. Buildings that should look sharp appear faded, as if the city had been lightly erased.

That was my introduction to spring in Korea.

Eventually, the dust passes, and the sky clears again. The city returns to itself.

But there’s something else about spring in Korea — it’s the way that the season unfolds. At first, the country still looks tired from winter. The hills are brown, the trees bare along the sidewalks and the wind carries a lingering trace of cold.

Then, almost without warning, the first blossoms appear.

The plum trees come first, in temple courtyards and parks, with their pink flowers opening on dark, twisted branches. The blossoms seem fragile, but they arrive while the air is still cold, stronger than they look. There is something quietly reassuring about plum blossoms, blooming before the world is ready.

Not long after, the magnolias follow.

Magnolia trees are impossible to miss. Their blossoms are large and pale, like porcelain cups opening toward the sky. For a brief week or two, they stand along city streets and beside apartment buildings, blooming boldly while the branches are still bare.

They always seem slightly theatrical to me, as if the trees have decided that winter has gone on long enough and it is time for something dramatic.

Then the hillsides suddenly turn yellow. Forsythia spreads across parks and embankments like spilled sunlight. The bushes bloom so brightly that they almost look artificial, as if someone had painted them overnight.

And then almost overnight it happens: Cherry blossoms.

One day the branches are bare. A few days later the city is filled with pale pink clouds.

Cherry blossoms are the most famous sign of spring in Korea, and for good reason. Entire streets transform. Riversides fill with people walking beneath the blossoms. Couples scrambled to stand underneath the pink canopies and have their photos taken.

That may be why spring here feels so meaningful — it does not arrive suddenly. It unfolds step by step, blossom by blossom.

After living in Korea long enough, you begin to notice the signs almost without thinking. A magnolia blooming beside an apartment complex. Plum blossoms opening in a temple courtyard. A hillside glowing yellow with forsythia.

Each one quietly announces the same thing: Winter is loosening its grip.

In Korea, these blossoms have long carried meanings beyond the season itself. The plum blossom, which opens while the air is still cold, has traditionally been a symbol of perseverance and quiet strength. It blooms when nothing else dares to. The cherry blossoms that follow remind us of something different — the brief, fragile beauty of life, poignant precisely because it does not last.

Perhaps that is why spring is so closely watched here. The blossoms are not just flowers. They are reminders — reminders that hardship passes and cold eventually gives way. That life returns, even after the world has seemed still for far too long.

And every year, as the hills begin to brighten and the trees open their pale flowers once again, the same quiet lesson appears in the branches: Nothing lasts forever. Not winter. Not the dust in the sky. Only the turning of the seasons and the certainty that sooner or later, spring will find its way back.

Jeffrey Miller is the author of several novels including "War Remains," a story about the early days of the Korean War, and "No Way Out," a thriller set in Seoul in 1990.