- Where
- Jeju Island
Republic of Korea - Coordinates
- 33.3617° N
126.5292° E - The work
- Breath-hold diving, no tanks, by rule
- Depth
- Commonly to 10 m, as deep as 20
- Hours
- Up to 7 hours a day, c. 90 days a year
in water as cold as 10°C - Status
- UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2016
- Best visited
- April–June, September–November
Heard them before I saw them: a long high whistle from somewhere out past the rocks, then another, then several. Orange floats scattered across the water and a head coming up beside each one, then gone again. They were working. It went on for hours and I sat down on the sea wall and did not do anything else with my afternoon.
The short answer
The haenyeo — literally sea women — are the breath-hold divers of Jeju Island, off the southern coast of South Korea, who harvest abalone, sea urchins, conch and seaweed by hand from the seabed. They use no oxygen tanks, by rule rather than by tradition alone, and dive commonly to around ten metres and as deep as twenty, working up to seven hours a day for roughly ninety days of the year in water that can be as cold as ten degrees. Their culture was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016. UNESCO records that the number of active haenyeo exceeded 4,500 in 2013 and had fallen to approximately 2,600 by the end of 2024.
Why it's worth knowing
Most disappearing traditions disappear quietly, and the record of them is assembled afterwards from fragments. This one is being counted, year by year, while it happens.
A survey of the Jeju-si district in 2021 gave the age breakdown of its 2,141 registered divers: ten women in their thirties, thirty-two in their forties, two hundred and twenty-eight in their fifties, six hundred and ninety in their sixties, eight hundred and forty-eight in their seventies, and three hundred and thirty-three over eighty. A hundred had stopped in the previous twelve months.
Ten women in their thirties. Three hundred and thirty-three over eighty. You can read the end of a practice off that table.
The reason it cannot simply be scaled up is the rule at the centre of it. As one haenyeo put it in an interview published by UNESCO: “To be a true haenyeo, one must rely solely on their own breath without the aid of oxygen tanks. Any diver using breathing equipment is not considered a haenyeo.”
That rule is not nostalgia. A diver on a tank can stay down until the seabed is empty. A diver on one breath cannot. The prohibition is the harvest limit, built into the body of the person doing the harvesting, and it is the mechanism behind the principle the haenyeo state directly: not taking more than what the sea gives. They describe the seabed as a field or a garden, tended, rather than as a wild resource to be worked out.
So the thing being lost is not only a job. It is a demonstration that a fishery can be limited by how long a person can hold their breath, and that such a limit can hold for centuries.
The field notes
Why the women
Diving off Jeju is very old — one account traces it to the fifth century — and it was originally men’s work. Men were pojak; women were jamnyeo.
The shift to women is usually explained by two pressures acting together. Large numbers of Jeju men died at sea or went to war. And there was a government tax on men’s diving earnings that did not fall on women’s. Between mortality and fiscal policy, the work moved.
By the eighteenth century it was a women’s occupation, and it produced something genuinely unusual in a Confucian society organised around men: households where the woman was the principal earner. Scholars describe Jeju as matrifocal rather than matriarchal, which is the more careful word. But the practical fact stands. The money came from the sea, and the women went and got it.
Skills pass from mother to daughter, and training has traditionally begun around the age of ten or eleven. Divers are ranked in three grades by experience — hagun, junggun and sanggun — and the senior divers guide the others. Younger women stay out of the shallow ground where the oldest and weakest work.
Sumbisori, the sound on surfacing
The most distinctive thing about watching haenyeo is not the diving. It is the noise.
On surfacing, a diver releases a long high whistle called sumbisori. It is not a signal or a song, though it functions socially as both. It empties the lungs completely and quickly, which reduces buoyancy and makes the next descent easier, and it manages the exchange of air after a breath-hold.
A group of haenyeo working a stretch of coast produces a continuous, irregular chorus of it — audible from shore, and unlike anything else. Each woman’s is recognisable to the others.
Their catch goes into a net sack tied beneath a float, the tewak, which marks their position on the surface and which they rest on between dives.
The bulteok
Before and after diving, the women gather at a bulteok — a low stone enclosure on the shore with a fire in it, where they change and warm up.
These are not merely changing rooms. Decisions about where to harvest, when to open and close grounds, how to allocate the shallow water to the oldest divers, and what a beginner is permitted to take, are made there. One account describes them as the boardrooms of the community, which is a fair description of a structure that has regulated a fishery for generations without any external authority doing it.
Each diving village has its own association with its own protocols. The sustainability of the harvest is a matter of local governance, decided by the people who do the diving.
What the cold did to them
There is a scientific literature on the haenyeo, and it records something that has since partly gone.
Before wetsuits were adopted in the 1970s, the women dived in cotton, and they developed measurable whole-body adaptations to cold — elevated basal metabolic rate in winter, altered shivering thresholds — which made them a subject of environmental physiology research from the 1960s. When wetsuits arrived, those whole-body adaptations faded, and research interest faded with them.
Recent work found that some of it survives. Older haenyeo still show superior local cold tolerance in the hands and face compared with non-diving women of the same age — the adaptation apparently having narrowed from the whole body to the parts still exposed. A lifetime of the work is legible in the extremities.
What is being done, and what it is up against
The response since UNESCO listing has been substantial. Two Haenyeo Schools recruit and train newcomers, fishery cooperatives have opened to entrants from outside the traditional lines of descent, and the Haenyeo Museum runs education programmes. Interest among younger women has risen.
The counterweight is the sea itself. UNESCO records that fishing grounds are shrinking through the degradation of marine ecosystems, and haenyeo attest directly to the effects of rising sea temperatures, coastal development including power plant construction, and pollution including waste left by visitors.
This is the hard part of the arithmetic. Recruitment can address the age profile. It cannot address a seabed with less on it. A tradition defined by taking only what the sea gives is exposed in a very direct way when the sea gives less.
- Go to the museum at Hado first. It will change what you are looking at.
- Listen before you look. The whistle carries a long way.
- Buy the day’s catch from a stall by a diving village.
- Watch from the sea wall, not the water’s edge.
- Do not photograph a face without asking. They are at work.
A tewak. The orange float a haenyeo works beside — once a hollowed gourd, now foam — with a net bag hanging beneath it for the catch. It marks her position on the surface, holds the day’s harvest, and is what she rests her arms on between dives. A row of them bobbing off a rocky shore is how you know, from the road, that women are working below.
Tally, in the marginA float, a net bag, and a place to rest your arms. You can tell from the road that somebody is down there because of it.
Getting there
How to get there. Jeju lies off the southern coast of South Korea and its airport is one of the busiest in the world — the Seoul–Jeju route routinely tops global passenger rankings. Flights from Seoul take about an hour. Ferries run from several mainland ports and take considerably longer.
Where to see haenyeo. They work coastal villages around the island rather than any single site. Two reliable points: the Haenyeo Museum at Hado in the north-east, which is the proper introduction and holds the equipment, the history and the film footage; and the Seongsan Ilchulbong area, where scheduled demonstration dives are performed and where a Haenyeo School operates.
Watching them work. Diving is seasonal and weather-dependent, and it is a job rather than a performance. If you come across women working a stretch of shore, watch from a distance, do not get between them and the water, and do not photograph faces without asking. The whistle carries; you will hear them before you see them.
Eat what they catch. Small stalls near diving villages sell the day’s harvest — abalone, conch, sea urchin, often served raw within an hour of coming out of the water. Buying directly is the most useful thing a visitor can do.
When to go. April to June and September to November give the best weather. Diving is more common outside the coldest months, though haenyeo do dive in winter. Summer is hot, humid and busy.
And the rest of Jeju. The island is itself UNESCO-listed for its volcanic landscape — Hallasan, the lava tube system, and the Seongsan Ilchulbong tuff cone — and most visitors come for that. It is worth knowing that the two things are related: a volcanic island with almost no surface water and thin soil is a hard place to farm, which is part of why so much of the living came from the sea.
Mark this place
Common questions
Who are the haenyeo?
The haenyeo — ‘sea women’ — are breath-hold divers on Jeju Island, South Korea, who harvest abalone, sea urchins, conch and seaweed by hand from the seabed without oxygen tanks. Their culture was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016.
Why don’t haenyeo use oxygen tanks?
Because using one disqualifies you. As a haenyeo put it in an interview published by UNESCO, a diver using breathing equipment is not considered a haenyeo. The rule functions as a harvest limit: a diver on a tank could work the seabed until it was empty, and a diver on a single breath cannot. It underpins the principle of not taking more than the sea gives.
How deep and how long do haenyeo dive?
UNESCO records dives to around ten metres with breath-holds of about a minute; other accounts describe descents as deep as twenty metres and holds of two to three minutes. They work up to seven hours a day for roughly ninety days a year, in water that can fall to ten degrees Celsius.
How many haenyeo are left?
UNESCO records that the number exceeded 4,500 in 2013 and had fallen to approximately 2,600 by the end of 2024. More than sixty per cent are aged seventy or over; including those in their sixties, the figure reaches ninety per cent. Historical figures for the 1960s and 1970s range from about 14,000 to 26,000 depending on the source and year.
Why are the divers women?
Diving off Jeju was originally men’s work. The shift is generally attributed to two pressures: large numbers of Jeju men died at sea or in war, and a government tax fell on men’s diving earnings but not on women’s. By the eighteenth century it had become a women’s occupation, producing households in which women were the principal earners — unusual in a Confucian society.
What is the sound haenyeo make when they surface?
It is called sumbisori: a long, high whistle released on surfacing. It empties the lungs quickly and completely, reducing buoyancy and easing the next descent. It also functions as a signal — a group working a stretch of coast produces a continuous chorus of it, and individual divers are recognisable to one another by their own.
What is a bulteok?
A low stone enclosure on the shore with a fire in it, where haenyeo change and warm themselves before and after diving. It also functions as the community’s decision-making space: where to harvest, when to open and close grounds, how shallow water is allocated to the oldest divers. Each diving village has its own association and protocols.
Can visitors watch haenyeo diving?
Yes, though it is work rather than performance. Scheduled demonstrations take place near Seongsan Ilchulbong, and the Haenyeo Museum at Hado is the best introduction. If you encounter divers working a shoreline, watch from a distance, keep clear of their route to the water, and ask before photographing faces. Buying the day’s catch from stalls near diving villages is the most directly useful thing a visitor can do.