The Joseon Dynasty holds many dramatic stories. Among them, few are as heartbreaking as that of King Danjong: a boy who became king, only to be stripped of his throne in a coup and exiled to a mountain village in Gangwon-do Province. “The King’s Warden” takes this history as its foundation and imagines the four months King Danjong spent in exile before his death by poison, told with warmth, humor and a touch of creative license.

With his loyal subjects dead and himself powerless to change any of it, King Danjong was sent to Cheongnyeongpo Meandering Stream in Yeongwol-gun County, Gangwon-do Province, a deep mountain hamlet ringed by jagged peaks and winding valleys, reachable only by raft. The village head, hoping that hosting a man of high rank might bring some benefit to his community, lobbied to take the king in. But the broken, despairing King Danjong wanted nothing more than to die, and his condition only worsened.

What finally loosened the lock on King Danjong’s heart, and transformed the village head’s calculated hospitality into something more like a genuine bond, was a simple meal. White rice, rabbit meat, a few side dishes made with sancho (prickly ash) and other mountain herbs, and a bowl of soup. But the story behind each dish was anything but ordinary: daseulgi (marsh snail) foraged by the village head, a soup made by someone’s careful hands, santtalgi (Korean raspberry) picked gently by a child from the mountainside, a precious root of wild ginseng offered up by a village father who had treasured it. Every item on that table was filled with genuine worry for a man who had stopped eating. Hearing these stories, King Danjong gradually began to engage with the villagers, to share meals and slowly heal.

The daseulgiguk (marsh snail soup) drew particular attention. There is no historical record of what King Danjong ate or enjoyed during his exile, but Yeongwol-gun County was deep in the interior even by the standards of its time, and food would not have been plentiful. The filmmakers seem to have worked from this premise, researching traditional foods with deep roots in the region. That search led them to one of Yeongwol-gun County’s most prominent dishes: daseulgiguk.

Daseulgi is a river mollusk that lives in clear water. Found throughout Korea’s rivers, it has a pleasantly bitter, clean flavor and a satisfying chew. It was a fitting vessel for the villagers’ affection: each daseulgi, no bigger than a thumbnail, must be shelled and blanched one by one, making a bowl of the soup a small monument to time and care.

The moment King Danjong finally raises that lovingly prepared meal to his lips, audiences begin to fall fully into the story, laughing and crying alongside the characters. A kind of King Danjong pilgrimage took shape, and waiting for those who arrived, carrying the film’s lingering warmth, was another dish: eosuribap (rice with East Asian hogweed).

Eosuri doesn’t appear in “The King’s Warden,” but it is inseparable from King Danjong, and the film’s success has brought it new attention. A wild mountain green with a fragrant, full-bodied flavor and a hint of bitterness, it is at its best between April and June. A local legend adds a more poignant note: King Danjong came to love this green because its scent reminded him of the scent of Queen Jeongsun, from whom he had been so cruelly separated. This, too, however remains uncertain.

Perhaps for this reason, some restaurants list dishes featuring eosuri as “King Danjong’s table.” One beloved preparation is eosuribap, in which the greens are steamed into rice, fragrant and quietly complex. For anyone visiting Yeongwol-gun County after seeing the film, eosuribap, along with daseulgi dishes such as daseulgiguk, has become essential eating. People are traveling to where a lonely king once died, sitting down before a meal that bears his name, while remembering him centuries later.