The haenyeo of Jeju

Haenyeo free-dive to harvest abalone, sea urchins and seaweed, up to seven hours a day and two hundred dives per outing. They surface with the sumbisori, an exhaled whistle that clears carbon dioxide and signals their position. The trade became female in the eighteenth century, partly because women were exempt from the levy on men’s labour, which made them their households’ main earners, a rare situation in Confucian Korea. There were twenty-six thousand of them in the 1960s; fewer than three thousand remain, a large majority over seventy. UNESCO intangible heritage since 2016.