In that intervening quarter-century, Empress Ki exercised great influence over the Yuan court. In addition to her connection to the emperor himself, she enjoyed a powerful institutional base, a special government organ with wide-ranging tax collecting authority created specifically for her use. Through this organ, she amassed tremendous power and initiated several grand projects. After a while she served in effect as the monarch, as her husband gradually lost interest in affairs of the state. She even led a failed attempt to nudge her husband off the throne in favor of her son. The official history of the Yuan dynasty, written by scholars of the successor Ming dynasty, notes that Empress Ki also developed a reputation for corruption and extravagance. This also suggests that her behavior and that of her court allies contributed to the demise of the Yuan dynasty itself. The Yuan experienced a series of rebellions all across China in the middle of the fourteenth century, many at the hands of the so-called “Red Turban” Chinese bandits, a group of which was led by the man who would become the founder of the succeeding Ming dynasty.
Just as important for our story, Empress Ki also exercised decisive power in her home country of Kory. This was done through both her direct intervention in monarchical succession, and through her family members, whose status and influence, backed by the empress of the Mongol empire, increased considerably. Empress Ki’s father was formally invested as a “king” in the Yuan empire, and her mother in her old age enjoyed ritualized visits from the Kory monarch. The Ki family is remembered, however, almost exclusively for its lavish lifestyle and venality, on display both among the common people and within Kory elite circles. Outright theft of others’ property, including slaves, reached such severity among her siblings in Korea, in fact, that Empress Ki herself had to send a warning to her family members. One of her older brothers in particular, Ki Ch’l, who once headed the Eastern Expedition Field Headquarters and exercised greater authority than the Kory monarch, is especially singled out in the official histories for his corruption and abuse of power. Indeed, his biographical entry in the official History of Kory comes under the section on “traitors” and recounts the sordid deeds of the entire Ki family. Little wonder, then, that when the last Kory monarch under Yuan domination, King Kongmin, unleashed an anti-Yuan policy in 1356, he purged Ki Ch’l and his family in a surprise attack. For this, Kory suffered a reprisal invasion ordered by Empress Ki, but this was successfully fended off, and indeed King Kongmin and others understood that Yuan control over China was in its last throes. Little remains known of the fate of Empress Ki, who fled with her son, the next Yuan emperor, to the Mongol homelands ahead of the Chinese rebels who would establish the Ming dynasty.
Despite this inglorious end, however, Empress Ki’s life and times present an intriguing picture of Kory’s successful adaptation to the Yuan overlord period. She was likely the one most responsible, for example, for spreading Korean influence in China. She did this through her political authority, to be sure, but also through her incorporation of Korean females and eunuchs into the Yuan court. These Koreans contributed to the flowering of a “Korean style” in the Chinese capital, as things Korean, from clothing to food to lifestyle, became fashionable. As a Korean observer at the time noted, it became almost a requirement for elite males in China to take Korean concubines, who cultivated an aura of beauty and sophistication. Chinese sources, too—and often not in a flattering way—noted that Koreans, in particular Korean women, exerted strong influence over popular taste in China. The flourishing of the “Korean style” may have represented a peak in the export of Korean culture in premodern times, and not until the early twenty-first century would Korean culture, popular or high, enjoy such widespread emulation and popularity outside the peninsula.
This presents, then, another reminder that the Mongol period, while certainly a time of humiliating subjugation to a foreign power, also left a more favorable imprint on Korean culture and identity. We certainly cannot discount the horrific circumstances of the long Mongol siege of the mid-thirteenth century, or of the way Lady Ki and countless other captives went to China in the first place. But her rise to the heights of the Mongol court—and hence to a status as perhaps the most powerful person in the world at one time—shows her as a fitting representative of how Koreans throughout history adapted to the realities of power among their neighbors. Korea’s first experience of integration into a truly global order—a mixture of brutal conquest, humiliating submission, and cultural exchange—shared its core features with the experience of other subject peoples in the Mongol empire who spanned all the way to Europe. The implications for the longer view of Korean history are especially important when comparing this interlude to the periods of foreign domination and intervention in the twentieth century.
In the short term as well, there were significant repercussions. The end of the Mongol period, for example, induced a concerted backlash among Korean elites, who, after two centuries of disruptions caused by both domestic and foreign usurpers, sought to restore a more stable and inward-looking form of rule. And in arousing the Red Turban rebellions, the Mongols were responsible for the rise of Yi Snggye, a Korean military leader who made his name in repelling Red Turban invaders (as well as the so-called “Japanese pirates”) during the late Kory era. Together, these two outcomes of Mongol rule contributed directly to the fall of the Kory dynasty itself, and to the birth of a new dynastic order in Korea under Yi’s command.
7
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Kory-Chosn Transition
CHRONOLOGY
1383 First meeting between General Yi Snggye and Chng Tojn
1388 General Yi Snggye’s overthrow of the Kory ruling order
1392 Establishment of the Chosn dynasty
1398 Yi Pangwn’s purge of Chng Tojn; abdication of the throne by Yi Snggye
1400 Yi Pangwn’s ascension as the third Chosn monarch, King T’aejong
1418 Beginning of the reign of King Sejong the Great, son of King T’aejong
1446 Promulgation of the Korean alphabet
YI PANGWN’S PURGE OF CHNG TOJN, 1398
Six years after the founding of the new dynasty, for which he played the role of mastermind as well as lieutenant, Chng Tojn was killed by a militia sent by Yi Pangwn, the fifth son of the dynastic founder. The prince, furious over Chng’s betrayal in publicly backing Pangwn’s half-brother for designation as the crown prince, now considered the scholar-official a major stumbling block to his own ascent to the throne. Despite having worked in tandem to achieve the common cause of toppling the Kory monarchy, the two had grown increasingly at odds over the issue of royal succession. Pangwn, uneasy at the prospect of not getting his just reward, purged his former partner, thereby eliminating from the scene the primary intellectual force in the expression of dynastic legitimacy. From the inception of the Chosn era, then, a pattern of struggle was laid between ambitious monarchs and pious officials that would feature prominently in the dynasty’s politics as a whole.
Had it not been for this bloody moment, Yi Snggye, the dynastic founder, would have enjoyed unquestioned primacy in the saga of dynastic
founding. Like Kim Yusin and Wang Kn, the leading figures in the Silla unification and Kory founding, respectively, Yi was a military figure who began from the geographical fringes of the reigning kingdom. And it was Yi’s audacity, foresight, and capacity to mobilize a wide range of followers—from military men to scholar-officials and even foreigners—that made possible the monumental change of a dynastic turnover. In contrast to Wang, however, Yi had to deal with potential trouble not from rival warlords but rather from rival sons. When he formally proclaimed the new dynasty in 1392, Yi could scarcely have foreseen that the monarchy he labored to establish would almost immediately begin to fray from the ravages caused by his own progeny. From the historian’s vantage point, this particular episode—indeed, the entire process of dynastic turnover from Kory to Chosn—brings into relief major issues affecting the historical judgment of the Chosn dynasty as a whole,
even of premodern or “traditional” Korean civilization itself.
CHNG TOJN: FROM MASTERMIND TO POLITICAL POWER
In 1383, after nine years of political exile, the up-and-coming Confucian scholar Chng Tojn visited the northeastern frontier of Kory. There, in General Yi Snggye’s home region, Chng had his fateful encounter with this future founder of the next Korean dynasty. Whatever took place in their meeting, it was enough to forge a strong alliance, with Chng hitching his ideals and destiny to the man who had amassed heroic feats in repelling marauding Japanese pirates and Red Turban raiders (Chapter 6). As it turned out, this bond could be characterized as an alliance of mutual convenience, with Yi using the scholar as much as Chng used the general. When, as Kory’s second-ranking military officer, Yi Snggye was sent to lead a Korean expedition to invade Ming dynasty China in a show of force during a border dispute in 1388, he recognized this as folly and instead turned his army toward the Kory capital. There he arrested his commander and effectively took control. Waiting for him was Chng Tojn, who quickly led efforts to implement the political changes that allowed Yi to rule, including the forced abdication of the Kory monarch in favor of Yi’s hand-picked one. Chng’s increasing influence accompanied his accumulation of political offices, and he even went on a diplomatic mission to China to soothe the concerns of the Ming court. Chng’s rivals managed to send him to a brief exile in 1391, but to his rescue came Yi Pangwn, who killed many of these rivals, including the most prominent loyalists to the fading Kory monarchy. In 1392, freed from his imprisonment with the help of Pangwn, Chng Tojn joined dozens of other top scholar-officials in officially pleading for Yi Snggye, the man who had effectively ruled the country since 1388, to take the final step and establish a new dynastic order. For all of these efforts on Yi’s behalf, Chng Tojn was awarded the designation of Dynastic Foundation Merit Subject, First Rank.
Chng’s role in this story invites comparison with other lieutenants of military leaders who established new political orders in Korea, such as Kim Ch’unch’u, the mastermind behind General Kim Yusin’s campaigns to unify the three kingdoms (Chapter 2), and later Kim Jong Pil, the dutiful assistant to General Park Chung Hee in the 1960s (Chapter 23). Unlike these two, however, Chng Tojn would not survive the turmoil of the takeover process, and so he came to resemble more the many scholar-officials in the Chosn era who would become embroiled in royal disputes and pay for this involvement with their lives. Like his successors, Chng was driven by a fierce insistence on his own interpretation of Confucian ideology, and by the official’s obligation to remonstrate the monarch when the latter strayed from the proper path. As part of the earliest cohort of Confucian scholar-officials in the Chosn, however, he helped lay down the original blueprint of the dynastic order, and thereby exerted a far greater influence than his peers would later. Chng was by no means the only important figure in this regard, and to some historians his contributions were overshadowed by those of other “founding [Confucian] fathers” of this era. But clearly Chng stood as the most versatile and influential in establishing the fundamental contours of early Chosn government and society.
In the first few years of the new dynasty, Chng authored many of Chosn’s foundational documents. These included an early version of the dynastic law code that, after decades of gestation, would be promulgated in final form eighty years later. In this and other works, Chng displayed a penchant for crafting a working compromise between Confucian ideals, on the one hand, and practical politics on the other. His model for government organization harkened explicitly to the ancient Rites of Zhou, one of the core works of the Confucian canon. Chng’s reverence for China’s classical age brought about an affirmation of a universal civilizational order centered on Korea’s allegiance to the Ming dynasty. He did not view this arrangement in terms of China and Korea as separate countries as much as partners reviving the original glorious connections of the mythical era when a Chinese sage, Kija, purportedly brought civilization to Korea. Chng also helped to institutionalize Confucian meritocratic ideals further through an emphasis on using examinations instead of connections to recruit government officials. This likely reflected his own relatively low birth status (he came from a family of local officials, it appears), a point exploited by his enemies throughout his career. Also arising from his own experience—namely, his near-decade spent in political exile—was his emphasis on the welfare of the peasantry, the meek majority whose struggles he witnessed directly in the remote corners of the country. As if these political and philosophical works were not enough, Chng helped to design the layout of the new capital city of Hanyang (Seoul), drafted an official history of the Kory dynasty—an important work in legitimating the Chosn—and even composed musical paeans to the new dynasty and its founder.
These accomplishments mattered little, however, in the face of naked ambition from members of the royal house, and Chng’s death served as one of many episodes of bloodshed that surrounded royal succession in the early Chosn dynasty. Chng’s downfall began with his public support of Yi Snggye’s decision to appoint Yi Pangsk, the founder’s youngest son, as the crown prince. Prince Pangwn, who had long supported Chng’s preeminent standing in the circles of royal advisers, considered this a betrayal and took action, just as he had done several years earlier when he did away with scholar-officials, like Chng Mongju, who had opposed the toppling of the Kory monarchy. Now Pangwn set his sights on
Chng Tojn, who was beaten to death by Pangwn’s agents in 1398, just as other assailants eliminated the crown prince. The dynastic founder, unable to bear any more of this mayhem among his children, abdicated in favor of another son and returned to his home town of Hamhng. Pangwn killed yet another fraternal rival in 1400, setting the stage for his ascension to the throne later that year as the third Chosn monarch, King T’aejong. The violence would not end there, as T’aejong’s efforts to make amends to his father by sending royal emissaries to Hamhng were poorly received. Indeed the now “Senior King,” still infuriated by his son’s bloody actions, either incarcerated or outright killed a series of these “Hamhng messengers,” or Hamhng ch’asa, a term that still today serves as shorthand for people, sent for errands, from whom nothing is ever heard. The father finally relented and returned to the capital, where, in a final fit of rage, he fired an arrow in T’aejong’s direction, narrowly missing him!
A RENAISSANCE, REVOLUTION, OR COUP?
These disturbing, in some ways horrific circumstances during the opening decade of the Chosn can elicit a wide range of perspectives on the significance of the dynastic turnover, and even cast doubt on its authenticity as a major historical event. Indeed, different schools of thought regarding the true meaning of this transition have arisen, and they have heightened the historiographical stakes: the judgment on Confucianism’s impact on Korean and Chosn history; the location of “legitimate” Korean tradition, especially the underlying tendencies in social and family customs; indeed the larger debates regarding the flow of premodern Korean history, such as stability vs. change, external inducement vs. internal propulsion, and so on. In fact, the prominence of both Yi Pangwn and Chng Tojn can illuminate and support each of the main perspectives on the historical significance of the dynastic transition.
Historians who tend to view this moment as a kind of Confucian renaissance emphasize the primacy of ideology in driving the events. Officially, at least, the scholars, officials, and even military men like Yi Snggye drew explicitly from the teachings of what Western historians commonly call “Neo-Confucianism” in establishing and justifying the new dynastic order. Neo-Confucianism, a scholarly and ideological movement that, in Korea, began to brew in the late Kory era, had begun in Song dynasty China in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It sought to resuscitate and refashion the classical texts of Confucianism in order to apply them, expansively, to addressing contemporary problems. The particular version of Neo-Confucianism that came to hold sway in the Chosn dynasty has often been called the “School of Nature and Principle,” which mo
re specifically referred to the firm link established between human nature and metaphysical doctrine. The proper understanding and practice of human connections lay at the heart of Confucian moral teachings, with filial piety—reverence for one’s parents, explicitly invoked in the Confucian Five Relationships—serving as the core ethic that, when flexibly applied, guided all human interaction. The “great chain” of Confucian cosmology began with the individual’s self-cultivation of filial piety through ritual and learning, which in turn facilitated the application of morality to achieve familial and social harmony, a just political order, and peace under heaven. The founders of Neo-Confucianism in China and their transmitters to Korea preached the need to implement systematically these latent Confucian teachings.
One can see why, then, Chng Tojn, Yi Pangwn, and other Chosn founding fathers perceived in Neo-Confucianism not only an update to the millennium-long influence of Confucianism as a group of political doctrines, but a comprehensive approach to ethics, politics, social order, economy, and culture. The impressive range of Neo-Confucian legislation in the first few decades of the Chosn era reflected this ideology’s systematic reach, and indeed the intricate attention given to even the realm of the family was among the most striking features (Chapter 8). Nevertheless, it bears noting that some Neo-Confucian practices, such as the state examination system and even male primacy in tracing family heritage, had long been in existence in Korea. Conversely, most of the new legislation inspired by Neo-Confucianism, especially in regard to instituting a patrilineal lineage system, took centuries to implement. In short, it can be said that Neo-Confucian ideology, however important, cannot account for all or even most of the thrust behind the dynastic turnover. Chng Tojn and Yi Pangwn, both successful passers of the Confucian civil service examination in the late Kory, subscribed to this ideology, for example, and Yi still found reason to eliminate Chng.
A History of Korea Page 8