The vernacular culture exerted perhaps the greatest influence in regard to females by shining a spotlight on the social class of “kisaeng,” or courtesans. Like the Japanese geisha, the kisaeng courtesans carried out both sexual and artistic functions. And, like the palace ladies, many courtesans were attached to government service, usually provincial or county government offices. This reflected also their “base” social status, which put them in the same category as slaves. Their sometimes scandalous love affairs and renowned talents in music, dance, and letters gave these women prominent standing in the folk culture as a whole, while the lives and accomplishments of certain kisaeng became legendary. In fact, a disproportionate number of famous females from the Chosn era were kisaeng. In addition to Hwang Chini, the early-sixteenth century figure renowned for both her great beauty and extraordinary literary skills, many other kisaeng gained fame for their talents and romances. The sorrowful tales of their forced parting from their lovers became the basis for some of the great literary and musical expressions of premodern Korea (Chapter 12), and they constitute a rich source of information about Korean culture and society at the time.
The prominence of such low-status females in the historical memory of the Chosn dynasty, especially of the mid-Chosn era, also testifies to the solidification of the decrease in standing of females as a whole, especially of the aristocracy. It became rare, for example, for daughters to gain equal inheritance with their brothers, especially the oldest son, and movement and visibility for women were significantly curtailed. These developments also
went hand-in-hand with the hardening of the hereditary social hierarchy beginning in the seventeenth century. The social and political discrimination against the offspring of concubines and remarried widows, a semi-Confucian legal measure from the early Chosn, now took firm root throughout society. One consequence was the increasing practice, among elite families, to adopt nephews—often distant nephews—into a household instead of allowing a concubine’s son to become the legal heir. These concubines’ descendants, including those of kisaeng courtesans, became a distinctive hereditary status group that, by the nineteenth century, swelled in numbers to constitute a major social force.
LATENCY OF THE MID-CHOSN ORDER
As suggested by the formation of these conventionally “traditional” Korean social patterns, the mid-Chosn era stood as a time of reconstruction and systematization in the wake of the foreign invasions. The Japanese invasions might have been more devastating in terms of human and material loss, but the Manchu invasions, particularly the Manchu conquest of China shortly thereafter, dealt a greater blow to Koreans’ sense of self and propriety. At the heart of the political conflicts and social strife lay the task of implementing a sense of Confucian order, and of reformulating a national identity as that of the sole remaining true civilization. The bloody contests that embroiled Song Siyl and others also demonstrated that a significant strain in Korea’s sociopolitical leadership sought to reassess Korea’s place Under Heaven by asserting native practices that transcended Confucian orthodoxy. And as the Lady Chang episode demonstrated, the self-styled rationality of Confucianism, now after nearly three centuries as the official social ideology, still had to contend with longstanding native beliefs and practices.
One possible consequence of the persistence of native tendencies was the rise of money as a social force, particularly amidst the economic expansion and advances in agricultural techniques and production of this era. Lady Chang, who is conventionally known as someone from low social origin befitting her position as palace lady, actually entered the royal compounds through the maneuvering of her wealthy family. Her social status, in fact, was that of a “chungin”—hereditary lineages of technical officials such as interpreters, physicians, and accountants. Her father was a prominent interpreter who likely used his great wealth, gained through his trading activities while accompanying government embassies to China, to wield political influence. There is strong evidence that many of the rich but sub-aristocratic members of society who could not hope to enter high office or marriage relations with the ruling aristocracy—i.e., those belonging to the secondary status groups—turned to monetary influence-peddling to gain the prestige that otherwise was denied them. If so, the Lady Chang story unveils a significant undercurrent of social fluidity in her time.
The secondary status groups
One of the enduringly fascinating features of Korean civilization since the beginning has been the commanding influence of social status in determining both social interaction and structure. And perhaps the most compelling manifestation of the Korean social hierarchy was the emergence, in the mid-Chosn, of the secondary status groups. To a far greater extent than the hereditary aristocracy or commoner peasantry, which were not significantly different from their counterparts elsewhere in the premodern world, the secondary status groups embodied Chosn Korea’s systematic integration of political power with the delineation of ascriptive social privilege.
Five secondary status groups, who collectively constituted a hallmark of late Chosn society, came into distinctive form beginning in the post-invasions recovery period of the seventeenth century: the lineages of technical officials, such as the family of Lady Chang; the hereditary clerks of local government who descended from local elites of the Kory era; the many concubine descendants, who constituted one of the largest social categories in the late Chosn period; the local elites of the northern provinces, victimized by a regional bias with origins deep in Korean history; and the military officials who, in an earlier era (however briefly), stood as equals to their civilian counterparts. Though originating under different circumstances, these secondary status groups all suffered discrimination both socially and politically, and hence embodied the core principle linking hereditary social status to political power, or, to be more precise, to bureaucratic eligibility. Their existence as sub-aristocratic groups, in other words, both determined and was determined by their lower possibilities for gaining government office.
The secondary status groups acted as a kind of buffer between the ruling aristocracy and the majority mass of commoners. Hence they embodied the complicated mixture of the rock-solid principle of hereditary status and the sporadic possibilities for some social mobility in the mid- to late-Chosn. They had a foot in the realms of both the ruling class, with whom most of them had an ancestral connection before being sloughed off into secondary status, and the ruled, with whom they could commiserate about the injustices of the system. They represented, then, the Chosn social structure in its full range of characteristics, from the dominant Confucian ethos and socioeconomic system to popular culture and sentiment (Chapter 12). And therein lay the latency of their historical significance: while they absorbed social conventions and internalized the Confucian orthodoxy, as time passed they demonstrated an increasing desire for social recognition and privilege, which remained largely thwarted until the modern era.
That Lady Chang’s ascent to the royal palace created such an uproar, however, testified also to the reverse: the firm limits to social mobility irrespective even of material wealth. The chaos of the invasions led to a determination on the part of the aristocracy, armed with its command of political institutions and Confucian orthodoxy, to maintain its dominant social standing through a creative combination of factors. While allowing room for sub-aristocratic groups, such as the technical official class, to gain a small measure of social mobility through material accumulation, the preeminence of birth and marriage in determining privileges and sociopolitical power remained intact.
11
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Intellectual Opening in the Late Eighteenth Century
CHRONOLOGY
1750 Birth of Pak Chega
1752 Birth of King Chngjo
1562 Birth of Chng Yagyong; execution of King Yngjo’s crown prince, Chngjo’s father
1765 Hong Taeyong’s trip to China
1776 Death of King Yngjo; beginning of King Chngjo’s reign
&n
bsp; 1778 Pak Chega’s visit to China, drafting of “Discourse on Northern Learning”
1779 Appointment of Pak Chega to a position in the newly created Royal Library
1780 Pak Chiwn’s trip to China
1790 Pak Chega’s third trip to China
1800 Death of King Chngjo
1801 First Catholic persecution; Chng Yagyong sent into exile
THE RETURN OF PAK CHEGA TO KOREA, 1778
In 1778, Pak Chega, a little-known intellectual, gained the privilege of accompanying a close friend on a tribute mission to China. So inspired was he by this trip that, upon his return later in the year, Pak wrote the Discourse on Northern Learning, at once a travelogue as well as a wide-ranging social commentary on the ills of his native country. Through this work, Pak Chega voiced the views of a scholarly movement that drew together some of the country’s brightest minds, who together pushed for a thorough renovation of Chosn dynasty society, and particularly its economy, by looking to the example of contemporary China. While
Koreans had a long history of adopting Chinese models, for over a century before Pak’s appointment most Korean elites had dismissed Qing dynasty China, established by the Manchus in 1644, as a country ruled by barbarians.
From the vantage point of Pak Chega and those in his intellectual circle of “northern learning” advocates, the urgency of reform directly correlated to the challenge of overcoming this long-held, ethnicized bias against the Manchu-run Qing dynasty—the “north”. Nearly all of these scholars had visited Qing China and come back with an eye-opening impression of its socioeconomic advancement. These advocates of northern learning declared not only that Koreans must overcome their prejudices regarding the Manchus, but that this must in turn spur a comprehensive reconsideration of long-held Korean tenets and practices, including those of the Confucian orthodoxy. In this way the northern learning movement constituted, however briefly, an apt capstone to the Chosn dynasty’s “golden era” of the late eighteenth century, marked by peace, relative political stability, and cultural flourishing. Little wonder, then, that this period is also preferred by Koreans as a truer representation of the latter Chosn era, before the ravages of the nineteenth century led to the tragedies of the twentieth.
“UTILITY FOR THE GREATER GOOD”
The unofficial motto for the northern learning school, appearing repeatedly in the writings, was “iyong husaeng,” a term that can be translated in many ways, including “utility for the greater good,” and reflects an approach to solving problems practically and logically. Historians tend to identify the northern learning cohort as part of a wider scholarly movement in the late Chosn era called “practical learning” (sirhak), but this was a coherence constructed mostly by modern historians. Furthermore, one could argue that all Confucian reform proposals that targeted policies affecting the lives of people, by their very nature, were a reflection of “practical learning.” The northern learning movement, however, was real—nearly all of the movement’s figures had a singularly influential experience of visiting China, befriended each other and, in their writings and advocacy activities, supported common core principles. These principles in pursuit of “utility for the greater good” included an embrace of foreign models, especially the scientific teachings of the West; an encouragement of manufacturing, trade, commerce, and even consumption, as well as the concomitant removal of the social stigma attached to profiteering and commercial activities; and the leveling of the social hierarchy. Together, these positions, in fact, went about as far as one could in questioning Neo-Confucianism itself—or at least the domination of its long-held tenets in Korea—without explicitly rejecting it.
The apex figure of this movement was Hong Taeyong, who visited China as part of a tribute mission to Beijing in 1765. There he became well acquainted with Chinese scholars, Catholic clergymen, and a plethora of writings about the world beyond the peninsula. Hong’s experience left him in stunned awe, and he meticulously recorded his observations in a travelogue he wrote following his return. In this and other works, Hong noted the extraordinary energies in the daily lives and economic activities of the Chinese, even beyond the showcase capital of Beijing itself. He took this as an impetus to launch a general critique of Korean customs and Confucian orthodoxy, most clearly in evidence in his “isan Mountain Dialogue,” which features a conversation about the world and nature between the imaginary characters “Empty” and “Substantive.” Needless to say, “Empty” reveals himself as a thinly veiled caricature of the Korean scholar mired in the abstractions of Neo-Confucian philosophy. As seen in this work and others, however, the interaction with Chinese and Western scholars seems to have most affected Hong’s received view of the larger cosmos, and indeed it is Hong’s scientific writings for which he is best known. In them he propounded and legitimated, mostly through deduction, the ideas of a round, rotating earth that encircled a stationary sun, and of humanity’s commonalities with the rest of the natural world. Some historians still consider Hong Taeyong the greatest scientific thinker of the Chosn era.
Hong’s circle of like-minded colleagues included his protégé Pak Chiwn, who finally took his own trip to China in 1780 and returned to write the best-known travelogue of this period, the “Diary of the [Journey to the Chinese Emperor’s] Summer Palace.” Like Hong, Pak admiringly described the flourishing lives of the Chinese, whose use of advanced practical technologies was directly connected to their economic productivity and governmental efficiency. This work was far more than a travelogue, however; his observations of China induced critical reflections on a wide range of topics concerning his home country, to which he applied the extraordinary literary skill that placed him among the most innovative writers of the Chosn era. Indeed, aside from the “Diary of the Summer Palace,” Pak’s best-known works are short stories, written in literary Chinese. Many have in common a satirical portrayal of the late Chosn society and mindset, in tandem with allusions to the very different examples found in China. In his “Tale of the Yangban” or “Tale of H Saeng,” for example, Pak takes aim at Korea’s hereditary social hierarchy, in which one’s social status corresponded little, if at all, to one’s contributions to the greater good. These stories depict a parasitic aristocracy that relied upon empty learning and the privileges accorded by birth, while people of lower standing were engaging in socially productive, practical work and even growing rich.
Such themes were perhaps most systematically integrated into a prescriptive for national renovation by the work and writings of Pak Chiwn’s close friend Pak Chega, whose renown extended to poetry, painting, and calligraphy. Pak Chega’s appointment in 1779 to a high position in the Royal Library by King Chngjo, newly enthroned three years earlier, allowed him to further elaborate on the points made in the Discourse on Northern Learning and to influence the formulation of government policy. By the time the final revised version of the Discourse appeared in print more than two decades after its unveiling, it contained the most systematic expression of the northern learning program, garnished with the wisdom gained from Pak Chega’s experience in government service.
Among the most striking ideas appearing in this work and in Pak Chega’s policy proposals was the explicit endorsement of the pursuit of private wealth. According to Pak, the core problem facing late Chosn Korea was widespread poverty, both in relation to China as well as in absolute terms. This condition stemmed in part from the ruling ethos of austerity that discouraged the consumption of high-quality goods, which in turn destroyed any incentive to produce, improve, and circulate material items. One solution, then, was to encourage the aristocratic yangban to engage freely in commerce, trade, and manufacturing—all areas of activity that, in the Chosn era, had been scorned as unbecoming of the nobility. This would, Pak stated, discourage idleness and serve as a model for “pursuing profit,” which in turn would enrich everyone.
Korea also was beset by decay in the infrastructures of commerce and manufacturing, according to Pak. Along these lines, he seemed alm
ost obsessed with the simple wagon, which was the first of dozens of novelties—ranging from sericulture and paper currency to buildings and boats—that he describes having seen and studied while in China. He noted that ancient Koreans effectively used wagons, and even in contemporary times one could find a few of them in scattered areas. So why were wagons not in greater use as a central mode of transportation and transport? Nothing so encapsulated his homeland’s backwardness, Pak appears to have been saying: widespread use of wagons internally, in conjunction with open trade externally, would boost the circulation of goods, promote the diversification and improvement of locally produced specialty items, and benefit the economic conditions of the country as a whole.
Indeed the northern learning school’s “utility for the greater good” motive constituted very much a materialist proposition: only after the basic economic conditions are met can other concerns be addressed. In laying out the interconnectedness of the material with other realms of existence, scholars like Pak Chiwn in fact aped the great Confucian chain of being, as expressed famously by Confucius in The Great Learning, a core book of the Confucian canon. But instead of locating self-cultivation at the most fundamental level, the northern learning advocates designated material well-being. This in effect overturned the long-held spiritual and ritualistic basis of Chosn Neo-Confucianism, and it was even done with the rhetorical tool of appealing to the classics. In his introduction to the Discourse on Northern Learning, for example, Pak Chega quotes the ancient sages, including Confucius himself, to emphasize the economic foundation of ritual and morality— that the people’s welfare must be secured before focusing on enlightening them in spiritual propriety. In this sense the northern
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