learning school presented one of the most compelling intellectual challenges to Neo-Confucianism as the Chosn orthodoxy.
THE SPROUTS OF MODERNITY?
Historians have suggested that the northern learning school, as part of the “practical learning” trend, demonstrated the stirrings of Korea’s own drive toward modern ideas and institutions. The calls for a centrality of the people’s welfare in statecraft and the leveling of the hereditary social hierarchy ostensibly represent modern ideals. And the prioritization of material welfare as well as the promotion of industry and trade to increase national strength suggest not only a vibrant mercantilism but indeed the shift toward capitalism. Economic historians, furthermore, have dug up evidence that the late Chosn witnessed increases in productivity stemming from greater commercial activity and, in the agricultural sector, the adoption of new techniques and technologies. Northern learning scholars, as noted above, certainly did embrace technological advances and the development of industries and infrastructures, as well as the encouragement of consumption, commerce, foreign trade, and manufacturing. But the expression of such ideals and, as it turned out, the lack of sustained implementation of them, reflected more the fact that Chosn Korea, despite some advances in productivity, was nowhere close to achieving the critical mass necessary to overturn the basic production modes. In fact, that Pak and others so lamented the absence of changes long having been adopted in China testifies to the starker reality of late eighteenth-century Korea. The vociferous opposition to the northern learning school, some of which stemmed from a distaste for its literary conventions, did not counter that Korea’s economic conditions were inaccurately portrayed, but rather that they were acceptable given the risk of exposure to corrupting influences.
This takes us to the issue of the historical significance of the northern learning school, given its seeming lack of any major, immediate impact. Was it simply an interesting but ultimately inconsequential intellectual movement? As suggested above, the “what if ” questions surrounding these promising developments of the eighteenth century are particularly bitter-sweet due to the solipsistic decay, leading ultimately to calamity, that followed in the nineteenth century (or so it seems—see Chapter 13). The underlying historiographical issue, though somewhat crudely put, is, did the internal development of Chosn society have enough within itself to trigger the shift toward the modern? There appears to be a search for a reassurance, almost cathartic in tone, of the validity of Korean tradition and civilization before the nineteenth century as a way to accept the sacrifices and ultimate accomplishments of the modern experience. Over the past few decades in South Korea, as seen in historical scholarship as well as in historical fiction, television dramas, or movies, this search has been narrowed to several benchmarks for measuring the advances of the late eighteenth century, such as capitalism, Catholicism, and royal absolutism. And in this regard, even more than the northern learning advocates, the historical figures who have been featured most prominently are two with direct personal connections to Pak Chega: the great philosopher Chng Yagyong, better known by his pen name of Tasan, and King Chngjo.
King Chngjo in fact brought Pak and Chng together to work in the Royal Library. The king was an accomplished scholar in his own right. And his charge to his officials in the new Royal Library was to compile and organize a grand repository of works in order to advance scholarship and government policy, just as the Hall of Worthies had done for King Sejong the Great. Like Sejong, Chngjo has enjoyed great acclaim for personifying the ideals of the sagely Confucian monarch. He was the third in a triumvirate of long-reigning, powerful, reform-oriented kings under whose rule Chosn culture and civilization reached a peak: Sukchong (r. 1674–1720), Yngjo (1724–76), and Chngjo (1776–1800). King Yngjo, the longest reigning monarch in Korean history, not only brought stability but introduced a series of state reforms, including a major update to the dynastic code, that spurred cultural and social advances. Many restrictions on hereditarily discriminated groups were eliminated under his leadership, and he is lauded for having striven, somewhat successfully, to control the factional strife among his officials. Despite these accomplishments, however, Yngjo also is remembered for a tragedy in his family: in 1762 he ordered that his murderous, mentally disturbed crown prince wither away while locked in a rice chest. King Chngjo, Yngjo’s grandson and the doomed prince’s son, had witnessed this horror as a child, and it is a wonder that the psychological scarring did not overwhelm him once he ascended to the throne in 1776. Indeed, on the sixtieth birthday of both of his parents in 1795, Chngjo formally rehabilitated his father through a lavish royal outing to his father’s new grave site south of Seoul.
Chngjo’s own accomplishments as monarch might have matched those of his predecessor in half the time, although it is widely lamented that he did not reign longer. While maintaining Yngjo’s intolerance for factional strife, Chngjo was keen to promote cultural advances through the circulation of new ideas. The combination of his interest in new models and publications from China and his desire to cultivate talented young officials appears to have brought Pak Chega to his attention. A year following the publication of Pak’s Discourse on Northern Learning, King Chngjo appointed him in 1779 to his compiler’s position in the Royal Library. Pak in fact was one of four new pathbreaking officials in this post—all of them were concubine’s children or descendants. The monarch had earlier proclaimed a policy of opening the path toward higher government office for these long-discriminated men. Indeed, Pak appears to have enjoyed the favoritism of King Chngjo, who in 1790 sent him as a special ambassador to China.
By then Pak had served for over a decade in the Royal Library, where he befriended and mentored other young officials, none more accomplished than Chng Yagyong. Beginning with his entrance into government service in the 1780s, Chng went on to establish himself as one of his era’s foremost intellectuals and is today commonly cited as the greatest thinker of the late Chosn. He was certainly one of the most prolific authors and versatile minds. He produced hundreds of masterful writings on topics ranging from the core Confucian pursuits of statecraft, philosophy, and social criticism to history, economy, science and engineering, architecture, and religion. In the realm of religion, in fact, Chng may have been the first major scholar-official of his time to embrace not only the scientific but the religious and philosophical teachings of Catholicism. He may even have converted. Korean visitors to China had begun to notice the Catholic presence in the form of Jesuit priests in Beijing in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the closing years of the eighteenth century that the potential challenges from this religion became a serious issue in Korea. The first Korean Catholic was baptized in China in 1784, and soon Korean and foreign missionaries clandestinely pursued their work in Korea itself, converting thousands by the turn of century, including many from the aristocracy and secondary status groups. Over protests urging a harsh crackdown on a set of teachings that appeared to promote an abandonment of one’s social and ritual responsibilities, King Chngjo cautioned patience and treated this religion as a superstitious curiosity that needed to be monitored. Following Chngjo’s death in 1800, however, the Chosn court soon pursued a mass persecution of Catholics, and amidst this tumult Chng Yagyong was stripped of his position and sent into exile.
Chng would never recover his political or intellectual influence, even after his exile of over fifteen years ended while in his late fifties (he would live into his seventies). But the second half of his life that he spent in exile and recovery proved extremely fruitful for him intellectually: it allowed him to reorganize his thoughts, synthesize the various strains of reformist policies that had circulated in the late eighteenth century, and witness directly the plight of the people in the countryside. As a result, he could provide an exhaustive diagnosis for Korea’s systemic ills. His proposed solutions in many ways reflected the influence of the northern learning school, especially given his embrace of new technologies—and particularly in agriculture—th
ough with a more reserved enthusiasm for copying the Qing model. In contrast to his friend Pak Chega, Chng directed more of his attention to fixing statecraft, with an emphasis of fundamental points inherent to Neo-Confucian doctrine but left neglected over the years amidst the wrangling over abstractions. Chng’s premise, then, was that a good society began with good governance more than with material or technological advances. This perspective was reflected in his most famous work, Core Teachings for Shepherding the People, which harkened back to the focus in the Confucian classics on proper education, guidance, and care for the people as the basis of proper government and society. On one level, this work was a handbook on how to be an effective county magistrate, based on Chng’s own experiences as both a magistrate and exiled observer. On another level, the reform measures advocated in this work extended to lessons on administration that applied on a far wider scale. Chng argued, for example, that real-life administrative problems were handled poorly due to the government’s reliance on a stilted examination system to recruit officials, which rewarded rote learning and empty philosophy.
That Chng Yagyong, like Pak Chega and Pak Chiwn, faded into the political and intellectual wilderness in the early nineteenth century heightens the contrast with their prominence in the late eighteenth century, and in turn the sense of what might have been. Their fates, then, constituted a regrettable end to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the Chosn golden age: a whimper instead of a bang. The bang would have to await the tumult of the ensuing era.
12
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Popular Culture in the Late Chosn Era
CHRONOLOGY
early 17th c. Publication of the Tale of Hong Kiltong
1844 Publication of the Hosan Unofficial History by Cho Hiryong
1850s Standardization of p’ansori librettos by Sin Chaehyo
1858 Publication of the History of Sunflowers
1862 Publication of Observations from the Countryside by Yu Chaegn
PUBLICATION OF OBSERVATIONS FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE, 1862
“Many upstanding people have lived in our country, which stretches for hundreds of miles in all directions. How can it be, then, that we know about only a few of these people whose stories deserve to be passed down through our words and literature?” So asks the scholar and renowned painter Cho Hiryong in the preface to the book, Observations from the Countryside, on behalf of the book’s author, Yu Chaegn. Yu’s work meant to address Cho’s rhetorical question by presenting the biographical portraits of almost 300 notable people whose lower social status had prevented their upstanding actions and lives from having become more widely known. Their backgrounds ranged from the well-educated but subordinated groups of people holding technical positions in the government—or chungin, like Yu himself—to local military officers, clerks, doctors, artists, peasants, and merchants, as well as slaves, monks, and other “mean” people. People of all such backgrounds lived as models of filiality, morality, self-cultivation, and sacrifice, Yu wanted to show.
Observations from the Countryside typified a flurry of such publications in the mid-nineteenth century. Biographical compilations of lower status groups, including a work that had appeared a decade earlier authored by Cho Hiryong himself, were published in tandem with a growing poetry movement headed by non-aristocratic literary figures like Yu and Cho. In turn, this literary movement partook in a trend that figured prominently in the latter half of the Chosn dynasty: a greater awareness of the plight of the common people through the increasing expression of their voices in popular cultural forms, from novels to music, dance, and painting. The most well-known folk stories today in Korea, in fact, originated in this era, crafted and transmitted through both written and oral means. The flourishing of these cultural expressions in the late Chosn era also presents a treasure trove of clues about the everyday lives of the people, as well as subtle digs at the injustices and sorrows of the hereditary social hierarchy. Literature and art thus expressed discontent in a way that circumvented the political and social structures of authority, until it became a palpable groundswell of challenges to the status quo.
TALES OF THE PEOPLE
Little wonder, then, that the adventures of Robin Hood-like righteous bandits held a prominent place in this body of literature. Such tales provided a scenario that, on the one hand, espoused the orthodox values of righteousness and benevolence, and, on the other, addressed the social yearnings of lower status groups through escapist fantasy involving heroic exploits. One such story was The Tale of Hong Kiltong, centered on the story of Hong, a concubine’s son abused by both his family and society at large due to his birth status. Unable to endure the rampant prejudice against him, he runs away and leads a group of bandits that attack corrupt officials and distribute the booty to those exploited by them. This story ends with Hong and his followers settling into a kind of socialist utopia without hierarchies and discrimination. In written form, The Tale of Hong Kiltong, which appeared in the early seventeenth century, might have represented the first Korean novel in the vernacular. Clearly, however, the story did not originate with its putative author, H Kyun, but rather had circulated since the times of a real historical figure named Hong Kiltong in the fifteenth century. The legendary elaboration on his life probably drew also from a similar story involving another, better-documented bandit, Im Kkkchng, of the early sixteenth century. Im’s adventures were similar, but his background was even lower than that of Hong Kiltong: Im came from the social outcast group of butchers, tanners, and other “unclean” people.
Another marginalized group, namely women—or, more often, girls—also appeared prominently in the popular tales circulating in the late Chosn. Like those of the righteous bandits, these stories of virtuous women also appealed to the Confucian ethos propagated by the elite. That these stories’ protagonists were females from lower backgrounds showed that such values had penetrated the masses while also promoting these common people’s humanity and goodness. The most famous such story is The Tale of Ch’unhyang. Ch’unhyang, the teenage daughter of a courtesan concubine, falls in love with and betroths the son of the local county magistrate. While her beloved returns to Seoul and becomes a successful young official, she endures a series of hardships stemming from the next magistrate’s evil cravings for her in expectation that she, like her mother, would serve her “duties.” Ch’unhyang, though, resists with her insistence that she remain faithful to her husband despite her social background, and in the end her lover returns as a secret government inspector and rescues her just before she is to be executed. The Tale of Simch’ng was another popular narrative of a virtuous woman who demonstrated the core Confucian values of filial piety, loyalty, and sacrifice. Simch’ng, having acted on her belief that she could cure her father’s blindness by sacrificing her own life, is instead rescued from the underworld and delivered intact to the king, who falls in love with her and marries her. The story ends with a joyous reunion with her father, whose sight is restored. Like Ch’unhyang, the reward of reunion comes from Simch’ng’s faithfulness to her Confucian duties. The larger message of cosmic justice arriving through good acts also drew from Buddhist undercurrents as well as from the centrality of a common woman overcoming her tribulations despite the odds arrayed against her. Indeed, these latter narrative elements are the most compelling and likely contributed most to the popularity of these stories.
It appears, in fact, that both the tales of Ch’unhyang and Simch’ng began not in written form but rather as orally transmitted stories used as songs in shamanistic ceremonies, a genre that ultimately developed into what we now call p’ansori (see below). The elaboration and transmission of these tales through a more definitive, written form were made possible by the gradual spread of the vernacular as a means of communication among those unable to acquire the high culture of literary Chinese. Despite the great effort that went into the creation of the native alphabet back in the mid-fifteenth century, for the most part the social elites shunned the use of what th
ey called this “vulgar script.” Until the end of the nineteenth century, then, the alphabet’s usage and development remained consigned to the lower social orders and, significantly, females. But these groups discovered what is today commonly touted as the great strength of this alphabet—namely, its efficient simplicity and versatility—and likewise, beginning in the seventeenth century, there appeared a surge in mostly informal works employing the vernacular. Not surprisingly, the popularization of the tales of common people accompanied the increasing use of the Korean alphabet among the lower social orders. That these tales also featured compelling plots and characters (including historical figures), especially for the benefit of illuminating social injustices, likely also contributed to their popularity.
OTHER CULTURAL FORMS
P’ansori, a distinctive “opera” genre that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stands today as perhaps the best-known traditional Korean musical form. The singer or singers, accompanied by a drummer who keeps the beat and occasionally shouts responses and encouragement, recount a sprawling tale full of characterization, plot twists, and long monologues. The great challenge to the singers comes from the demand to voice several different characters as well as the narrator, and from the enormous stamina necessary to pull off a complete performance. The most popular works of the p’ansori repertoire, such as the “Song of Ch’unhyang” and “Song of Simch’ng,” invariably date from the late Chosn era, and the successful transmission of these works through the ages owes much to the efforts of systematizers, in particular Sin Chaehyo of the early nineteenth century, who standardized the librettos and performance styles.
A History of Korea Page 13