A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  Mask dances (t’alch’um), a theatrical performance genre comprised of one to several characters dancing to accompanying instrumental music, also became standardized in the late Chosn into the form that we know today. As the name suggests, the performers wore masks of exaggerated expressions representing the status and emotion of the characters involved. Their “dances” combined choreographed displays and spontaneous movements that, when supplemented by spoken dialogue, furthered the story along its trajectory. The different elements of artistic expression that went into this Korean version of the Gesamtkunstwerk—theater, music, song, dance, colorful costumes—usually served the purpose of satire. The aristocratic and other characters with pretenses to authority, including even Buddhist monks, were usually depicted with ridicule, as if this comedic context presented the most effective means of expressing the grievances of lower-status people. Not coincidentally, like Sin Chaehyo, the great systematizer of p’ansori, the creative figures behind the promotion and development of mask dances came from the ranks of the hereditary local clerks in the late Chosn, the hyangni. Due to their administrative duties, these clerks were literate, organized, and able to measure the pulse of the local mood.

  Examples of the final major art form of the late Chosn, genre painting, have come down as among the most cherished and representative expressions of traditional Korea. Unlike dramatic singing and satirical mask dances, which boasted a history of development before their respective standardized forms of the late Chosn, genre painting—the depiction of daily life—could not draw upon a definitive heritage before the eighteenth century. The extant Korean paintings preceding that period are mostly portraits, Buddhist works, landscapes, or drawings of plants and animals. In fact one has to turn all the way back in time to the Kogury tomb paintings to find a similarly lively attention to people in everyday settings. But unlike these Kogury wall paintings’ preoccupation with the social elite, the eighteenth-century genre paintings are concerned also with showing commoners and even low-born peoples. In style as well, due likely to the influence of Western painting techniques by way of China, one sees a turn in perspective and spacing that corresponded to the shift in subject matter to the commonplace and ordinary. So representative of “traditional” Korean life and culture have these paintings become that the two most prominent masters of genre painting are also the two best-known painters of Korean civilization—perhaps even the two best-known artists: Kim Hongdo, whose expertise extended to all other painting forms but is most beloved for his uncanny, sympathetic depictions of commoners and slaves (and the occasional aristocrat)

  going about their daily lives (Image 12); and Sin Yunbok, whose beautiful pictures of glamorous courtesans and aristocratic lovers evoke scenes in the Tale of Ch’unhyang.

  Image 12 “Wrestling”, by Kim Hongdo, eighteenth century. (Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.)

  POPULAR CULTURE AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  One of the most remarkable aspects of these developments in late Chosn popular culture is that the subject matter of these works seems to have mirrored the lower social status of those responsible for their production, standardization, and dissemination. When we dig a little deeper, however, we find that actually the creative forces—whether court painters like Kim Hongdo and Sin Yunbok, clerks promoting the mask dances, or the p’ansori “composer-authors” like Sin Chaehyo—came not from common or low-born backgrounds, but rather from secondary status backgrounds: families of technical officials in Seoul, hereditary clerks in the countryside, or the descendants of concubines. While the secondary status groups played an integral role in maintaining the Chosn structures of state and social authority, they also suffered from the restrictions of the aristocratically driven hereditary status system (Chapter 10). They were caught, in other words, between a fervent desire to emulate the rituals, behaviors, and education of the aristocracy and thereby be considered social elites themselves, and the frustrations at the fruitlessness of most such efforts to attain true recognition for their talents. This explains, perhaps, why their artistic works rarely featured themselves, but rather focused on mostly downtrodden commoners and the low-born. Even in the genre paintings there are subtle hints of the social critiques that were more openly expressed in the tales, songs, and mask dances. Neither revolutionaries nor even effective agitators, the artists and intellectuals of secondary status background had to achieve a delicate balance between social recognition and social reality.

  The former tendency of emulating the aristocracy can be seen in their emphasis on the Confucian values of filial piety, loyalty, reverence for political authority, and chastity (for female characters) in these works. Even Sin Chaehyo’s p’ansori librettos, full of allusions to the Confucian canon, point to his absorption of the dominant value system. The capital-based poetry societies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also reflected this sentiment. While a separate literary movement was necessary for talented figures of non-aristocratic background who wanted to organize themselves, these authors did not produce vernacular verse on themes of social injustice, but rather poetry in literary Chinese on traditional themes. Meanwhile, the subject matter of their contributions to the vernacular poetry form, sijo, remained mostly the yearning for love, nature, and contemplation.

  The reflective tendency of subtler protest against social discrimination, however, also spawned an undisguised effort among the secondary status groups to proclaim a higher place in the social order. And here the genre of choice was not poetry but rather the more mundane prose of biography. Works of literary biography had long taken their position as central elements of what can be considered this era’s contributions to a “national literature”—in the true sense of the term given these works’ use of the vernacular. They included the “court diaries” written by palace ladies as well as fictionalized or partially fictionalized biographical novels of historical figures. While the biographical compilations that the secondary status groups produced were mostly in literary Chinese, they were equally important because of their subject matter: a focus on people beyond the examples of heroic and court figures. The secondary status groups had begun these efforts with profiles of those from their own ranks. A history of hereditary clerks, for example, emerged in the late eighteenth century, featuring the lives of exemplary figures mixed among appeals for greater social recognition. Genealogies for secondary status groups also appeared, mimicking the form of traditional aristocratic genealogies.

  The real breakthrough, however, in not only the social history but also the literary history of the late Chosn, came via the biographical compilations, such as Observations from the Countryside, of people from all non-aristocratic backgrounds. These works truly reflected an ideology of social rectification in the guise of popular culture. The profiles of “Interpreter Hong” or “Filial Lady Yi,” for example—among close to 300 separate biographical portraits in Observations—provide examples of lives worth remembering as well as a clear sense of these people’s adherence to common values. As the author of Observations notes in his preface, “Since long ago there have been wise and good people throughout the countryside who have gone unnoticed [because of social status]. How could the disappearance of their memories not be lamentable?” It was precisely such a sentiment that pervaded the growth of popular culture in the late Chosn.

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  Nineteenth-Century Unrest

  CHRONOLOGY

  1811–12 Hong Kyngnae Rebellion in P’yngan province

  1862 Uprisings in southern Korea, beginning in Chinju

  1866 Final mass persecution of Catholics

  1866 Attack and destruction of the General Sherman

  1866 Attack by a French expedition off Kanghwa Island

  1871 Attack by an armada of American marines off Kanghwa Island

  1876 Signing of the Treaty of Kanghwa, opening of trade relations with Japan

  1880 First in a series of organizational reforms in the Korean central gov
ernment

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN MERCHANT SHIP, THE GENERAL SHERMAN, 1866

  In the summer of 1866, residents of Pyongyang saw something very strange in the middle of the Taedong River: a black, iron-clad merchant steamship, with cannons, carrying mostly Chinese and Malay sailors but headed by a few pale-faced men. This American ship, called the “General Sherman” in honor of a union commander in the recent American civil war, had become stuck on a sandbar in the middle of the river. Impatient with the progress of negotiations regarding their demands for trade, the officers of the ship began firing on the shore and even abducted a Korean negotiating official. Soon, the order from the authorities came down to attack the vessel, and after a few days of fighting, Korean soldiers managed to set the ship afire. The crew members who swam to shore were all killed. The Pyongyang governor who directed the attack was none other than senior high official Pak Kyusu, grandson of

  the famed eighteenth-century scholar-official Pak Chiwn. As it turned out, the General Sherman was not simply a wandering intruder, but rather the harbinger of an ominous phenomenon. It marked the onset of imperialism, a force that had already engulfed China and induced great internal disruption in Japan, and would soon push Korea onto the currents of a new world order. Within a month, in fact, Korea would be attacked again, this time from French forces.

  The arrival of imperialism, and all that it implied for Korea’s existence as a nation and state, dominates historical consideration of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It marked the beginning of Korea’s unwitting entrance into the cutthroat system of competing nation states that would eventually strip the country of its autonomy. While imperialism ushered in the transition to the modern era, however, significant internally driven upheavals also proved essential to this process. Both sets of developments also stimulated, however, the rise of a concerted reform movement that questioned almost every aspect of Korean society and eventually led to the formal “opening” of the country through the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. Pak Kyusu, the Pyongyang governor at the time of the General Sherman incident, found himself in the middle of several seminal moments of this period. His role in guiding the government through the winds of change, like the events of the era as a whole, complicates any easy judgment on the nineteenth century, which has long been dominated in historical memory by perceptions of decay and decline.

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ISSUE AND INTERNAL PROBLEMS

  The nineteenth century, marked by both internal uprisings and external threats, continues to stand as a troubling historical fulcrum in Korea’s transition to the modern era. In this regard, the period is taken simply as the prelude to “the end,” that is, the loss of national sovereignty and other calamities of the early twentieth century. The shadow cast by the nineteenth century on Korea’s modern experience is so long and dark that attempts have arisen recently to suggest that, given the flourishing of culture and statecraft in the eighteenth century (Chapter 11), the nineteenth century was more of an anomaly. Both of these perspectives situate the nineteenth century in longer, and presumably more significant, historical developments—that of the late Chosn era that preceded it, and of the modern era that succeeded it. While such a long-term historical approach is always edifying, it is equally important to take the nineteenth century on its own terms and show how it represented a distinctive period in Korean history.

  Many factors contributed to the major events that racked the nineteenth century, but we must look first to politics. Here, an event took place—conveniently, for arranging historical eras, at least—at the very beginning: the death of King Chngjo in 1800. As discussed in Chapter 11, King Chngjo has come to embody in the historical annals all that was hopeful and healthy in the Chosn dynasty, and his sudden death while still in his forties represented the end of the comprehensive reform movement that he had been leading. He was followed on the throne, coincidentally, by a succession of four kings too young to exert authority on their own when they began their reigns. Not so coincidentally, throughout the nineteenth century the court came under the corrupting influence of royal family members, especially those of the queen. The network of corruption extended all the way to local administration, and this constituted a fundamental cause behind the eruptions of rebellious violence—the largest in the Chosn dynasty until that time—in northern Korea in 1811 and southern Korea in 1862.

  The Hong Kyngnae Rebellion of 1811–12 is striking for its many similarities to the Myoch’ng Rebellion of 1135–6 (Chapter 5): a charismatic malcontent, convinced by divination of Pyongyang’s rightful place as the center of Korean civilization and, seething at the discrimination against the northwestern region of the country, leads a devastating uprising to overthrow the reigning dynasty. On both occasions, the central government’s forces eventually crushed the rebels after a long siege, but the negative reverberations in P’yngan province, and indeed throughout the country, would last for decades. The lingering bitterness following the Hong Kyngnae Rebellion, however, would prove especially consequential because, unlike the Myoch’ng Rebellion, the uprising was instigated by rampant corruption by local government authorities. Indeed, the venality came at a particularly acute time—amidst near-famine conditions. And this largely explains how, under the banner of regional solidarity, the rebel leaders could mobilize so many people from different socioeconomic and status backgrounds to join the cause.

  While the court undertook a thorough investigation of the rebellion, it could do little to overturn the most entrenched cause, which was not the famine nor even regional discrimination, but rather local corruption. For misconduct by local officials was rooted in the chain of graft emanating from the central court itself, chronically headed by a weak king and beset by factional strife. Hence, smaller-scale uprisings continued, and it was almost inevitable that another major peasants’ revolt would erupt. Half a century later it did, striking this time the southern provinces. In early 1862 residents around the southern coastal city of Chinju, fed up with the extortionate local military commander, rose up to kill local officials and take command of government offices around the area. The central government hurriedly dispatched Pak Kyusu to investigate the uprising and mollify the local populace. This did little to stop the spread of the revolts throughout the southern provinces—and indeed all the way to some counties in the north as well. Eventually Pak came to recommend several systemic reforms in the taxation system as a way to address the grievances of the populace. His recommendations, however, were swallowed up by the festering dysfunction of the central government.

  Indeed, the most consequential result of the 1862 rebellions might have been to alter the growth of a nascent religious movement. In the tense atmosphere of southern Korea following the uprisings, the authorities arrested a wandering preacher, Ch’oe Cheu, for spreading heterodoxy and subversion. He was quickly tried and executed in 1864, and hence began Ch’oe’s status as that of a martyr. By then, his teachings, which he labeled “Tonghak,” or “Eastern Learning,” boasted several thousand followers organized into geographical units in over a dozen localities. Ch’oe’s story, and that of his movement in the early years, diverged little from the familiar path followed by the founders of other religions: an early life of doubt and restlessness leading to a path of self-discovery, followed by a moment of extraordinary revelation of universal truths so powerful that they compelled the receiver of this vision to initiate a religious and social movement. The Tonghak theology, however, was particular to the conditions out of which Ch’oe arose. It blended elements of native Korean spirituality, Confucian ethics and cosmology, Catholic teachings of a single divinity, and a timely message of universal brotherhood and equality. What was most striking were the distinctively Korean prayers and incantations, methods of divination, and healing practices. Even the name of “Tonghak” referred to Korea—traditionally, the “eastern country”—and contrasted consciously with “Western Learning,” or Catholicism. The Tonghak theology’s incorporation of a strong native, eve
n nationalist, identity compels a comparison to other nation-centered religious movements that arose in the nineteenth century: the Taiping in China and the Mormon Church in the US, both of which were founded by extraordinary men who blended nativist elements with established religious practices. Not surprisingly, Ch’oe’s execution in 1864 only served to harden the resolve of his followers, who flourished underground for the next three decades before erupting through an explicitly nationalistic revolt in 1894 (Chapter 14).

  To the governing authorities, Ch’oe—despite his movement’s profession of a faith that deliberately contrasted with Catholicism—looked very much like someone trying to spread a subversive tenet like Catholicism. Like Tonghak, Catholicism, with its call for an ontological equality under a personal deity, was considered gravely threatening to the carefully crafted social order. While King Chngjo had found this religion a curious but potentially disruptive superstition that demanded surveillance, after his death in 1800, the overwhelmingly hostile sentiment from the central elites was unleashed on the small but growing Catholic community in the country. The first state-led persecution of Catholics in 1801 killed several thousand converts, and when this failed to exterminate the movement, further roundups and mass executions took place periodically over the next several decades. The final anti-Catholic campaign took place in 1866, and by then, thousands of Korean Catholics had been martyred. Even today parts of the countryside are dotted by memorials to individual followers