A Genealogy of Dissent: The Progeny of Fallen Royals in Chosŏn Korea

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Park, Eugene Y., author.

Title: A genealogy of dissent : the progeny of fallen royals in Chosŏn Korea / Eugene Y. Park.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002639 | ISBN 9781503602083 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503607231 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families of royal descent—Korea—History. | Royal houses—Korea—History. | Korea—Kings and rulers—Genealogy. | Korea—History—Chosŏn dynasty, 1392–1910. | Korea—History—Koryŏ period, 935–1392.

Classification: LCC DS905.52.R69 P37 2018 | DDC 951.9/02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002639

Typeset by BookMatters in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

Cover design by Angela Moody

A Genealogy of Dissent

THE PROGENY OF FALLEN ROYALS IN CHOSŎN KOREA

Eugene Y. Park

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To Seri, Lauren, and Harry

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Conventions

Prologue

1. Death and Resurrection, 1392–1450

2. Search for a Ritual Heir, 1450–1589

3. The Court and Society, 1589–1724

4. Renewed Attention to the Koryŏ Legacies, 1724–1864

5. Modernity, Kinship, and Individuals, 1864–1910

Epilogue

Koryŏ-Chosŏn Monarchs, Era Names, and Reign Years

Character List

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Maps

1. Chosŏn Korea, 1700

2. Kyŏnggi Province, 1700

3. Hwanghae Province, 1700

4. Chŏlla and Kyŏngsang Provinces, 1700

Figures

P.1. Ideographs for the Wang and associated surnames

1.1. The Kaesŏng Wang descent group segments

1.2. King Kongyang and his immediate relatives

1.3. Wang U and his immediate relatives

2.1. The Wang Sullye line of ritual heirs, 1452–1540

2.2. The major lineages descended from Wang Mi and Wang Hŭng

3.1. The Wang Hun line of ritual heirs, 1589–1724

4.1. The Wang Hun line of ritual heirs, 1724–1864

Photographs

1.1. A section of Sŏng Haeŭng’s commentary on the Tonghak Temple Record of Perished Souls showing the Wang victims who were interned on Kŏje

2.1. The Sungŭijŏn

2.2. The grave of Wang Sullye

5.1. Map of Majŏn (1872) showing the Sungŭijŏn

5.2. Map of Majŏn (1899) showing the Sungŭijŏn

E.1. The fully restored Sungŭijŏn

E.2. Bronze statue of Koryŏ T’aejo, excavated in 1992 in Haesŏn-ri, Kaep’ung-gun, Hwanghaebuk-do, North Korea

Tables

1.1. Regime changes in the Balkans, China, Korea, and Japan, 1333–1453

5.1. Budget changes for state-funded sacrificial rites, July 1898

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many for this book. Don Baker, David L. Howell, Sun Joo Kim, Young-Key Kim-Renaud, John S. Lee, Mark Peterson, Paul J. Smith, Son Byung-giu, Boudewijn Walraven, Anne Walthall, and anonymous reviewers provided comments on earlier versions of this work. With research, I received help from Ahn Yootack, Christopher Atwood, Remco Breuker, John B. Duncan, Frank Hoffmann, Hong Soon-Min, Kang Hosun, Kim Yong-Sun, Lee Donggue, Seok Lee, Noh Kwan-Bum, David M. Robinson, David Spafford, Holly Stephens, Sem Vermeersch, Michael Wert, Yang Jin-Suk, and Yoo Hyun Jae. Among the present-day Kaesŏng Wang, Jennifer Wang Medina, Hye-Sook Wang, Wang Kyusik, and Wang Yŏngnok provided valuable testimonies. Sixiang Wang translated a number of poems discussed in this book. The Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University granted permission to reproduce original maps. Frank L. Chance, Sherrill Davis, and Alexander Martin assisted with manuscript preparation, funded by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant (AKS-2017-P00). As editors for Stanford University Press, Kate Wahl and Jenny Gavacs placed trust in my project in its early stage, and Marcela Maxfield guided me through the rest. Last but not least, my family was understanding about all the weekends and holidays I devoted to writing. I dedicate this book to them.

Conventions

This book generally employs the Pinyin, Revised Hepburn, and McCune-Reischauer systems for the romanization of, respectively, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. Exceptions include alternative spellings such as Seoul that have become widely known. Likewise, for the sake of better recognition by most readers, colonial Korea’s local place names are given in Korean pronunciation, even though the official language at the time was Japanese.

The text omits the suffix of a locale name indicating its administrative level if clear from context. When mentioned, English translations of such suffixes are as follows:

province (to) → county (kun, hyŏn) → district (myŏn) → subdistrict (ri)

pre-1910 Seoul (Hansŏng) → district (pu) → subdistrict (pang) → ward (kye) → neighborhood (tong)

post-1914 city (si, pu) → district (ku) → subdistrict (tong, chŏng)

Until 1894 all centrally appointed Chosŏn officials, including provincial governors and county magistrates, were members of a nine-rank bureaucratic hierarchy, with each rank divided into senior and junior levels. When mentioning a post for the first time, the text indicates its rank, using a scheme in the manner of, for example, 3b (junior third rank).

A prominent individual, as an officeholder or a scholar if not both, whom the direct descendants honored as their lineage founder could date as far back as the sixteenth century or so. Accordingly, a lineage could comprise members of a relationship that may seem very distant to most readers of this book. When discussing two or more lineage members together, the text mentions exact relationships only if they were third cousins (p’alch’on) or closer. Most certainly so for a family of chungin (middle people) status or higher, and increasingly so for the rest of the population, the third-cousin radius defined a close patrilineal kin group, within which the death of a member obligated the rest to perform proper mourning rituals. The closer the relationship is, the longer the mourning period.

While functioning as a record of relationships among the members of a patrilineal descent group, a written genealogy of Chosŏn generally did not include the given names of females. Instead, it typically noted the wife of a subject descent group’s male member by her patrilineal ancestral seat (pon’gwan) and surname in the manner of, for example, Kaesŏng Wang, while recording a married daughter only by the full name of her husband and his ancestral seat. This meant that a daughter who died without marrying had no place in the genealogy.

To the extent that they are readily searchable on the web, the text provides the birth and death years of an individual when mentioned for the first time, and all dates are according to the Gregorian calendar unless noted otherwise. This is true even for events that East Asia reckoned according to the lunar calendar, which remained the standard in Korea until the government went solar on the seventeenth day of the eleventh lunar month of 1895, or New Year’s Day of 1896 according to the Gregorian calendar. Primary source citations use the format in the manner of January 1, 1900 for Gregorian dates and 1800.1.1 for the lunar calendar. On a more personal level, the customary Korean age count regards a person to be of one se at birth, subsequently gaining a year on every New Year’s Day. Accordingly, one’s age in se is either one or two years greater than one’s age according to Western practice.

Far more complex is the conversion of Korean measures and currency to Western units. Simplified conversion rates are as follows (mostly for the Chosŏn period up to 1902, government standard only):

Measures of distance and volume:

Units of currency:

Map 1. Chosŏn Korea, 1700.

Created by Alexander Martin.

Map 2. Kyŏnggi Province, 1700.

Created by Alexander Martin.

Map 3. Hwanghae Province, 1700.

Created by Alexander Martin.

Map 4. Chŏlla and Kyŏngsang Provinces, 1700.

Created by Alexander Martin.

Prologue

This is a story of a Korean family’s survival. After the downfall of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), its descendants, the Kaesŏng Wang, weathered persecution and an ever-changing sociopolitical terrain. An extermination campaign (1394–1413) by the succeeding Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) against the former royals was thorough: most of today’s Kaesŏng Wang are descendants of a single individual who was able to claim descent from the Koryŏ dynastic founder only as the sole monarch among his patrilineal ancestors. After ending the persecution, by 1452 the Chosŏn court secured a descent line of surviving Wangs to offer the ritual sacrifices at Sungŭijŏn, the shrine officially approved for honoring select Koryŏ monarchs. The rehabilitated Wangs retained membership in the aristocracy (yangban), participated in government service examinations, attained court ranks and offices, and even commanded troops. All the same, an emerging body of accounts, written and oral, expressed sympathy toward Koryŏ and its progeny as victims, although the Wangs themselves stayed clear of such discourse until the end of the Chosŏn monarchy. Only then did the Wang genealogy begin including, and thus acknowledging as legitimate kings, the two late Koryŏ rulers who were deposed and executed as false Wangs by the Chosŏn founder.

The post-Koryŏ plight of the Kaesŏng Wang raises historically meaningful questions. Above all, why did the Chosŏn state massacre members of the former royal house only to reinstate them? As the Wangs recovered from a population bottleneck, how did descent lines of varying shades of social status emerge? How did the fate of a long-departed dynasty come to serve as a medium for dissent centuries after the 1392 dynastic change? And what impact did such forces of modernity as colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and urbanization have on the Kaesŏng Wang as an increasingly heterogeneous collective?

What to do with the members of the previous royal house and their descendants was an issue of fundamental concern for the Chosŏn state. Historical precedents of Korea and China demanded that Chosŏn, as the legitimate successor of Koryŏ, honor the latter by treating the progeny appropriately. At the same time, since much of the Chosŏn leadership hailed from the Koryŏ establishment, fear that surviving advocates of Koryŏ might conspire to revive the old dynasty was strong, and the Chosŏn state virtually exterminated the Wangs twenty-one months after the dynastic change. Once the dust settled, the government’s policy toward the Wangs, the Koryŏ loyalists, and the legacies or relics of Koryŏ changed depending on the context of the particular period.

This study finds that the Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change entailed the founding of a [new] state (kaeguk) as Chosŏn struggled with the legacies of the vanquished state (sŭngguk) before coming to terms with them. As of 1392, the aristocracy comprised descent groups that had been staffing officialdom for centuries, and what to do with the Wangs was a security issue for the new regime. After killing the Wangs for two decades, the Chosŏn state searched for a Wang so that he could offer the ritual ancestral sacrifices at the Sungŭijŏn. Also, the court sanctioned regular performance of the Buddhist Ritual of Water and Land (suryukchae, suryukhoe) to pray for the spirits of perished Wangs, until mounting opposition from Neo-Confucian ideologues led to the end of official sponsorship in the sixteenth century. Addressing Buddhist, Confucian, and shamanistic concerns, such rituals were necessary not only for appeasing anguished spirits that could wreak havoc in the realm of the living but also for legitimizing Chosŏn as the successor of Koryŏ. Self-identification of Chosŏn as such allowed room for the surviving Kaesŏng Wang to prosper as long as they subscribed to the cardinal Confucian moral virtues, especially loyalty to the ruler. Those with means enjoyed membership in the aristocracy, as officeholders and nonofficeholders alike. At the same time, the Chosŏn state increasingly fostered a plurality of views on its past and present, including understandings that were critical of the establishment, if not outright subversive. The official treatment of various relics and legacies of Koryŏ, such as written genealogies, the Sungŭijŏn, Koryŏ royal tombs, other remains at the old Koryŏ capitals Kaesŏng and Kanghwa, and of course the Wangs themselves evolved from suppression to neglect to toleration to promotion.

My long-standing fascination with the plight of descendants of vanquished polities and their families, including the Kaesŏng Wang, led me to write this book. In the 1990s when I first read an account purporting to describe the final moments of Koryŏ King U, whom the future founder of the Chosŏn dynasty deposed and executed as a false Wang, the dignity displayed by someone who was arguably the first royal Wang victim of the dynastic change moved me.¹ In December 2013 while researching the post-Koryŏ Kaesŏng Wang connections to the Koryŏ dynasty proper as documented in primary sources, I began to notice interesting patterns and gain new insights into the fate of the Wangs. This is the subject of the book, a narrative of the plight of the progeny of the fallen royals to the present, particularly during the Chosŏn period.

The Kaesŏng Wang of today is a descent group that has recovered from a population bottleneck. The Wangs ostensibly belong to one of five descent lines. Reflecting the scope of bloody persecution by the early Chosŏn state, some 80 percent of South Korea’s Kaesŏng Wang, numbering 19,808 as of 2000, descend from Wang Mi (1365–n.d.), who was a descendant of the Koryŏ dynastic founder, Emperor T’aejo, through his fifteenth son, Hyoŭn T’aeja (also known as the Tongyang Kun, given name unknown, n.d.–961?).² The rest of the Wangs claim descent from later monarchs, and connecting links are problematic, as discussed below.

Once the persecution ended, a growing population of Kaesŏng Wang competed in the government service examinations. Their success was modest in the civil examination (munkwa), which was the most prestigious competition and vital for attaining the highest, politically important civil offices. Likewise, in the licentiate examinations (samasi, saengwŏn-chinsasi) for admission into the Confucian Academy (Sŏnggyun’gwan), the participant pool of which significantly overlapped that of the civil examination, the success of the Wangs was limited. They fared better in the military examination (mukwa), a competition that in principle recruited future military officials but increasingly awarded degrees to a socially diverse pool of candidates.

It is important to put the Kaesŏng Wang experience in perspective, and it contrasts with that of a descent group of comparable population, the Hamjong Ŏ, who numbered 13,321 as of 2000 in South Korea. Among descent groups of population size between 10,000 and 19,999 at the time, including the Kaesŏng Wang, the Hamjong Ŏ were the most successful in the civil examination during the Chosŏn period. A complete record of Chosŏn civil examination graduates shows that whereas the less populous Hamjong Ŏ produced twenty-four graduates, only nine Kaesŏng Wang were successful.³ And according to extant, incomplete, records for other examinations, the Hamjong Ŏ produced sixteen military examination graduates, fifty-eight licentiates, and one technical examination (chapkwa) graduate, whereas the more numerous Wangs produced twenty-one military examination passers, twenty-seven licentiates, and a technical examination passer.⁴ Each descent group’s lone technical examination graduate was a mid-Chosŏn figure who did not found a specialist chungin lineage—hundreds of which, during the last three centuries of Chosŏn, constituted a status group of state-employed experts residing in the capital, Seoul.⁵

The stark contrast between the two descent groups in terms of patterns of examination success reflects significant differences in the nature of their political roles and residence patterns. Almost all of Hamjong Ŏ examination graduates resided in the "yangban crescent" comprising Seoul, the surrounding Kyŏnggi Province, northern Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, western Kangwŏn Province, and southeastern Hwanghae Province.⁶ In fact, most of the late Chosŏn Hamjong Ŏ hailed from an aristocratic lineage belonging to the Patriarch (Noron) party, which had triumphed by the mid-eighteenth century as political hegemon. Not only did a number of Ŏs achieve state councilor (1a)- and minister (2a)-level actual posts (silchik) as distinct from sinecures (sanjik), but a female member also married King Kyŏngjong, thus further enhancing the lineage’s prestige. Compared with the Ŏs, the presence of the Wangs in officialdom was far more modest. The most important offices achieved by the Wangs include a third minister (Ch’amŭi, 3a), the first counselor (Pu chehak, 3a) of the Office of Special Counselors (Hongmun’gwan), and the third inspector (Changnyŏng, 4a) of the Office of the Inspector-General (Sahŏnbu).

Other than accounts of the early Chosŏn state’s persecution of the Kaesŏng Wang, their post-Koryŏ story has received scant attention among historians. To begin with, most studies discussing the Wangs focus on the court politics preceding the May 1394 massacre and its aftermath, various state-sanctioned rituals in honor of some Koryŏ monarchs, a local elite Kaesŏng Wang lineage, or the first comprehensive Kaesŏng Wang genealogy.⁷ Otherwise, the post-1392 story of the Wangs tends to be told and retold outside the realm of historical scholarship. Perhaps the most widely known claim is that during the persecution, many Wangs changed their surname by adding one or more strokes to the ideograph for Wang (king), and such newly adopted surnames supposedly are Ok (jade), Chŏn (field), Chŏn (all), Kim (metal), Kŭm (lute), or Ma ("horse) (figure P.1).⁸ According to other lore, even after ending the persecution, the Chosŏn state kept a watchful eye on the Wangs, making it difficult for them to enter officialdom, so the Wangs did not bother.⁹ Yet another story relates that as the Wang population increased in the county of Ich’ŏn, Kyŏnggi Province, the court reportedly prohibited the Wangs from traveling beyond five ri (approximately two kilometers) from the center of their village, hence named Ch’ŏgo (measured five).¹⁰ And according to a most compelling account, in the late nineteenth century the authorities arrested and executed a Pak-surnamed man when he petitioned the court to reclaim his ancestor’s original surname, allegedly Wang.¹¹

Figure P.1. Ideographs for the Wang and associated surnames.

To shed more light on the post-Koryŏ history of the Kaesŏng Wang, I have examined a range of sources. Much of my evidence derives from court histories, supplemented by law codes, town gazetteers, local elite registers (hyangan), household registers (hojŏk), examination rosters (pangmok), written genealogies, epigraphs, and literary anthologies. Not surprisingly, the information that these sources provide tends to corroborate the official line, which justifies the Chosŏn state’s initial persecution of the Wangs and stresses the benevolence of the kings that rehabilitated the Wangs. Thus, constructing a more nuanced narrative demands considering various works of unofficial history (yasa) and oral history. The latter category includes interviews of present-day Wangs. In addition, visits to various sites associated with the post-Koryŏ history of the Wangs helped me tell a more vivid story.

Accordingly, each of the book’s five chapters weaves together macro and micro histories. Introduced with a broad-sweep overview of the political, social, and cultural history of the period under consideration, each chapter presents the main narrative on the Kaesŏng Wang in a more or less chronological manner, reign by reign. Discussion of each reign begins with a brief overview, except in chapter 5, which builds its narrative around the events invariably involving foreign powers. Since a court-centered history alone cannot provide an adequate context for the post-Koryŏ story of the Wangs, each chapter also incorporates local history, customs, and legends. Assuming that they too changed over time, I make an effort to date such material—first discussing the earliest known when feasible. A brief summary at the end of the chapter reviews its main points.

Chapter 1 examines the early Chosŏn period, from 1392 to 1450, when the new dynasty virtually exterminated the former royals, only to rehabilitate them. Rather than just recounting the oft-told story of the May 1394 massacre and the persecution thereafter until 1413, this chapter seeks to elucidate the Chosŏn state’s definition of the royal Wangs as a target of persecution, the number of victims, the veracity of the claim that some surviving Wangs changed their surnames, and the rationale for officially rehabilitating the Wangs. For comparative perspective, the chapter also considers China’s Yuan-Ming, Japan’s Kamakura-Muromachi, and western Eurasia’s Byzantine-Ottoman transitions.

Chapter 2, covering the following period, from 1450 to 1589, focuses on the state’s effort to maintain a line of ritual heirs of Koryŏ and the reemergence of the Kaesŏng Wang as a descent group. Disproving a widespread assumption, this chapter demonstrates that a number of Wangs, especially the members of the Kwach’ŏn lineage, passed government service examinations and received offices—even attaining significant, prestigious civil posts. By the mid-sixteenth century, the advantage of being a Kaesŏng Wang was such that Wang-surnamed individuals of varying shades of social status made claims to be one, hence forcing the state to examine competing claims when it had to secure a new line of ritual heirs.

Chapter 3, considering the mid-Chosŏn period from 1589 to 1724, analyzes the segmentation of the Kaesŏng Wang as a descent group. While successive members of a third new line of ritual heirs, the Majŏn lineage, performed their duties at the Sungŭijŏn, the Wangs as a whole became geographically dispersed and even more socially diverse. Descent from an early Chosŏn scholar-official without any illegitimate children (sŏŏl) in the intervening generations became the unquestioned marker of one’s aristocratic status. Among various Wang descent lines, the Kaesŏng lineage began eclipsing the Kwach’ŏn lineage in terms of examination success and office holding.

In late Chosŏn when most Kaesŏng Wang were detached from officialdom, the throne repeatedly articulated its desire to better honor the legacies of Koryŏ, human and material. Chapter 4, which examines the period from 1724 to 1864, highlights how the court took stock of the state of Koryŏ royal tombs, other physical remains of Koryŏ, and the Kaesŏng Wang themselves—all while the position of ritual heir devolved to essentially that of the Sungŭijŏn superintendent. As the late Chosŏn elites as a whole were increasingly removed from officialdom and based their aristocratic status solely on descent, the Kaesŏng Wang published their first-ever comprehensive genealogy (taedongbo) in 1798.

As portrayed in chapter 5, during Korea’s struggle for survival as a nation in the age of imperialism, the Kaesŏng Wang began making adjustments. Likely aided by material wealth in a more commercialized economy, the continuing successes of the Kaesŏng lineage in terms of passing examinations and obtaining offices climaxed with civil examination graduates, some even achieving civil posts of mid-level or higher. In contrast, the Majŏn lineage not only saw its role as the caretaker of the Sungŭijŏn further diminished by having a fixed term of service, but also the Wangs with problematic claims of descent from later Koryŏ rulers began gaining the position and securing acceptance into updated editions of the comprehensive Kaesŏng Wang genealogy.

The epilogue presents some vignettes about the Kaesŏng Wang in the modern era. Once the Chosŏn monarchy ended, the Wangs were free to celebrate their past without worrying about the official, self-legitimizing rhetoric of Chosŏn. In addition, forces of modernity such as colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and urbanization have reshaped the material and human legacies of Koryŏ. Post-Chosŏn profiles of some individual Wangs conclude what is a compelling story of the progeny of fallen royals.

CHAPTER 1

Death and Resurrection, 1392–1450

An early Chosŏn king was a vassal of the Chinese empire under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and a first among equals vis-à-vis the aristocracy wielding political power at the national level. When those who spearheaded the Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change had a fallout over the issue of whether to rally around the dynastic founder T’aejo’s ambitious fifth son, the future third ruler, T’aejong, supporters occupied key positions in officialdom. During the reign of T’aejo’s second son and successor, Chŏngjong, who was a figurehead, and in the early part of his own reign, T’aejong disposed of institutions and individuals that posed a threat to a stronger kingship, including private armies, powerful royal in-laws, and outright rebels. Thanks to T’aejong’s ground-laying work, the reign of his third son and successor, the conscientious Sejong, was one of more effective governance, secure borders and shores, and social stability.

At the top of the early Chosŏn social hierarchy was the aristocracy, which legislated measures to further narrow the membership criteria and exclude others. Mindful of his own half brothers that T’aejo fathered by another woman while his first wife was still alive, the first wife’s son, T’aejong, took measures to marginalize children mothered by concubines or remarried women. At the same time, compared with the remainder of the Chosŏn period, central officialdom at the beginning was more open to aristocratic families from all parts of Korea except the northern frontier regions. Also, families that produced officeholders typically were not oriented toward one particular segment of officialdom in terms of the civil, military, or technical service branches. Moreover, some commoners, who constituted the majority of the population, attained examination degrees, court ranks, or offices, although those who did could not achieve admittance into the existing aristocracy. Below the commoners were the lowborn (ch’ŏnmin), mostly chattel slaves (nobi); a slave could secure freedom only through manumission by his or her owner, either the state or an individual.

Across status boundaries, all people practiced a varying combination of shamanism, Buddhism, and Daoism, while the mainstream elites increasingly viewed Neo-Confucianism as the orthodoxy. At the beginning of the Chosŏn period, intellectuals in general not only pursued studies that featured Neo-Confucianism in the form of core interpretations of key Confucian texts by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), encyclopedic learning, belles-lettres, and guwen (Ko. komun, ancient writing) scholarship, but also explored various non-Confucian systems of thought.¹ The age of Buddhism as officially patronized by the state and the aristocracy effectively ended with the dynastic change, but the religion remained popular, especially among women and nonelites as well as for some kings and aristocratic men. From time to time, Buddhist and shamanistic practices drew vociferous criticism from Neo-Confucian ideologues who saw Chosŏn as the recipient of the Mandate of Heaven transferred from morally depraved Koryŏ. From such a perspective, the last king of Koryŏ and other members of the former royal house, which had lasted for nearly five centuries, were at the mercy of the new dynasty.

The Debate about the Former Royals

As of 1392, the Kaesŏng Wang population was probably sizable, with the majority likely descended from Koryŏ T’aejo, Wang Kŏn. While their early history is shrouded in myths and legends, most likely it was T’aejo’s father, Wang Yung (former name Yonggŏn, ca. 850–897), who began using Wang as the family name. Late Silla individuals visiting China or interacting with the Chinese tended to adopt known Chinese surnames, and Yung, as a Yellow Sea merchant based in Kaesŏng, presumably did so. Yung and his family formed strategic marriage ties to other prominent families in the vicinity. Yung’s father, Chakchegŏn (ca. 830–n.d.), maintained a sphere of influence extending beyond Kaesŏng, including nearby locales such as Chŏngju, Yŏnan, Paekch’ŏn, and Kanghwa, an island located at the mouth of the Han River to the south.

The Kaesŏng Wang are not synonymous with the Koryŏ dynasty, under which the sociopolitical standing of a Kaesŏng Wang depended on his or her descent line. The royal kin (chongch’in) section of the History of Koryŏ (Koryŏsa), completed by Chosŏn officials in 1451, records the progeny of T’aejo through direct male descent only, and the coverage is highly selective.² Mothered by the daughters of prominent local strongmen, a considerable number, if not the majority, of T’aejo’s sons probably died during the early Koryŏ political turmoil, culminating with massive purges by Emperor Kwangjong, T’aejo’s fourth son and the fourth monarch. Among those he killed was the ancestor of most of the living Kaesŏng Wang, Hyoŭn T’aeja.³ Once the dust settled, the descendants of the eighth ruler, Hyŏnjong (a grandson of T’aejo though his son, Wang Uk, ca. 940–996, posthumously honored as Emperor Anjong), rapidly increased in number, and all subsequent Koryŏ monarchs were his descendants. Among them, two princely lines became especially populous: (1) the descendants of Hyŏnjong’s fourth son, Wang Ki, the Chŏnggan Wang (also known as the P’yŏngyang Kong, 1021–1069); and (2) the descendants of Wang Sŏ, the Yangyang Kong (1144–1204), the second son of the twentieth ruler, Sinjong, who was a fifth-generation descendant of Hyŏnjong through his third son, the eleventh monarch Munjong. In fact, the History of Koryŏ’s genealogical coverage of royal Wangs centers on these two cadet lines. Both maintained marriage ties to the main line of royal succession, which became extinct in 1398 with the simultaneous death of the last Koryŏ monarch’s two nephews (figure 1.1).

Other Kaesŏng Wang are poorly documented, including some who claim descent from the monarchs Hyŏnjong, Kojong, or Ch’ungjŏng through highly problematic genealogical links. Besides the Wangs recorded in official histories and tombstone inscriptions as members of the royal house, an additional small number are identifiable as members of nonprincely lines descended from the first cousins of T’aejo, who had no brother. Most likely, such descendants led a more mundane existence as hereditary local functionaries (hyangni) in the vicinity of Kaesŏng.⁴ Furthermore, a number of other Wangs appear in various sources without any information on their relationship to the royal house.

After supplanting a dynasty that had ruled Korea for nearly five centuries, bolstering the new dynastic rule was the main concern of the Chosŏn founder. Having eliminated Chŏng Mongju (1338–1392) and other Koryŏ loyalists, on August 5, 1392, Yi Sŏnggye ascended the throne—ostensibly upon the abdication of the last Koryŏ ruler, King Kongyang, and at the urging of Chŏng Tojŏn (1342–1398), Cho Chun (1346–1405), and other leading supporters. In March 1393, the new king, posthumously honored as T’aejo, renamed the country from Koryŏ to Chosŏn with the approval of the name and his accession from the Ming dynastic founder, the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–1398), as T’aejo treated the Ming as the suzerain and the guarantor of the legitimacy of his rule.⁵ Also, although a devout Buddhist, T’aejo promoted Confucianism over Buddhism, which for long had had ties to the Koryŏ establishment. Moreover, based on the Rank Land Law (Kwajŏnpŏp) that he and his supporters had instituted in 1391, in part to deprive their adversaries of their economic base, T’aejo’s court idealized an agrarian subsistence economy and stable social hierarchy. In more concrete terms, T’aejo’s overall effort entailed exterminating the royal Wangs, moving the capital from Kaesŏng to Seoul (then known as Hansŏng), rewarding his key supporters with the title of dynastic foundation merit subjects (kaeguk kongsin) and grants of land and slaves, and reorganizing the institutions of the state as codified in the newly compiled Six Codes of Administration (Kyŏngje yukchŏn).⁶

Figure 1.1. The Kaesŏng Wang descent group segments.

Note: The names of Koryŏ rulers are boldfaced, with asterisks denoting the enshrinement of a spirit tablet at the Sungŭijŏn. Although he reigned for five months before the throne reverted to his predecessor, traditional historiography excludes Wang Ch’ang, the An’gyŏng Kong (deposed king, temple name Yŏngjong, r. 1269), from the enumeration of Koryŏ monarchs.

T’aejo’s reign began with