I grew up hearing stories of Korean women and girls who were trafficked during World War II—commonly known as “comfort women”—but I never knew that Korean girls had been traded long before then. That is, until I stumbled across the term kongnyŏ, which refers to the “beautiful women” who were taken from their homes and given up as a human tribute.
I was haunted by the idea of kongnyŏs, and knew I wanted to write about them when I stumbled across this group of women again while reading a letter by Yi Kok (1298–1351) in Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392–1910. In Yi Kok’s letter, written in 1337, he addressed the Mongol emperor of Yuan China, requesting that the practice of seizing Korean girls be prohibited. The passage that caught my attention and sparked the heart of the mystery in The Forest of Stolen Girls was the following:
“I am told that when people of Koryŏ (Korea) have a daughter, they immediately hide and guard her against being detected, so that even close neighbors cannot see her. Whenever an emissary comes from China their faces turn pale with fear … Military clerks go from house to house in all areas searching for hidden daughters … When the seized maidens are gathered for selection, their numbers include both attractive and unattractive persons. But if a bribe is large enough to meet the emissary’s greed, even a beautiful maiden will be set aside. Once a maiden is set aside, a search is conducted to replace her, so that several hundred houses are searched just to obtain one maiden.”
Thirteenth-century Goryeo dynasty–era Korea was under Mongol rule during this time, and so Korean maidens were given as tribute, among other things like horses and fur. It is true that some women (like the teen who would become Empress Ki of Yuan China) were sent by Korean aristocratic families to try to build closer ties to Mongol elites, but in many cases, women were taken against their and their families’ wills. It is estimated that over the span of eighty years, the number of Korean girls who were taken as official tribute, along with those taken privately, would total two thousand girls.
Unfortunately, the practice of human tribute giving continued into the Joseon dynasty era, because after the fall of the Mongol empire, the Ming dynasty was established in China, and Korea became a vassal state again in order to prevent war. A meticulous record was kept in the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty of the number of women taken: 114 women were taken to Ming over seven tributary missions. However, it is said that a great number of girls were privately seized by envoys, nobles, and officials, and they were usually unmarried girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
It was only after 1435 that Korea finally ended this practice of sending human tributes.