The period stretching from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century was one of peace, stability, and prosperity in Korea. In general this was true of East Asia as a whole. The Qing had consolidated their rule in China and presided over an era of demographic and commercial expansion. Japan under the Tokugawa entered a period of limited contact with the outside world, but it was also a time of economic growth and domestic order. The Qing had gained firm control over Manchuria, securing that region. Korea thus faced no major threats from its neighbors. Internally several centuries of efforts to promote Neo-Confucian values and institutions had resulted in a major transformation of society. Educated Koreans were proud of this transformation that made their society a center of civilized values. Yet there was still a wide discrepancy between the ideals of society held by Confucianists and the reality around them. Consequently, many Koreans called for various reforms that would solve the problems of poverty and social injustice and strengthen the state. A large body of literature critical of society emerged and a number of reforms were carried out, although seldom as vigorously as their adherents hoped.
The eighteenth century also saw a cultural efflorescence as Koreans produced many works of art and literature, including some new genres. Koreans wrote a number of histories and studies of their own culture during this period. Some historians today see in the eighteenth century a heightening of national consciousness and a growing awareness and appreciation by Koreans of the distinctiveness and uniqueness of their culture. Koreans also began to see their land as the truest bastion of the great Confucian tradition. More than China, it was Korea, they believed, that kept the line of transmission of civilization in its purest, most unbroken form. Yet for all the increasing pride and confidence literate Koreans felt in their society, many remained concerned about its problems.
The late seventeenth century saw Korea ridden with factional struggles centered in the capital. The Namin (Easterners) came to power in 1674. They were ousted by the Sŏin (Westerners) in 1689, who soon split into rival Noron and Soron (Old and Young Doctrine) factions. The Old Doctrine emerged as dominant. Then two very able monarchs came to power. The first, King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–1776), made a practice of appointing officials from all the major factions, a policy that brought a half century of political stability as he carefully balanced factions and exerted a strong personal influence on the court. During his exceptionally long reign he gained the experience and skill to dominate his officials. He was succeeded by his grandson Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), who also strove hard to provide orderly government. Factional disputes and court intrigue continued, but during their long rule the two exemplary monarchs were able to moderate the intrigue and attract many talented scholars and administrators to the central government.
In many ways Korea during the reigns of Chŏngjo and Yŏngjo came as close to being a model Neo-Confucian society as ever appeared in East Asia. As good Confucians the Yi monarchs employed the concept and rhetoric of the sage-king. However, kings not only used the rhetoric, but had also to submit to the rigors the ideal demanded. The king was the father-ruler. Koreans believed that humans through the power of reason could make society moral, orderly, and rational on the model of and in harmony with the larger universe. In order to establish such an order the Mandate of Heaven (Chinese: tianming; Korean: ch’ŏnmyŏng) was conferred upon a certain individual to become a ruler. This idea vested every action by the king and his court with enormous importance. It was also a heavy burden since every action had major moral and cosmic significance. The ruler was at once chief priest to his people, dynastic instrument to his forebears, promoter of civilization, upholder of the classics, and exemplar and father to his people.
A Korean monarch’s role as a model of Confucian conduct restricted him. His every utterance was carefully scrutinized and he had to constantly display his virtue. His authority was also limited by the fact that the Chinese emperor, not he, was the center of the universe. The investiture ceremony of the Korean ruler by the Son of Heaven symbolized this peripheral and subservient position of Korean king. The monarch’s power was further restricted by the fact that a relatively small number of powerful aristocratic families monopolized the greater portion of top posts and were power centers in themselves. In addition, Koreans took the moral authority of scholars seriously. Learned men serving as censors and private scholars issued memorials that criticized the actions of the king and his officials. Yŏngjo, in particular, availed himself of the rhetoric and ritual to fashion an image as a moral ruler. It was not an easy task, because the bureaucrats had their own claims to be wise and upright upholders of the moral order. The king had to continually and scrupulously adhere to the letter and spirit of Neo-Confucianism. Much of a king’s time was spent in performing rituals, and Yŏngjo exerted his power in part by dutifully and carefully performing them. Adding to his prestige and influence, Yŏngjo created a new ritual of expressing sympathy with the people during times of famine or epidemics when he would meet with afflicted families and do what he could to ease their sufferings.1 His grandson and successor Chŏngjo followed in his path.
But even these able monarchs could not free themselves from court intrigue. Yŏngjo’s principal queen had no sons; two, however, were born from lesser wives, and one died young. The surviving son, Changhŏn, was made crown prince and assigned duties at court. The prince’s behavior became increasingly erratic and bizarre as he manifested symptoms of mental illness. In 1762, the king ordered his son placed in a rice chest and smothered to death. This became a famous episode in Korean history. Two major new factions emerged over these events: the si that opposed them and the pyŏk that accepted them. Thus for all his skill as a king, Yŏngjo created still new factions. The next king, Chŏngjo, was Changhŏn’s son. He had to contend with the struggle for power between the P’ungsan Hong clan and the Ch’ŏngp’ung Kim clans. Accounts of his reign, while fairly uneventful, nonetheless are full of tension for life at the royal court was often a perilous one. Every action by every member was subject to criticism. A mistake among even members of the royal family could lead to exile or death.
Meanwhile, Korea maintained correct if not warm relations with China under the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. The Manchus had defeated Korea in 1636, forced the Koreans to pay indemnities, and held members of the royal family as hostages. Initially harsh, the tribute extracted by the Manchus, who after 1644 ruled China as the Qing dynasty, was considerably reduced in the seventeenth century. Still each year the Koreans supplied rolls of their prized paper, furs, and bolts of cotton and other cloth. This tribute continued until the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to the inconveniences of tribute, Koreans continued to view the Qing rulers as barbarian usurpers. King Hyojong (r. 1659–1674), who had spent eight years as a hostage, harbored a hatred of the new Chinese rulers. He plotted to organize a “northern expedition” to attack the Qing that never materialized. Anti-Qing forces were encouraged by the resistance of Ming loyalist groups within China, but with the defeat of the last Ming loyalist base in Taiwan in 1683 those hopes faded. The Yi court then became reconciled with the reality of the Manchu rule of China.
Despite the contempt many Koreans felt for the new dynasty and for the way Chinese officials had compromised their integrity by serving it, relations gradually improved. Under the able emperors Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1736–1796) China prospered, and Koreans came to admire the flourishing culture and economy of Qing. Trade along the border and during diplomatic exchanges prospered. Korean embassies continued to visit Beijing during New Year’s, at the ascension of new emperors, and at various other occasions. Chosŏn monarchs still found the investiture ceremony by the Son of Heaven useful for legitimizing their authority. Furthermore, the diplomatic missions continued to be an important source of information and cultural exchange. Many of Korea’s leading scholars and officials participated in these missions, where they had an opportunity to meet with Chinese officials and scholars and collect books. Korean officials visiting Beijing, especially in the eighteenth century, were impressed by the prosperity and by the high cultural attainment of Qing China. As in the past they were eager to follow the latest trends from what they regarded as the world center of culture.
Most Koreans, however, felt more loyalty to the old Ming dynasty and regarded the Manchu rulers as both usurpers and part barbarian. While out-erly submitting to the Qing they continued to discreetly honor the memory of the Ming. In 1704, King Sukchong built an altar, the Taebodan, to the Ming emperors. Court officials built another altar in 1717 to the Ming emperor Wanli, who had sent troops to assist Korea during the Hideyoshi invasions. In a number of quiet but subtle ways the Chosŏn government hinted at its disdain for its powerful neighbor. Tribute missions to China that had been called choch’ŏn (Chinese chaotian, “going to court”) were given the less exalted title of yŏnhaeng (mission to Beijing). Koreans continued to use a calendar that was dated from the last Ming emperor rather than adopt the calendar of the Qing. The Qing in turn remained somewhat suspicious of Chosŏn, and restricted trade and contact with them.
One line of thought was that Korea could do nothing but wait until Heaven sought to restore legitimacy to the celestial throne. Until that time Korea had to maintain correct relations with its neighbor, and carry the burden of being the sole inheritor of the Way of the Sages. As a result the idea came about among Koreans that since China was ruled by a dynasty of questionable legitimacy, and since its rulers were not fully civilized, Korea remained the last true bastion of civilization (that is, of course, Confucian civilization). Yŏngjo reflected on this idea that China under the Qing was itself part barbarian when he stated that “the Central Plains [China] exude the stenches of barbarians and our Green Hills [Korea] are alone.”2 Such an idea was reinforced by the reports that in China the teachings of Wang Yangming and other “heterodox” thinkers were widely accepted. Only Korea remained firm in its adherence to “orthodox” Confucian teachings as transmitted by Zhu Xi. All this gave the Korean elite a feeling of distinctiveness or separateness from China as well as a sense of cultural superiority even if their country was militarily weak.
Korea also maintained neighborly relations with Japan. Despite the destruction and loss of life caused by Hideyoshi’s invasions, Chosŏn sought to establish peaceful relations with the new government of the Tokugawa shogunate that was established after 1600. In 1606, Seoul sent an embassy to the new ruler, Tokugawa Ieyasu, in Edo (Tokyo). In 1609 a treaty was established with the So clan of Tsushima across the Korea Straits. This allowed Japanese ships to trade at Pusan. A special walled compound was built outside that city, the Waegwan (Japan House), where Japanese merchants could reside and trade. From the early seventeenth century to the 1870s about five hundred Japanese lived in Japan House.3 The two societies carried out a modest but not insignificant trade with each other. Korean merchants sold a variety of Korean goods and some Chinese products in exchange for Japanese porcelain, crafts, and especially silver. Japan’s biggest import from Korea was ginseng. In the seventeenth century when the shogunate debased the coins, it minted a special silver money primarily to buy ginseng. Trade between the two lands declined somewhat in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but was never insignificant. In addition to trade, Koreans occasionally sent embassies to Edo. Eleven were sent between 1606 and 1793. These were huge affairs including hundreds of members who traveled by ship and over land visiting cities and towns. A number of Korean scholars accompanied these embassies, where they met Japanese scholars and artists. As a result of these embassies Korean scholars had some influence on Japanese art and philosophy, and they sometimes came back impressed by Japan’s prosperity and commercial development.
Despite the trade at Pusan and the occasional embassies with their friendly meetings between Korean and Japanese scholars, the Koreans remained distrustful of their island neighbors. The Chosŏn government refused requests by the Bakufu government to send embassies to Seoul, and the Japanese merchants at Pusan were confined to their walled compound. A sensitive diplomatic point was the refusal of Koreans to acknowledge the Japanese ruler’s title of Emperor. This would place the Japanese on equal terms with the Chinese emperor, totally unacceptable in the Korean view of the world. It would also place Korea in the diplomatically inferior position. The Tokugawa shoguns dealt with this problem by simply avoiding any reference to the Japanese emperor in their diplomatic exchanges. In their dealings with Chosŏn the shoguns assumed the title for themselves of Taikun (Great Prince). This term was picked up by Westerners when they came to Japan and is the origin of the English term “tycoon.”
On their northern border, the Qing had incorporated Manchuria into the Chinese Empire, which meant that Koreans no longer had to worry about Central Asian invaders. In fact, as the result of the use of firearms and artillery by the Chinese and by the Russians in the west, the power of the nomads had been broken. But a new threat slowly emerged from the northwest: the Russians in the seventeenth century conquered Siberia and began to approach the frontiers of Korea. The full force of this new threat, however, would not be felt until the nineteenth century. During their embassy visits to Beijing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Koreans had their first encounters with Westerners. Initially these contacts were no more than curiosities for Koreans, but toward the end of the eighteenth century Western ideas began to influence a small circle of intellectuals (see chapter 9).
Koreans continued under the Qing to send three tribute missions a year. All totaled up, about seven hundred missions went to Beijing during the two and a half centuries from the inauguration of the Qing dynasty in 1644 to the end of the tributary system in the late nineteenth century. The typical mission consisted of about thirty officials who along with their scribes, translators, servants, and porters added up to about two hundred to three hundred persons. They followed a prescribed land route that took up to eight weeks each way and stayed in Beijing for about two months in the Hall of Jade River in the south part of the city. Although technically these were diplomatic missions, the members privately engaged in trade with merchants along the way and in the Chinese capital. Upon arrival there were official functions to attend and the audience with the emperor to prepare for, but much of the time was spent seeing the sights, meeting with Chinese and the occasional foreigner in Beijing, and of course shopping. Other than translators who held the humble status of chungin few Koreans could speak Chinese, but they could read and write it. They therefore communicated with their Chinese counterparts in what they called “brush talk,” that is, through writing.
For most Koreans the trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and they tried to make the most of it. Many educated members wrote travel accounts when they got back. About forty of these travel diaries from the Ming, usually called Choch’ŏnrok (Audience with the Emperor), and five hundred from the Qing, called Yŏnhaerok (Travel Records to Beijing), have survived. They provide a glimpse into how Koreans saw themselves as well as what they saw in China. By the eighteenth century these travel diaries became a vehicle to critically compare Korea with China, generally with the aim of pointing to the need for reform in their society. This school of critical writing became known as Pukhak (Northern Learning), the north being a reference to Beijing. Thus a uniquely Korean literary form combining travelogue with criticism emerged that had no counterpart elsewhere in East Asia. The diarists were impressed by the level of commercial activity in China. Markets were open all day and night, every day, unlike in Korea where markets generally opened only on market days. And their size and variety were impressive. One observer writing in 1828 wrote, “The lengths these people will take to make a living are really ingenious. There are some who will even cut other people’s hair, others will administer baths, still others will cut people’s fingernails. And there is a gadget for everything, even for picking paper out of privies or for carrying horse manure.”4
Korean travel diarists used their works to criticize their own society. Among the important travel diaries was Hong Tae-yong’s Yŏn’gi (Beijing Record). Accompanying an uncle to Beijing as a military aide in 1766, Hong wrote of the order and prosperity of China under the Qing Qianlong emperor.5 Pak Chi-wŏn’s Yŏrha ilgi (Jehol Diary) saw China’s wealth as a model for Korea. China possessed good roads, canals, and canal locks, and made use of carriages, baggage wagons, and wheelbarrows. Korea had a mountainous terrain, Pak noted, but even China’s mountainous regions had good roads. Why not Korea? he asked. He was also aware of the less rigid class distinctions in China and the greater ability of men of talent to rise to high office without belonging to elite families. Another famous critique is Pak Che-ga’s Pukhak ŭi (A Proposal for Northern Studies), a memorial to King Chŏngjo in which he argued that Korea must emulate China’s technology and commerce.
Korean travelers to China, however, also found much to be critical of. They commented on the subservience of the Chinese to their “barbarian” Manchu rulers. While Koreans proudly wore Ming-style fashions, such clothes were prohibited to their hosts. Especially notable was the custom by which Chinese men shaved the front part of their scalps and tied their hair in the back of their heads into queues. This practice, ordered by the Manchus to distinguish the Chinese from themselves, was to many Koreans a shameful sign of subservience. They could not help contrasting this to their own proud adherence to the practices of the venerable Ming dynasty and their own freedom from domination by a foreign ethnic group. Hong Tae-yong, while engaging in a “brush talk” with a Chinese scholar, for example, was explaining the Korean custom of showing respect for the former dynasty by leaving a blank line before writing the name Ming. The Chinese scholar upon seeing the character for Ming quickly tore up the paper before authorities could see it.6 Thus, while Koreans increasingly admired the Qing, especially under the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, they also became acutely aware of their differences, including their greater ideological purity.
Koreans also journeyed to Tokugawa Japan on the twelve missions to that country between 1607 to 1811. Travelers to Japan also wrote diaries and noted the differences between their society and Japan. Since such missions were fewer and held less prestige than those to China, these diaries never developed into a Japanese equivalent to the Northern Studies literature. They do, however, provide insights into how Koreans contrasted themselves with the Japanese. Korean envoys were impressed by the prosperity of Tokugawa Japan, by the size of their cities and their cleanliness. Osaka was larger than Seoul, but almost entirely devoted to commerce with a vast number of shops. There was no equivalent commercial center in Korea. Travelers also commented on the high quality of Japanese craftsmanship and the sophistication of agricultural technology. The cities and towns were clean and bustling, the countryside was prosperous, and the people were well dressed. Japanese steelmaking, in particular, was of a high standard. They also commented on Japan’s military strength.7
Yet there was much they did not admire about Japan. Japanese moral standards were woefully inadequate. Men and women socialized too openly, and the women were flirtatious. Prostitution and brothels were everywhere, and people of the same surname married. Most shocking was the sight of men and women bathing naked together. Although Koreans themselves had once practiced this custom, in Yi times this was scandalously in violation of propriety. The principle of segregating men and women was not practiced; boys and girls played together, and were not separated at the age of seven as in Korea. Also disturbing was the practice of homosexuality, which confused the distinction between men and women, a cardinal Confucian virtue. Koreans found the level of civilization in Japan to be lower than in their own country. Japanese scholarship was inferior to their own, since the Japanese showed less mastery of the Confucian classics. They had internalized less of what they did know. There were no altars to Confucius and no ritual robes at funerals, nor did the Japanese properly carry out the rites to their parents or ancestors. Koreans were unimpressed by Japanese literature. Their lack of propriety between men and women, their inferior knowledge of Confucian literature and ritual, and their practice of blackening their teeth were all signs of their semibarbarian nature. Patronizingly some Koreans noted the Tokugawa state sponsorship of Neo-Confucianism, commenting that they were making some progress. Koreans could point out with pride that the Zhu Xi school of Neo-Confucianism had been introduced to Japan by a Kang Hang (1567–1618), a Korean scholar who had been taken to Japan as a prisoner of war. Kang worked with Fujiwara Seika, the Japanese scholar who helped establish Neo-Confucianism as an officially sponsored school of thought during the Tokugawa period. Visitors also noted that Yi T’oegye was studied and admired in Japan. Yet visitors from Seoul also noted that Confucian scholars were lower in social status than warriors.8 Overall the level of learning in Japan, Koreans felt, was much inferior to their own. A few scholars, notably Tasan, took Japanese scholarship seriously enough to study it. But for many the Japanese were “barbarians like the beasts and the birds.”9
The Chosŏn court, the central bureaucracy, the local government officials, the military, and the many scholars and officials supported by the state derived their income from a complex system of taxes. The Chosŏn state was more successful than its predecessor in raising revenue; still, it struggled to get adequate support. Revenue came from the collection of land taxes, tribute payments in which individuals and localities were required to supply specialized products, the use of corvée labor from commoners, and the forced labor of government slaves. The state also imposed a vast array of supplementary taxes. Since Korea was an overwhelmingly agricultural society, taxes from commerce and industry made up only a small portion of the revenue. Most of the tax burden fell on the peasants.
A major source of revenue came from tribute taxes that consisted of tribute of local specialties to the chinsang (royal family), to the kongmul (central government departments), and to the sep’ae (Chinese emperor). Provincial governors and magistrates were required to supply tribute articles to the king, and these of course were exacted from the commoners and slaves under their jurisdiction. The state kept kongan (tribute ledgers) to keep track of payments. The ledgers were based on populations of different districts; however, they were not periodically revised to account for changes in population or in the local economy that may had once but no longer produced a certain product. This resulted in unreasonable levies in some areas. Special levies of tribute could be issued, and sometimes tribute was collected years in advance. Chinsang was especially burdensome because it could be levied frequently and unexpectedly. Tribute contracting (taenap or pangnap) became increasingly more common. Tribute contracting involved middlemen who collected rice or cloth as a substitute for tribute payments from district magistrates or from commoners and used them to purchase tribute goods. Many royal family members and high officials engaged in contracting, and sent their personal aides or slaves to forcibly collect tribute if necessary. By the seventeenth century the tribute system was, in practice, replaced by the direct purchasing of goods through contractors. As a result most peasants and officials simply paid their tribute in the form of rice, cloth, or cash.
Peasants were also burdened by uncompensated labor service. This involved transporting grain taxes and tribute items from villages, and the transportation of them to collecting points. It also included manufacturing boats; mining; gathering husks, straw, coal, and firewood; and hunting game. It could also involve digging for coal; fishing; tending horses; building dikes, dams, city walls, and bridges; and supplying goods on demand. Peasants also had to bear the expense of putting up foreign envoys, officials who were on government business, and the king and his entourage when they were on the expeditions. These expenses could be unannounced and burdensome. Besides this formal tax system, peasants and other commoners were regularly forced to pay bribes and unauthorized fees to officials who often depended on these unofficial charges to support themselves.10
The inequity of the tax system and its unsystematic nature troubled many officials, who suggested a variety of reforms. Since as good Confucianists Koreans looked back to the time of the ancient sages of China for models, officials from time to time suggested various reforms based on their understanding of ancient Chinese practice. One popular idea was the well-field system of ancient Zhou China in which the state owned all the land and distributed it to the peasantry, dividing allotments into eight family plots with a ninth plot to be harvested for the state. The interesting fact is that scholars often viewed private ownership of land with suspicion. If only the state owned and could redistribute the land, some argued, the extremes of wealth and poverty would be eliminated and a prosperous peasantry could adequately support the state by paying uniform and fair land taxes. A more practical reform was the taedongpŏp, the new tribute replacement tax. The new tax, introduced in the seventeenth century, was designed to replace the old tribute tax. A percentage of the harvest was collected in rice, but this could also be paid in cotton cloth or in copper cash. This was carried out, first in Kyŏnggi province and then gradually throughout the country, over the next century. The land tax fostered the accumulation of commercial capital by kongin (tribute men). It also contributed to the emergence of independent artisans producing the products needed by the state. The taedongpŏp reduced the cost of arbitrary exactions of officials and clerks, reduced the costs of government expenses in collecting tribute, enormously simplified the tax system, made it more uniform, and prohibited all sorts of irregular levies not authorized by law. Compulsory labor was replaced by paid wages. While an improvement, the new land tax did not eliminate the burdens and inequities of the tax system. Officials could still levy tribute for some items, and governors could demand rare or specialized items from their areas for use by prestigious visitors. The main problem with the reform was that regular periodical land surveys were not carried out, leading to inequities in the land tax system.
Another burden for commoners was military service. Later in the Chosŏn period local levies of peasant-soldiers were replaced by paid recruits and an annual military tax of two bolts (p’il, each one equaling two by forty feet) of cotton cloth. In 1750 a kyunyŏkpŏp (Equalized Service Law) was enacted in an attempt to levy the tax peasants paid in lieu of military service more equitably. The law reduced the tax to one bolt of cotton and added a grain surtax of about one sixth of 1 percent of the harvest. It also imposed a number of miscellaneous taxes on fish traps, salt production, and fishing and trading vessels. This unfortunately caused a great burden on coastal communities dependent on income from fishing and salt flats. Many reformers saw a uniform household cloth tax as equitable and as a way of ensuring a secure source of revenue for the military. But there was a controversy centered on whether to tax the yangban. While taxing the yangban would enhance state revenues, it would give them the stigma attached to military service. When Yŏngjo levied a tax on the small number of yangban who did not register for school, about twenty-four thousand, this resulted in great protests.11 Young yangban avoided the tax by registering as students. Sometimes yangban participated in collective village cloth payments, but this was done only occasionally and voluntarily. The burden of this tax remained on commoners. Villagers formed kye to share the tax burden. The kye is an association in which members pool their money so an individual can then withdraw from this pool when he or she is in need. It is still common today as a way of raising or borrowing money. The unfairness was increased by the fact that the quotas were not adjusted after 1750 to account for changes in the number of adult males in the districts. Neither did the military tax prove an adequate substitute for military service. It became merely another tax, while the military was allowed to deteriorate.
The grain loan system also provided the state with revenue. The state sought to stabilize prices and prevent famine by adopting the Chinese practice of buying and storing grain and then using these stocks to provide grain loans for famine relief and to tide farmers over during the spring hunger season. In the fifteenth century a move was made toward adopting Zhu Xi’s sach’ang (village granary system), which would be in the hands of local leaders, not officials. But in Korea this was supervised by the magistrates. Although there was an aversion to charging interest, in practice a mogok (wastage charge) was levied that was, in fact, interest. The state had in effect become a moneylender. By the seventeenth century grain loans became an important source of revenue for the state and subject to abuse. The state also had Sangp’yŏngch’ang (Ever-Normal Granaries) in major market towns for price stabilization. These too lent grain at interest, profiting the officials who managed them. The total value of loans increased in the late eighteenth century. Poor peasants were seldom able to repay the loans on time, keeping them in constant debt, and the accumulated interest payments became in fact another tax. The greatest hardship was on the poorest, who were most likely to need to borrow grain. Overall the tax system, despite reform efforts, was complex and inefficient, reinforced yangban privilege, and placed the heaviest burden on the poor.
Chosŏn society was based on agriculture. At the start of the dynasty this base was strengthened by bringing in land for cultivating and by introducing new agricultural methods. Despite some setbacks such as those caused by the Japanese and Manchu invasions, agriculture continued to expand. The most important development in agriculture was the expansion of wet rice cultivation. The advantage of wet rice was its high yields per acre; it yielded twice as much grain per acre as wheat or barley on dry land. A number of irrigation projects such as building dikes and polders enabled new areas to be brought under paddy. Waterwheels were built to bring water from nearby streams, and the building of reservoirs allowed lowlands far from streams to be converted to paddies. Another important change that accompanied wet rice cultivation was the practice of growing rice in seedbeds and then transplanting them into the paddy. This was more efficient than broadcast seeding. Wet rice and transplanting led to a increase in food production. This more productive method of farming spread in some southern areas during the first two centuries of Chosŏn, and then expanded quickly again in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although most heavily concentrated in the south, it was practiced in all provinces except for P’yŏngan in the north.
Intercropping became more important in the eighteenth century, especially in the southern provinces where a winter crop of barley was common. Other intercrops included soybeans, red beans, millet, buckwheat, and root vegetables.12 Lighter ploughs and hoes also increased productivity. Other agricultural advances included the greater use of fertilizer and a move away from the use of fallow fields. It is not clear if these improvements actually made life more prosperous and comfortable for most peasants. Wet rice cultivation required intensive use of labor and careful attention to irrigation works. Transplantation was also risky, since a drought during the crucial transplantation time could spell disaster for the whole crop.
Evidence clearly indicates that the population of Korea expanded during the Yi dynasty, an expansion that was made possible by agricultural advances; but it is less clear if there was an increase in agricultural productivity. Korean agriculture became more sophisticated and yields per acre were higher than in Western Europe or most other parts of the world. They were not, however, as high as in late Tokugawa Japan or in the more productive regions of late Qing China. Historians debate over whether these agricultural changes led to an increase in agricultural surplus or simply meant more labor was needed. The lack of large urban centers and the rural nature of the population suggest that gains in productivity were modest. Some farmers did benefit by the greater use of cotton and tobacco as cash crops, and the introduction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of New World food crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes acted as an extra insurance against famine.
Korea never developed a flourishing commercial economy such as Western Europe, China, and Japan had. Korea remained an overwhelmingly rural, agricultural society. There were no major cities besides Seoul, which was a government center reaching perhaps two hundred thousand in population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nor was there a large vigorous commercial class. Korea was also slow to develop a money economy. Coins were minted by Koryŏ and during the Chosŏn period, but only sporadically. One reason for this was that in the fifteenth century the Ming demanded gold and silver as tribute. Koreans then avoided mining the precious metals for fear it would only encourage the Chinese to ask for bullion as tribute. But mining in general was also discouraged since it was thought that it drew peasants away from farming. Some copper was mined and the chief type of money was copper cash, produced regularly from the seventeenth century. This came in the form of Chinese-style round coins with square holes in the center that were placed on strings. Prices of large items were calculated in standard “strings of cash” commonly numbering a thousands coins. Without gold or silver coins or paper money, large-scale transactions could be cumbersome. Partly for this reason, these coins never replaced bolts of cloth such as silk or cotton that continued to be used as mediums of exchange. The state further discouraged a money economy before the mid-eighteenth-century by collecting tribute in kind rather than monetary payments. The Chosŏn state also contributed to the lack of commerce by discouraging navigation and shipbuilding as part of its isolation policy (see chapter 9).
One reason often given for the lack of commercial development was that in the Chinese-Confucian worldview merchants had a low social status. Wealth was thought to be derived from the land while trade and business only diverted people from productive work. Although some commerce was needed, it was considered by the officials to be a necessary evil. Since it was held in contempt, the yangban were forbidden to engage in trade. Such attitudes were hardly conducive to trade, yet they do not appear to have prevented a flourishing commercial sector in China. Korea was not on any major international trade routes, but neither was Tokugawa Japan with its vigorous commercial economy, nor did international trade account for more than a small proportion of China’s commerce.
The most fundamental factor contributing to the lack of a vigorous commercial sector was geography. China was a vast continental empire with regions that could specialize in producing particular products. Japan was a long if narrow archipelago with varied climatic regions that could specialize in crops best produced there. Korea by contrast was a smaller land with less regional specialization. More importantly, China had an impressive inland waterway network centered around two great rivers and a canal system that linked them, and Japan had the Inland Sea, a convenient highway linking the major population centers. In Korea there were no great waterways that linked regions. The most obvious avenue for trade was along the coasts. But there were problems, since the western coast had some of the world’s highest tides and treacherous sandbars, making navigation tricky. The eastern coast had few harbors and was away from the population centers. Korea’s mountainous terrain, while not formidable enough to seriously hinder communication, made the transport of goods expensive. Consequently, roads were merely footpaths and goods were carried overland on the backs of pedlars and porters.
The merchant class was small and their activities were carefully regulated. In Seoul commerce was restricted to sijŏn (licensed shops). There were two agencies to control them: the Kyŏngsigam (Directorate of Capital Markets), which regulated prices, attempted to prevent cheating and thievery, and collected merchant taxes; and the Ch’ŏngjegam (Directorate of Sanitation), which maintained sanitation. Outside of Seoul there were fewer shops. Instead trade was conducted primarily at periodic markets whose location and frequency were fixed by law. Most trade was conducted by pobusang (itinerant peddlers) who traveled from periodic market to market. The state also employed artisans to make weapons, clothing, furniture, and a variety of items for the court and officialdom. This eliminated the need for merchants to buy and sell things to the state. Most foreign trade was limited by law to diplomatic missions. After 1442 private trade was allowed among the envoys in their embassies to China, but this amounted to a very modest level. Imports from the official trade included silver, copper, tin, sulfur, swords, sandalwood, alum, sugar, pepper, water buffalo horns, sappan wood, licorice root, and elephant tusks. Some of these were of Southeast Asian origin. Exports were Korean cotton cloth, rice, hemp, ramie, ginseng, floral design pillows, sealskins, and books. Trade along the Yalu river border with China was prohibited, although smuggling existed. Imports consisted mostly of luxury goods for elite. Trade with Japan flourished for a while in the seventeenth century. Koreans imported Japanese copper and silver in exchange for ginseng, medicine, and a variety of goods. There was also a small-scale trade with Okinawa through which Southeast Asian spices were imported. But trade with Okinawa and Japan declined in the eighteenth century.
Late Chosŏn reformers sometimes criticized their land’s lack of commercial development and unfavorably compared Korea with the vigorous commercial cities of China and Japan. Some saw commerce as promoting prosperity, not distracting peasants from their farming or yangban from their studies. Commerce began to grow somewhat in the eighteenth century partly as a result of tax reforms. The taedongpŏp reform legalized state direct purchases from merchants, and this stimulated trade. Cash was minted more regularly, and the state began to buy goods rather than have them manufactured by government artisans. Artisans, as a result, began moving toward independent production for the market. The growth of cotton production and the introduction of tobacco, which came to Korea indirectly from the Americas through its Asian neighbors, provided new sources of cash crops for farmers.
Signs of greater independent merchant activity appeared. The pedlars formed a guild in the seventeenth century to protect their interests, and some were able to accumulate capital and achieve some prosperity. In the eighteenth century the government gradually gave up opposition to unlicensed merchants. In 1791, the government restricted the monopoly privileges of the authorized Seoul shops and allowed unlicensed merchants to sell any other product not covered which represented a modest move toward freer trade. As the state shifted from collecting tribute to buying goods, wholesale merchants called kaekchu or yŏgak emerged. They were intermediaries between peasants and the craftsmen and merchants in town. Wholesale merchants became involved in warehousing, consignment selling, and transport. They also ran inns for traveling merchants and provided banking services. Unlike the kongin (tribute men), some kaekchu served as middlemen in the international trade after 1876 and prospered. A few like Pak Sŭng-jik and Pak Ki-sun became successful entrepreneurs and pioneers of industry in colonial Korea.13 So in some ways Korea was developing into a more commercialized economy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, except for some scholars such as Pak Che-ga, the Confucian disdain for merchants and trade continued; and Korea remained less commercially developed than its neighbors.
Korean culture flourished at both the elite and popular levels during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although the influence of Chinese models in literature and the arts remained strong, there was an elaboration on indigenous forms of aesthetic expression and a focus on Korean subject matter in literature, history, and painting. For example, while the yangban continued to write poetry and essays in classical Chinese, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of a literature written in the han-’gŭl script. This included novels, a literary form that was very popular in the eighteenth century. The subject matter of novels varied. Some were military adventures, and some of these reflected the interest in Korea’s history by heroizing those who resisted foreign aggressors. An example was the novel The War with Japan; another, General Im Kyŏng-ŏp, was based on the exploits of a general who fought the Manchus. More popular were love stories. An example of the latter, and the most famous of all Korean tales, was The Story of Ch’unhyang. This was an eighteenth-century tale of a young lady who falls into the clutches of an evil local official but is eventually rescued by her lover.
While novels were popular in the late Chosŏn, poetry retained its hold as the prime form of literary expression. Sijo remained popular. In the eighteenth century a modified form of the sijo, the sasŏl sijo, became common. This maintained the basic format of the sijo with its fifteen-syllable first line and third and final line, but with a middle section that could be expanded by having additional lines added. This ended the tight restriction of the form that had been so prized, and allowed for elaboration and digressions. In the nineteenth century, Sasŏl sijo were written by chungin and commoners as well as yangban. They tended to be more down-to-earth and often coarse and comic. Most were anonymous. Many historians see in the growth of popular novels and in the newer, freer, and less aristocratic poetry signs of social change as nonyangban began to give voice to their feelings and taste in written literature. However, late Chosŏn literature was still dominated by the yangban. Indeed most authors of novels and expanded verse poetry were yangban who, out of propriety, remained anonymous.
An interesting genre of literature in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was the satirical stories written by scholars. These used humor to criticize the inequities and stupidities of Korean society. The outstanding examples came from Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805). An innovative writer, his best-known tales are still popular. Many are found in his Yŏrha ilgi (Jehol Diary, 1780), the record of his trip to China. In the Hŏ saeng chŏn (The Story of Master Hŏ), a yangban who takes up useful work goes into business, prospers, and offers practical solutions to social and economic problems, but finds the yangban elite unwilling to take up reforms. The Yangban chŏn (Yangban’s Tale) is about a lazy yangban who is a parasite on society. He studies but does not do any useful work and is scolded by his own wife. In Hojil (A Tiger’s Reprimand) a hungry man-eating tiger decides to eat Puk Kwak, a yangban scholar with a reputation as a moral exemplar. But encountering the tiger, the yangban falls in excrement after fleeing the house of a widow with whom he is having an affair. Consequently, he stinks so much that the tiger does not eat him.14 Another story in this genre is Chŏng Yag-yong’s (1762–1836) Ch’ultong mun (On Dismissing a Servant). In an anonymous story titled Changkki chŏn (The Story of a Pheasant Cock) a pheasant hen rejects her submissive role as wife. The story thus satirizes fundamental Confucian notions about the relations between husband and wife.
An interesting legacy of Chosŏn was women’s literature. In recent years scholars have rediscovered much of this large body of feminine writing. The percentage of women who were literate was small, since even yangban girls were discouraged from learning. Nonetheless, a small number of women became quite accomplished in letters. Lady Yun, mother of Kim Man-jung, is said to have tutored her two sons to pass the civil exams. Lady Sin Saimdang, mother of Yi I (Yulgok), was reported to have been very learned. Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a beautiful and highly intelligent daughter of a high-ranking official, was so talented as a youth that she attracted the attention of well-known poets who tutored her. Tragically she died at the age of twenty-three and destroyed many of her poems before her death. Her famous brother Hŏ Kyun collected what remained. These proved to be enough to earn her a reputation as an accomplished poet. Kisaeng such as Hwang Chin-i were often accomplished poets as well.
As in Japan, Korean women wrote primarily in indigenous script while men stuck to the more prestigious Chinese characters to express themselves. Women, if they learned to write, generally wrote in han’gŭl, which was regarded as fitting for them. Han’gŭl, in fact, was sometimes referred to as amgŭl (female letters). Women, following cultural expectations, generally wrote about family matters. But within these restrictions Korean women produced kyuban or naebang kasa (inner room kasa). These originated in the eighteenth century and were largely anonymous. They included admonitions addressed to daughters and granddaughters by mothers and grandmothers on the occasion of a young woman’s marriage and departure from home. Young brides would arrive with these kasa copied on rolls of paper. They would pass them to their daughters with their own kasa added. Other inner room kasa dealt with the success of their sons in taking exams, complaints about their lives, and seasonal gatherings of women relatives.15
Another genre of women’s literature was palace literature written by court ladies about the people and intrigues of court. A large body of this literature, much of it still not well studied, survives. Among the best known are the anonymously authored Kyech’uk ilgi (Diary of the Year of the Black Ox, 1613), the story of Sŏnjo’s second queen, Inmok. Queen Inmok is portrayed as a virtuous lady who falls victim to palace politics and jealousies. She struggles to protect her son and is imprisoned by Kwanghaegun. It ends when the doors of the palace where she is imprisoned are suddenly opened following Kwanghaegun’s overthrow.16 Another work, Inhyŏn Wanghu chŏn (Life of Queen Inhyŏn), tells the virtuous life of Queen Inhyŏn, who married King Sukchong in 1681. She too is victimized at the hands of the evil rival, Lady Chang. Today the most read of these palace works is the Hanjungnok (Records Written in Silence) by Lady Hyegyŏng (1735–1815). This is the autobiography of the wife of the ill-fated crown prince Changhŏn. Written in the form of four memoirs, it is a realistic and in most respects accurate story of her mistreatment at court, the tragedy of her husband’s mental illness and death, and the sufferings of her natal family by their political enemies. Her memoirs are a literary masterpiece, and because of their honesty and her astute insights, they are a valuable window into court life in the eighteenth century. Biographical writings by women in East Asia are very rare, and one by a woman of such high intelligence so close to the center of political life is especially important.17
In painting, Korean artists in later Chosŏn tended to focus on Korean landscapes rather than on scenes from Chinese literature, and departed from earlier conventions with bolder strokes, spontaneity, and liveliness. In the seventeenth century Kim Myŏng-guk (1623–1649) developed a distinctive style with strong Sŏn (Zen) influences. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an especially creative period in Korean painting. Chŏng Sŏn (1676–1759), for example, considered one of the greatest masters, painted the mountains of Korea. He is especially famous for his paintings of the Diamond Mountains located near the east coast of what is now North Korea. Sim Sa-jŏng (1707–1769) created a number of paintings from landscapes to animals characterized by a spontaneity, simplicity, and liveliness. A new genre of painting appeared in the eighteenth century that had no counterpart elsewhere in East Asia. These were playful scenes of everyday life depicting yangban socializing, peasants’ merrymaking, or just everyday activities. Among the genre painters was Sin Yun-bok (1758–?), an artist from the chungin class who depicted beautiful women and yangban enjoying the company of kisaeng. The subjects of his An Album of Genre Scenes are girls on seesaws, housewives washing clothes in streams, women selling wine, and women and men flirting. Sin’s paintings deviated too much from Confucian propriety and he was expelled from the Tohwasŏ. Another genre painter, Kim Tŭk-sin (1754–1822), painted ordinary people at work and play.
The most famous of the genre painters was Kim Hong-do (1745–ca. 1818). He painted peasants working in their fields, harvesting, working in their shops, performing music, and engaging in ssirŭm (Korean wrestling) matches. A versatile artist, he also created landscapes, portraits, and bird and flower paintings. But it is his genre paintings that are most treasured today. Although he died destitute, Kim Hong-do is recognized today as one of Korea’s greatest artists. These genre paintings with their playfulness and often humor have no counterpart elsewhere in East Asia. They are not only instantly charming and appealing, but are also a vivid record of everyday life in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Chosŏn. Genre painting was an example of the trend among Korean artists, writers, and musicians of drawing upon their own folk traditions to develop new forms of artistic expressions. A tradition of erotic art existed as well. Well-known painters sometimes discreetly created albums of these explicit works for their patrons.
In addition to the formal art of official artists and yangban amateurs, a rich tradition of art flourished that dealt with folk customs and beliefs. This folk art was “popular among all classes.”18 Unlike the more formal yangban art paintings, minhwa (folk paintings) were characterized by bright colors and a sense of spontaneity and vitality. They contained symbols from Buddhism, shamanism, and folk religion traditions. Many such paintings showed scenes from ordinary life, especially festive occasions such as birthdays and New Year’s celebrations. Other folk paintings depicted landscapes, tigers, and other wild animals. Another folk art tradition was the mask dance-drama. Mask dance-dramas were performed in Silla times if not earlier. In Koryõ times they were sometimes performed in court. During the Chosŏn period they were characteristic of village culture. The masks, generally of wood, were highly stylized. Black masks represented old men, red ones young men, and white ones young women. Some stories hint of ancient fertility festivals in which youth/summer triumphs over age/winter. Many satirized the yangban and monks, and provided an irreverence that bordered on social protest. Mask dances were generally performed during festivals such as at the first full moon of the year, Buddha’s birthday, Tano (a summer festival), and Chusŏk, the autumn moon festival. Puppet plays were popular and also served as social satire by poking fun at the yangban.
A uniquely Korean art form that emerged in late Chosŏn was p’ansori. In a p’ansori performance a singer delivers a folk tale while a drummer accompanies him or her, setting the rhythm to the singer’s tale and encouraging the singer by shouting out from time to time. The singer conveys the story not only by singing but also through a series of body expressions and dance-like movements. P’ansori combines music, drama, and dance in a unique style. It has its origins in eighteenth-century Chŏlla province, and it emerged by the nineteenth century as a popular entertainment performed in villages and towns by traveling performers.19 In the marketplace a singer would start with an unrelated song, a hŏduga, to draw a crowd. Then the performance itself could take up to eight hours, although usually only parts of a p’ansori work were performed. Originally there were twelve p’ansori works or madang; today only six remain. The stories were derived from folktales with many embellishments added. Among the most popular were the Tale of Ch’unhyang and the Tale of Hŭngbu. The latter is the story of selfish, greedy, cruel Nolbu and his kind, unselfish, but also unpractical younger brother Hŭngbu. Unable to provide for his huge family Hŭngbu asks Nolbu for help, but his elder brother is too selfish to assist. The contrast between the two provides great delight. The story ends happily when a magical swallow that Hŭngbu has helped provides him with money. His greedy brother mistreats the swallow to gain wealth only to be ruined. P’ansori has become a great art form and singers spend years of training, traditionally strengthening their voice by practicing over the roar of a waterfall. It has enjoyed a revival in contemporary Korea and has gained a small but growing international following.
The eighteenth century was a great period of historical writing in Korea. Accompanying the trend toward drawing upon local sources for artistic and literary inspiration, historians focused on the study of their own country. An Chŏng-bok (1712–1791), a disciple of Yi Ik, wrote the Tongsa kangmok (Abridged View of Korean History), the first comprehensive history of Korea from Kija to the fall of Koryŏ by a private scholar. An was concerned with the importance of legitimacy and loyalty. Touching a theme that was to inspire later nationalist historians, An was also concerned with Korea’s struggle against foreign invaders. He praised the achievements of those who resisted them such as Ŭlchi Mundŏk, Kang Kam-ch’an, and Sŏ Hŭi-as and less well known heros. Illustrating his professionalism, his addenda discussed historical problems and assessed the reliability of sources. Another scholar, Hong Yang-ho, in 1794 wrote the Haedong myŏngjang chŏn (Biographies of Famed Generals). It mainly focused on those who fought foreign invaders. Another private history, Haedong yŏksa (History of Korea) by Han Ch’i-yun (1765–1814), covered the history of Korea from Tan’gun to the fall of Koryŏ. Both An and Kang used Chinese histories as models, but their subject matter dealt with Korea’s own historical development. Han used hundreds of sources, including Japanese as well as Chinese and Korean ones. He compared and evaluated them, showing the sophistication of Korean historical scholarship. His work, not quite finished upon his death, was completed by his nephew Han Chin-sŏ.
Another important history was Yi Kŏng-ik’s Yŏllyŏsil kisul (Narration from the Yŏllyŏ Study), a history of the Yi dynasty from its founding to the reign of Sukchong (1674–1720). The first part deals with the various reigns and the second part with a number of special topics such as institutions, diplomatic relations, taxes, marriage customs, penal systems, and astronomy and natural phenomena. Yi, unlike most Korean historians, refrained from presenting his personal views. Instead he often presented verbatim quotations from his sources, four hundred in all, in an effort to be objective and letting “fact speak for itself.”20 Another work of significance was the Parhae ko (Study of the Parhae Kingdom), published in 1784. The author, Yu Tŭk-kong (1748–1807), challenged the idea of a unified peninsula-under Silla but rather saw Parhae as part of Korean history. Yu referred to the United Silla period as the period of the “Northern and Southern Kingdoms.” A number of geographies were compiled by authors such as Sin Kyŏng-jun (1712–1781), who wrote the Toro ko (Routes and Roads) and the Sansu ko (Mountains and Rivers), and Chŏng Sang-gi (1678–1752), who produced the Tongguk chido (Map of Korea).
Some scholars today see the beginnings of Korean nationalism in the renewed interest Koreans showed in their own historical tradition. An Chŏng-bok and Yu Tŭk-kong, for example, traced Korea’s history to early times, essentially making it as old as that of China. Since Koreans had often dated the start of civilization with the coming of Kija from China, dating their history back to Tan’gun before Kija implied that Korea was as old as its neighbor and not derivative of China, that it had its own distinctive development. While most contemporary historians regard nationalism as a modern concept not introduced to Korea until the late nineteenth century, some scholars see the antecedents of modern Korean nationalism in the writings of these late Chosŏn historians and other writers. Certainly, Koreans in late Chosŏn displayed a strong sense of possessing a distinctive culture even as they continued to identify with the greater world of Chinese-based civilization.
A large body of critical scholarship emerged in the seventeenth and especially in the eighteenth century. Today this scholarship is often referred to as Sirhak, “Practical Learning.” This is a modern term used to categorize a number of thinkers who had somewhat different concerns and a lively intellectual curiosity in a wide variety of areas yet who shared a desire to correct social and political injustices. Many of these scholars came from the sŏwŏn, private academies that were important centers of learning. By the eighteenth century there were hundreds of these private academies. They were autonomous institutions where private scholars taught, studied, wrote, and commented on public issues. Different academies became associated with different political factions, so that they were as much as centers of factional politics as scholarship. Nonetheless, they provided an institutional basis for nonofficials to scrutinize society.
One of the earliest of these practical learning scholars was Yu Hyŏng-wŏn (pen name Pan’gye, 1622–1673). His major work, Pan’gye surok, completed in 1670, systematically examined the landowning system, education, the institutions of government, and the military. As he did, he carefully pointed out weaknesses and suggested reforms. Among his proposals was a sweeping land reform based on the “Tang equal-field system” in which the government would take possession of all land and then assign equal plots for cultivation to all the peasants. Yu was not a total egalitarian. As with almost all Korean thinkers he accepted the idea of aristocratic privilege and social hierarchy. Under his proposals the state would provide modestly larger shares of land for yangban and bureaucrats according to their rank. But his goal was to create a society that avoided great disparities in wealth and poverty, and that would strengthen both the state and society. He also advocated the replacement of the civil examinations with a new recruiting system in order to reinvigorate the government. Yu was hardly a progressive in the modern sense. He was a conservative reformer, who wanted to bring Korea closer to what he regarded as the golden age of the past.
In the eighteenth century the number of social and political critics grew. One of the most important was Yi Ik (Songho, 1681–1763), who in the same tradition as Yu presented detailed analysis of economics and politics, suggesting various reforms that sought to return to a simpler, more egalitarian past. A man of broad learning and many interests, Yi was concerned with establishing social justice. He also advocated land reform that would guarantee land to all peasants and create a more equitable and just society. He realistically suggested that land reforms be carried out on a gradual basis.
A number of reformers, Pak Chi-wŏn, Pak Che-ga (1750-?), and Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–1793), of the Northern Learning School drew from their travels to China to critique their own society. They differed from thinkers such as Yu Hyŏng-wŏn and Yi Ik in that they did not seek to restore an agrarian past but were influenced by recent trends in Qing thought, commerce, technology, and literary styles. They found fault in the yangban for their idleness, and for their lack of appreciation of the practical benefits of commerce and technology. Pak Chi-wŏn, for example, a member of the Noron faction, criticized the scholar-bureaucratic class with his previously mentioned satirical narratives Yangban chŏn, Hŏsaeng chŏn, and Hojil (Tiger’s Rebuke). Hong Tae-yong (1731–1783), who belonged to this school, also wrote on science. He suggested that the earth rotated on its axis, and in general was critical of many of the commonly accepted East Asian views on the natural world.
Perhaps the most original of these thinkers was Chŏng Yak-yong (Tasan, 1762–1836), who suggested that the ancients were not always as wise as scholars thought and that changing conditions mean that new generations had to come up with new ways of dealing with problems. Tasan, also concerned with the disparities between rich and poor, called for communally owned land and an egalitarian redistribution of wealth. He was fascinated by science, and took a deep interest in medicine. Tasan was familiar with some Western science and medicine, as well as with Christianity, and drew inspiration from this new source of learning. As with his many of his contemporaries he was influenced by Qing scholarship. He also greatly admired Tokugawa Japanese scholars such as Ito Jinsai, Dazai Shundai, and Ogyu Sorai (all of the Ancient Learning School) and their examination of ancient texts with a concern for practical information. In a short essay, Ilbonron (Essay on Japan), he praised the effort of Japanese scholars to critically examine ancient texts. He suggested that the Japanese were becoming less militaristic and more civilized, boding well for the future relations between Korea and its island neighbor.21 Today, some see Tasan as a modernizer breaking with tradition and calling for radical change in thinking. Yet, for all his wide-ranging interests and his openness to new sources of ideas, Tasan was working within the Confucian tradition. He too saw the works of Confucius, Mencius, and the other Chinese classics as sources of great wisdom and guidance. Like Yu Hyong-won and Yi Ik, Tasan was more focused on establishing a more equitable agricultural order than promoting commerce.
Some historians today see in all this intellectual ferment the beginnings of modern thought. According to one interpretation the “seeds of modernization” were being planted in Korea during this time. Many contemporary Korean historians have found the beginnings of a commercial revolution, and the possibility of political and social change leading to a more dynamic modernizing society. They cite the loosening of state restrictions on trade, the growth of a money economy, the new cash crops such as tobacco and cotton, the new ideas on science and medicine, and the criticism of the yangban ruling class. However, despite the growth in commerce and a growing acceptance of the importance of commerce and industry among some members of the educated elite, Korea remained a very rural society. The basic contempt for merchants and business among most of the elite changed little before the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, most of the “practical learning” scholars were still operating within the Confucian tradition. Most cited the ancient sages and looked to the Korean or Chinese past to find precedents for their reform ideas. There were some exceptions, but Koreans at the start of the nineteenth century were still confident and proud of the fact that they were the upholders of the ancient line of transmission of civilized values. Koreans saw civilization as always being threatened by barbarism and their land as a bastion of the Way of the Sages. The origins of civilization were in China and its principles were laid down by the ancient sage-rulers. But now that China was ruled by semibarbarian Manchus, Korea was the foremost center of civilized values. Peoples outside of East Asia might have some useful things to offer, but they were outside of civilization, ignorant of the sages and of the Way of Confucius, illiterate in Chinese characters, and unable to appreciate true art and poetry or the principles of Heaven.
Everyday life in Korea did not undergo radical change either. Rather changes occurred within tradition. Rice was the main staple for those who could afford it, although the poor and even more prosperous peasants in times of bad harvests ate “coarse grains” such as millet and barley. Living in a cold country, Koreans pickled vegetables so that they would be available in the winter and early spring. In the eighteenth century chili peppers, of New World origin, were introduced, beginning the Korean love of spicy food that set them apart from their northern Chinese and Japanese neighbors. The national dish of kimch’i, pickled cabbages or other vegetables in garlic and fermented fish or shrimp seasoned with chili peppers, acquired its modern form at this time. Kimch’i was stored in big crockery jars and became an indispensable part of each meal. Fish and seafood was an important part of the diet, although Koreans were also fond of meat if they could afford it. Rice wine was also consumed in liberal quantities.
Chosŏn Korea was only modestly urbanized. The largest city was Seoul, whose population probably peaked in the late eighteenth century at two hundred thousand. If the two river ports of Map’o and Yongsan and a few other adjoining communities are added, the metropolitan area was about three hundred thousand, about the size of contemporary Berlin in Prussia but far smaller than London and Paris. Seoul in 1800 was less than a quarter as big as Edo (Tokyo) in Japan, smaller than Osaka or Kyoto or the great Chinese cities such as Beijing. Yet serving as the political, commercial, and cultural center of the kingdom it was by far the largest city in Korea. Seoul was a walled city with three main gates: the East Gate (Tongdaemun), West Gate (Sŏdaemun), and South Gate (Namdaemun). Running east to west was Chongno (Bell Street), the main avenue. It was a city of royal palaces, numerous royal shrines, government offices, large tiled-roof houses for the rich and small thatched ones for the poor. It also had two major market areas filled with private shops: Ihyŏn area near Tongdaemun and Ch’ilp’ae ara outside Namdaemun.22
Seoul in the late eighteenth century was followed in size by P’yŏngyang and Kasesŏng, each with thirty thousand, and by the southern cities of Chŏnju and Sangju with twenty thousand each. Ten or eleven other towns had about ten thousand people.23 Kaesŏng near Seoul, Ŭiji on the Chinese frontier, and Pusan, the port for trade with Japan, served as commercial centers. All other cities and towns were administrative centers. Unlike those in Western Europe, Japan, or China, Korean cities, even Seoul, lacked a vibrant urban culture. Partly this was due to the humble status of merchants, the modest scale of commercial enterprise, and the Neo-Confucian emphasis on decorum that inhibited a lively cultural life. In addition, most yangban, even when living in Seoul or another city, identified with their country homes, where they most often returned after retiring from public office. Furthermore, much of learning and scholarship in late Chosŏn centered around the hundreds of scattered, mostly rural sŏwŏn.
Most Koreans lived in rural villages and supported themselves through farming. Rural life was difficult. The widespread use of rice transplanting added to the labor-intensive, strenuous nature of farm work. All family members were involved in the tasks that were made more onerous by the fact that farms often consisted of scattered parcels, many on steep hillsides. Festivals, periodic markets, and itinerant peddlers and entertainers, as well as weddings and other special occasions, added variety and diversion to rural life. The craftsmen and laborers in cities and towns may have had more amusements available, but life for them was hard as well. Estimates of the actual living standards vary (see next chapter). Evidence suggests that most late Choson Koreans lived modestly, yet for the most part not in extreme poverty.
Life in small villages was often harsh. People lived in close quarters and disputes over field boundaries or any variety of personal resentments were frequent. Village gossip could create or aggravate these disputes that, when accompanied by heavy drinking, often led to violence. For example, the mere rumor that someone was sleeping with some’s else’s wife could, and judging by legal records, often did result in lethal assaults.24 In county seats the most important figure was the country magistrate who served a 1,800-day term. In smaller communities the local yangban generally provided leadership. He gave moral lectures at special occasions and informally adjudicated local disputes. Yurang chisigin (wandering scholars), who were poor unemployed yangban, often provided instruction to village children and acted as a means of spreading the dominant Neo-Confucian values to rural areas.
Village life, however, was also enlivened by seasonal festivals. The lunar New Year’s and the Autumn Moon Festival were the biggest holidays as they still are today. While the yangban looked down on most sports, archery was popular. Koreans are still great archers and in the late twentieth century often dominated Olympic archery events. Korean traditional wrestling, ssirŭm, similar to Japanese sumo, was also popular. In ssirŭm, at least as it is played today, each player binds his loins and the upper thigh of his right leg with a two-foot-long cloth or satpa. Each player grasps the satpa in the right hand at the loins and the left hand at the thigh; the first to touch the ground with any part of body other than the feet loses. Kings sometimes sponsored wrestling events awarding honors to winners. Several styles existed but only one style remains today. Another popular game was yut, played with wooden sticks thrown up in the air. Various martial arts, including those ancestral to t’aekwŏndo, were widely practiced in the Yi dynasty, even among common people. In the late eighteenth century the prominent scholars Yi Tŏng-mu and Pak Che-ga wrote the Muyedobo t’ongi (Illustrated Treatise on the Fighting Arts), a military and martial arts manual. Although the martial arts tradition was derived from China, the manual shows Korean innovations in techniques as well as in the use of schematic illustrations to indicate movement.25 Paduk, better known in the West by its Japanese name go and also as Korean chess or changgi, was popular, especially among the yangban. Most physical activities were confined to men; however, seesaws were popular among women.
Korean medicine was derived from Chinese practice and theory. Among the popular forms of treatment were ttŭm (moxibustion), ch’im (acupuncture), and hanyak (Chinese medicine). Koreans practiced four methods of physical observation: observing the face and overall appearance (sijin), listening to the sound of the person’s voice (munjin), questioning the person about his medical history and symptoms (munjin written with a different Chinese character), and feeling the pulse and stomach (chŏlchin). There were seventeen pulses, each requiring separate treatment. The standard medical reference was the Tongŭi pogam (Exemplar of Korean Medicine), first compiled in 1610. It ran to twenty-five volumes and was based on Korean and Chinese treatises on medicine. Eating healthy food was and is still an important part of Korean medicine. Healthful foods included poshin t’ang (dog meat stew), paem t’ang (snake soup), paem sul (snake wine), and above all ginseng, valued for its ability to preserve health and virility. These medical foods and medicines, as is true of many other aspects of popular and elite culture in late Chosŏn, are still part of a clearly defined Korean tradition.
Late Chosŏn Korea, while possessing a rigid class structure, was increasingly a society with common cultural values. The vast numbers of petitions to the monarch by ordinary people suggests a wide identification if not attachment to the dynasty and the state. Village schools, yangban public lectures, wandering scholars, and possibly rising literacy among males assisted in the penetration of Confucian norms among the peasant majority. Folk traditions, sports, medical beliefs, popular literature, the style of homes with their heated ŏndol floors, and the ubiquitous kimchi jars were all part of a rich, distinctive, and shared Korean cultural tradition.
The attempts to bring marriage and the family in line with the ideals of Neo-Confucianism included efforts to regulate concubinage and prohibit the remarriage of widows. Marriage to secondary wives was a common practice among the elite, but the tendency was to make a legal distinction between the offspring of first or main wives and the offspring of secondary wives. Children of secondary wives, called sŏŏl, were prohibited from taking the civil exams and serving as officials and had many other legal restrictions. These reforms had become general practice by the eighteenth century. They also attracted the attention of some late Yi scholars, who saw the discrimination against secondary sons to be a tragic and unfair situation. The prohibition against remarriage for widows (not for widowers), however, was generally accepted, since a woman must be a virgin when she marries, and she must be loyal to her husband even after death, and obedient to her son.
The Office of the Inspector-General memorializes [in 1413] as follows:
Husband and wife are the mainstay of human morality, and the differentiation between main wife and concubine may be blurred. Embodying the great principles of the one hundred kings of the Spring and Autumn period, King T’aejo accentuated the boundary between main wife and concubine devised by the scholar-officials and instituted as the law of conferring ranks and land on main wives. The distinction between main wife and concubine has thus become clear and the root of human morality straight.
At the end of the former dynasty, the influence of ritual decorum and morality was not pervasive, and the relationship between husband and wife deteriorated. The members of the officialdom followed their own desires and inclination: some who had a wife married a second wife; others made their concubine their main wife. This has consequently become the source of today’s disputes between main wives and concubines.
We have carefully examined the Ming code, which reads: “The one who makes a concubine his main wife while the latter is alive is to be punished with ninety strokes of the heavy bamboo, and the situation must be rectified. Someone who already has a main wife and still gets another one is also to be punished with ninety strokes, and they must separate.”
—T’aejong sillok 25:13a–b
Marriage was largely an affair between “two surnames,” and, as far as the wife was concerned, it lasted beyond her husband’s death. Confucian ideology stressed the woman’s devotion to one husband, and this emphasis on the exclusive nature of the marital relationship provided Confucian legislators with the arguments they needed to prohibit the remarriage of women, a custom prevalent during Koryŏ. The first version of the State Code of 1469 apparently barred the sons and grandsons of thrice-married women from advancing into the higher officialdom. The debate of 1477 makes it clear that the majority of the discussants, here represented by Kim Yŏngyu (1418–1494), were in favor of keeping the restriction to third and not extending to second marriages. How sensitive this issue was is documented by the fact that the State Code of 1485 did not directly outlaw remarriage but provided that the sons and grandsons of remarried women would not be eligible for civil or military office and would be barred from taking the lower and higher civil service examinations. The ideological and legal implications thus, in fact, made remarriage for a woman impossible.
—From Sŏnjong sillok 82:9b–20a
See Jahyun Kim Haboush, A Heritage of Kings: One Man’s Monarchy in the Confucian World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 39.
Jahyun Kim Haboush, “Constructing the Center: The Ritual Controversy and the Search for a New Identity in Seventh-Century Korea,” in Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn Korea, ed. Jahyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Hollym, 1999), 46–90.
James B. Lewis, Frontier Contact between Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 192.
Gari Ledyard, “Korean Travelers in China over Four Hundred Years, 1488–1887,” Occasional Papers on Korea (March 1974), 1–42.
Gari Ledyard, “Hong Taeyong and His Peking Memoir,” Korean Studies 6 (1982): 63–103.
Ledyard, “Korean Travelers,” 26.
Hur Nam-lin, “Korean Officials in the Land of the Kami: Diplomacy and the Prestige Economy, 1607–1811,” in Proceedings of the 1st World Congress of Korean Studies: Embracing the Other: The Interaction of Korean and Foreign Cultures, The Korean Academy of Korean Studies (Seoul: July 2002), 82–93.
Chai-shik Chung, “Changing Korean Perceptions of Japan on the Eve of Modern Transformation: The Case of Neo-Confucian Yangban Intellectuals,” Korean Studies 19 (1995): 39–50.
Hur Nam-lin, “Korean Officials,” 88.
James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 49.
Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 567.
Hochul Lee, “Agriculture as a Generator of Change in Late Choson Korea,” in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 111–13.
Carter Eckert, Offspring of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 12–13.
Kichung Kim, Classical Korean Literature (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 177–78.
Kim, Classical Korean Literature, 123–24.
Kim, Classical Korean Literature, 99.
JaHyun Kim Haboush, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: the Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 6–10.
Portal, Korea: Art and Archaeology (London: British Museum, 2000), 143.
Marshall R. Pihl, “P’ansori: The Korean Oral Narrative,” Korean Studies 5 (1981): 43–62.
Choe Yong-ho, “An Outline History of Korean Historiography,” Korean Studies 4 (1989) : 1–27.
Mark Setton, Chŏng Yagyong: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 128–29.
Kim Dong Uk, “The City Architecture of Seoul,” Korea Journal 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 54–68.
Hochul Lee, “Agriculture as a Generator of Change in Late Choson Korea,” in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 122.
William Shaw, Legal Norms in a Confucian State (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Center for Korean Studies, 1981), 81–85.
Andrew Pratt, “Change and Continuity in Choson Military Techniques during the Later Choson Period,” Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies 7 (2000): 31–48.
Peter H. Lee and William Theodore De Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition, vol. 1, From Early Times through the Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 312–17.
Lee and De Bary, Sources of Korean Tradition, vol. 1, 319–20.