Ch 10 - Political Turmoil

The History Purge of 1498

Yonsangun had a clear hostility toward the Samsa's censoring function as a valid concept of the art of government. Political turmoil dominated Yi society as Yonsangun acted to eliminate resistance to his authority. The Samsa's failure to adjust to his demanding requirements precipitated the first of four violent upheavals against the rural literati known collectively in Korean history as the "Literati Purges."

Every political charge, every personal attack, every rumor held the potential to trigger an uncontrollable and indiscriminate firestorm in the tense political atmosphere in Seoul. Kim Il-son, a former state historian in the Bureau of Historiography during the latter years of King Songjong's reign studied under Kim Chong-jik, son of the founder of Choson's Neo-Confucian literati movement. While serving as Third Censor in 1495, Kim proved himself to be a man willing to go to great lengths in criticizing government officials regardless of their power or status. One of Kim's accusatory memoranda set off a controversy that soon took on a life all its own.

Kim Il-son submitted a memorandum that accused Yi Kuk-ton of misconduct and factionalism while Yi served as an official in Cholla Province. Kim compounded his incendiary statement against the conservative member of the Bureau of Historiography by denouncing a personal dispute between Yi Kuk-ton and Song Chun as antagonism. The accusations infuriated Yi Kuk-ton, who quickly developed a monumental grudge against Kim Il-son and began looking for a way to settle the score. Yi Kuk-ton's promotion to Second Deputy Director of the Veritable Records Office gave him an ideal opportunity for revenge. Shortly after taking his new post, Yi began a thorough review of every history draft written by Kim Il-son. Yi found what he believed to be malicious slanders against the political actions and personal conduct of King Sejo. Inspired by this fortuitous discovery, Yi Kuk-ton prepared his own written charges against Kim.With the help of fellow conservative Yu Cha-gwang from the Office of the Royal Lectures, Yi Kuk-ton began to plot a scheme to avenge his honor.

Yu Cha-gwang, enrolled as a Merit Subject First Rank in 1468, thought of himself as eminently famous. He always sought to bring down anyone who appeared to surpass him in talent and royal favor. During his travels in Hamyang county, Yu composed a poem and persuaded the County Magistrate to have it carved on a board and displayed for all to read. When Kim Chong-jik became the new County Magistrate, he ordered the board destroyed, an act that Yu Cha-gwang deeply resented. Yi Kuk-ton's charges against Kim Il-son seemed an opportune way for Yu Cha-gwang to avenge his own long-standing grudge against Kim Chong-jik and his followers. With Yi's report in hand, Yu Cha-gwang sought the support of other government ministers to put the entire matter before Yonsangun as a case of high treason. He sought out State Tribunal Minister Yun P'il-sang, Second State Councilors No Sa-sin, and Third State Councilor Han Chi-hyong and enlisted their support largely by reminding them of their indebtedness to King Sejo. The group also enlisted the help of the queen's brother, First Royal Secretary Sin Su-gun. The Samsa had attacked his appointment as a Royal Secretary because of his blood relationship to the palace and Sin held a grudge against the censoring bodies.

The group held a secret meeting with Yonsangun in early July 1498, in which Yu Cha-gwang personally took charge of the proceedings and discussed the accusations against Kim Il-son at length. After carefully listening to the charges leveled against Kim, Yonsangun ordered the Bureau of State Records to bring him all of Kim Il-son's history drafts. At the same time, he ordered officers of the State Tribunal to the town of Chongdo in North Kyongsang Province to arrest Kim. The king's action is indicative of the seriousness of the charges, since Choson's long-standing tradition prohibited the king from ever reading the draft histories. Nevertheless, the Bureau of State Records excerpted six paragraphs referring to events of previous reigns along with portions referring to the royal family and placed them under seal for delivery to Yonsangun. For the next ten days, while history documents were being readied for delivery under seal to Yonsangun and Kim traveled to Seoul under arrest, the Yi government continued to function as usual, completely unaware of the violent storm about to break.

Kim Il-son arrived at the Yi court in Seoul on a hot summer day to face a dramatic, day-long interrogation. Under intense questioning from Yonsangun, Kim admitted that he wrote the unfavorable record of events in Sejo's reign. He justified his actions as the traditional duty of a historian to set down everything that happened, both good and bad. Yu Cha-gwang personally questioned Kim in laborious detail about his motives and his information sources. During the paragraph by paragraph interrogation, he accused Kim of writing about the traitorous Six Martyred Subjects and holding them up as examples of allegiance to the death. Kim repeated his own conviction that the six men were certainly praiseworthy in remaining loyal to King Danjong, the king they had originally served. Yonsangun became convinced that Kim was a subversive and demanded to know, "Why is it that you serve in my government?"  Kim responded,

"Sejo was a heroic and magnificently gifted sovereign;  he tranquilized the state and achieved a reinvigoration. Songjong was a peerless ruler who preserved and added to his heritage. The present king has succeeded to these enterprises. Therefore I serve him."

Under further interrogation, Kim Il-son revealed his sources and attempted to justify several other contentious items in his history drafts. Here, for the first time, he mentioned his teacher, the late Kim Chong-jik, as a source. Kim also mentioned Kim Chon-jik's composition "Lament for the Rightful Emperor," an essay made famous by its role in Sejo's purge and which he included in his drafts in connection with praising the Six Martyred Subjects. Following a detailed interpretation of Kim Chon-jik's essay, Yu Cha-gwang angrily asked that the author's crime of treason be punished to the full extent of the law. He also requested the burning of Kim Chon-jik's entire published literary collection along with the blocks used to print it. Yonsangun agreed and further ordered the interrogation of the editor and publisher of the work.

While there were strong motives for personal revenge at work in this incident, the charges brought against Kim were not entirely fabricated. Kim Chong-jik did not compose his "Lament for the Rightful Emperor" by accident, nor was its inclusion in the history drafts entirely the innocent act of a dedicated historian. Yonsangun descended from Sejo, not Danjong, and nearly two hundred years would pass before the act of attempting to restore Danjong to full kingly status and dignity would be overlooked as something less than treason. Furthermore, neither Kim Chong-jik nor Kim Il-son were ignorant unreasonable men. They understood very well that Sejo's usurpation of the crown, however morally regrettable or reprehensible it may have been, represented a political reality. The same Confucian creed that made them honor Danjong also required them to render service to Yonsangun.

Within days Yonsangun handed down a decree that stated, in part,

"Kim Chong-jik and his disciples have vilified the royal virtue and have even gone so far as to have Kim Il-son falsely write up history. Truly, this secret harboring of disloyal thought spans three reigns. When we think of this, we cannot help feeling the chill hand of dread."

Yonsangun ordered all high ranking military and civil officials third grade and above, the Censorate and OSC officials to discuss the punishment and present their recommendations. The majority opinion asked that Kim Chong-jik be charged with high treason and punished by decapitating his corpse. The Censorate however, asked only that he be posthumously stripped of his rank and title and that his descendants be disqualified from office. Yonsangun always resented the rebukes, even the suggestions, that came from the Censorate, and their report gave him all the justification he needed to remove them. Yonsangun adopted the majority opinion and ordered judicial proceedings against the Censorate on charges of shielding Kim Chong-jik from justice.

Yonsangun next focused his attention on the large body of Kim Chong-jik's Neo-Confucian disciples. Yu Cha-gwang, no doubt as revenge for the Hamyang County incident, asserted that another of Kim's poems was even more extreme than the "Lament for the Rightful Emperor." Yonsangun ordered all of Kim's followers brought to trial and demanded that Kim Il-son provide a list of their names. When he discovered that Kim Chong-jik's infamous "Lament" had also been praised in Kwon Kyong-yu's history drafts, Yonsangun ordered that all of Kim's followers be imprisoned. Yu Cha-gwang took advantage of the king's anger and tried to affect a wholesale purge of the government. He told Yun P'il-sang, "We must thoroughly investigate this cliquism, utterly root out the evil, and thus purify the government." Only State Councilor No Sa-sin spoke out against Yu, stating that freedom of government criticism should not be totally destroyed. In the end however, Yonsangun decided to follow Yu Cha-gwang's opinion.

State Tribunal Minister Yun P'il-sang and the State Tribunal investigating officers presented their recommendations to the king within a matter of days. They asked that twenty-eight men be sentenced for crimes ranging from high treason to anti-social conduct and cliquism. Punishments ranged from execution by dismemberment to removal from office. They also suggested that two recently deceased men should be posthumously divested of their office warrants. Finally, Yun P'il-sang and the others urged that former Censorate officials had proposed too mild a sentence for Kim Chong-jik and should be charged with cliquism. Yonsangun accepted their recommendations almost verbatim.

The body of Kim Chong-jik was exhumed and his skeleton was hacked to pieces in posthumous punishment. Yonsangun commanded five executions to be carried out immediately and fixed places of banishment for twenty-six others. Simultaneously, he ordered the discharge or demotion of seven supervisory officials in the Veritable Records Office. Ironically, Yi Kuk-ton, whose report triggered the purge, was himself removed from office for not reporting the existence of the draft history soon enough. Yonsangun closed the matter by ordering the offensive history drafts burned.

A report reached Seoul toward the end of 1498 from a resident of Chonan in ChungChongdo Province that stated young students in the area had indignantly asserted that Kim Il-son, Kim Chong-jik and other rural literati were innocent victims of the greedy and villainous Yun P'il-sang and Yu Cha-gwang. Authorities quickly rounded up the students and, after extracting confessions by torture, executed three of them. As many as thirteen others were either banished or assigned to forced labor. The incident became the first of four violent upheavals against the rural literati known collectively in Korean history as the "Literati Purges," sahwa.

Much of the motivation for the "history purge" of 1498 emerged from the active challenges to both the king's exercise of sovereign power and the authority and dignity of high government officials by the Samsa. On a more personal level, the censoring bodies limited the king's freedom of personal conduct and endangered the careers of individual high officials. During this period, Choson lived in almost unrelieved political turmoil as disparate interests struggled for control of the government's policy-making machinery. The mounting threat posed by the Samsa was seen as a threat to the very constitution of the state. The purge evolved out of the actions of a small group of responsible administrative officials and high policy advisers who quickly won support from the king. Driven as much by feelings of deep personal resentment and revenge as by any desire to launch a head-on attack against the ideal of censorship or the institutions that practiced it, the architects of the purge mounted an oblique, symbolic attack against Kim Chong-jik, his Neo-Confucian followers, and the menacingly rapid growth of power in the Samsa.

Attitudes on both sides of the "history purge" of 1498 displayed a basic characteristic aptly described at the time as "contempt for constituted authority," which could easily be construed as behavior subversive of the established order. The Censorate and the Kim Chong-jik group shared this fault equally. The "history purge" soon took on a life of its own, going much further than its initiators anticipated.

From the beginning of his reign, Yonsangun remained disinclined to heed or even tolerate the opinions of the Samsa. He looked for any opportunity to eliminate all sources of resistance to his authority. When the Samsa failed to adjust itself to his demanding requirements, he struck at the heart of the literati in Seoul by proceeding ruthlessly to exterminate them. Despite numerous warnings of his determination to end all attacks against his authority, the subversive activities of the literati continued unabated in the years that followed, creating an estrangement between the royal palace and the bureaucracy. The "history purge" of 1498 did nothing to neutralize the power of the rural literati in the Samsa, nor did it intimidate the Censorate, the OSC, or officials in the High State Council. Nevertheless, the purge had quite a sobering impact on these groups, who viewed with increasing alarm Yonsangun's clear hostility toward the censoring function as a valid concept of the art of government.

The Samsa continued to fire away at its all too familiar targets;  high government officials, the royal family, Buddhism and state policy. It also stepped up its criticism of the king's personal conduct. Protests in this area became increasingly frequent and more pertinent over the years as Yonsangun increasingly tended to neglect his duties in favor of more hedonistic pursuits. His chief occupations during this period appear to have been hunting and partying, both of which led to increased palace expenditures and a number of other perceived evils. He kept hunting dogs and falcons inside the palace and evicted hundreds of families from the vicinity of the palace walls, largely to prevent observation of his wanton frolics in the palace gardens. The State Councilors and other high officials often echoed the pleas of the Censorate for royal restraint in the areas of spending and personal conduct.

The king's activities soon brought the wrath of the Samsa, which recorded the specifics of their dissatisfaction with Yonsangun in a single memorial from the High State Councilors:  (1) granting firewood lands to princes and princesses, (2) avoiding contacts with the officialdom and playing games in the palace park in the company of eunuchs, (3) the inability to reach the king in an emergency due to his wandering deeply into the palace park, (4) the mounting backlog of unattended official business, (5) the demands for the procurement of fast horses for palace use, (6) the unrestrained level of expenditures, and (7) the exorbitant demands for tribute tax goods from Kyonggi Province. Historians later condemned Yonsangun for such depravities as turning the Won'gak-sa Monastery and the halls of the Songgyun'gwan University into houses of prostitution, making a stable out of the Zen Buddhist headquarters at the HungChon-sa Monastery, violating the daughters of court officials, and sending out teams of officers to select beautiful girls for his personal pleasure. In response to these and other criticisms, Yonsangun justified his behavior by announcing that he alone would be the sole judge of the propriety of the king's actions.

The Samsa tempered its lengthy sustained attacks and even used less vituperative language in its denunciations in the years that followed. The Samsa, often joined by the High State Councilors, viewed Yonsangun's aberrant behavior with increasing alarm. From the beginning of his reign, Yonsangun had a tendency to elicit critiques with uncommon frequency, yet he displayed little inclination to welcome or even tolerate its utterance. He made clear his own hostility toward the concept of censorship as a part of the art of governance and toward the manner in which it was practiced by the Samsa, particularly when it affected constituted higher authority.

The Samsa's basic concern remained focused on the official and personal conduct of the king. Operating from positions prepared by their predecessors, the rural literati continued to fire away at familiar targets, including Yu Cha-gwang, Im Sa-hong, Buddhism, marriage kin, and Choson's border policy. They also showed little hesitation to wander onto more dangerous ground. If Yonsangun had intended the "history purge" of 1498 as a warning to the Samsa, it was a warning that went unheeded. The events of 1498 proved to be only a foretaste of what was to come.