Ch 10 - Political Turmoil

Yonsangun and the Purge of 1504

The growing habit of "contempt of higher authority" was the one aspect of the nation's political and moral fabric that most disturbed Yonsangun. Determined to maintain the strict distinction between the sovereign and his subjects, he ruthlessly attacked the rampant arrogance and disrespect among high government officials. In 1504, Yonsangun initiated a brutal government purge intended to "thoroughly root out this pernicious trend."

In the years immediately following the "history purge" of 1498, Yonsangun's activities came to occupy a great deal of the attention of the government's censoring bodies. The State Councilors and other high officials often echoed the pleas of the Samsa for royal restraint in the areas of palace expenditures and personal conduct. As concerned as they were about Yonsangun's personal and official conduct, Seoul's high officials were in agreement with the king about the developing pattern of attacks on their persons and authority. Near the end of 1503, Chief State Councilor Song Chun angrily submitted his resignation;

"The habit of contempt of higher authority is characteristic of our dynasty. The young men band together in friendly association and develop deleterious habits. After 1498, these habits somewhat subsided, but now they have begun to wax again. I occupy the Chief State Councilor position, [but even so] have suffered truly many insults. I now ask to resign."

Yonsangun was fully sympathetic with Councilor Song's views, since the habit of "contempt of higher authority" was the one aspect of the nation's political and moral fabric that most disturbed the young monarch. In time, he began to see the overt expression of this contempt in the most innocent of acts.

During the course of a state banquet in the fall of 1503, Minister of Rites Yi Se-jwa accidentally spilled wine on the king's robes during dinner. Yonsangun, who interpreted that simple slip of the hand as a crime against the sovereign, became so angered he removed Minister Yi and three of his sons from their government posts and banished them to Hamgyong. Almost immediately, Yonsangun ordered removal of those Samsa officials who failed to indict the men for the crime of insulting the king and demanded they be demoted and barred from holding either Censorate or OSC offices until further notice.

Yet another trivial incident occurred six months later, one that perfectly fit the king's theme of "contempt of higher authority." Yonsangun ordered Governor Hong Kwi-dal of Kyonggi Province to send one of his granddaughters to the royal harem. The girl's father failed to comply with the request however, falsely asserting that his daughter's illness prevented her from traveling. Yonsangun not only instituted criminal charges against the girl's father, but after Governor Hong tried to justify his son's behavior, Yonsangun stripped him of his governorship and banished him to Hamgyong with the explanation:

"On the whole, today's high officials have the habit of contempt of constituted authority. If this is not severely punished, the younger officialdom will take it as their model. Hong Kwi-dal's utterance of disrespectful words is due simply to the fact that Yi Se-jwa was not sternly punished."

In a stern proclamation to the nation, Yonsangun stated his determination to maintain the strict distinction between the sovereign and his subjects. He blamed the mounting evils of the day on rampant arrogance and disrespect among high government officials. Yi Se-jwa was released from banishment in January 1504 by special royal command. When he arrived at the palace to thank Yonsangun for his reprieve, the king handed him a goblet of wine, saying, "This is the wine you spilled the other day." Yi Se-jwa's tears of gratitude soon turned to tears of sorrow, for in the wake of the Hong Kwi-dal incident, Yi was banished once again. Yonsangun immediately banished the incumbent Censorate officials for their failure to protest Yi Se-jwa's release from banishment. In his condemnation of the Censorate for its failure to impeach both Minister Yi Se-jwa and Governor Hong Kwi-dal, fearing their entrenched position and power in government, Yonsangun commented,

"...when someone is seen to be alone and defenseless, then the Censorate invariably attacks violently and unceasingly. When the Censorate should speak out, it does not;  and when it should not, it speaks out strongly."

In an open warning to Seoul and the provinces alike that he intended to "thoroughly root out this pernicious trend," Yonsangun initiated a brutal housecleaning in government that came to be known as the Purge of 1504.

All those who held office in the Censorate subsequent to Minister Yi Se-jwa's unfortunate accident at the state dinner were beaten and banished on orders from Yonsangun. He openly declared his intention to punish officials in the OSC as well, noting that even though they had indicted personnel in the past out of fear of remaining silent, not one OSC official offered an indictment of Yi Se-jwa. Responding as if on cue, the newly appointed members of the Censorate voiced their opinion that Hong Kwi-dal and Yi Se-jwa had been dealt with too leniently and asked for the death penalty and banishment for the men.

Minister of Rites Yi Se-jwa suffered the full measure of Yonsangun's cruel and imaginative vengeance. The king first commanded Yi to kill himself by drinking poison. Noting that Yi had committed the final breach of propriety by displaying anger at the royal poison-bearing messenger, Yonsangun ordered the corpse beheaded and the head paraded on display throughout Choson. Yi's severed limbs were mounted on stakes, his remains were denied burial, and his bones were ground into dust and scattered to the four winds. After demolishing Yi Se-jwa's house, a pond was dug on the site, and a stone marker inscribed with his crimes was placed on the property. The king next erased all laws or changes in the National Code for which Yi was responsible and voided any examination list certified by the former minister.

The legal provisions governing cases of high treason drew Yi Se-jwa's relatives into the king's widening net. Yonsangun removed Yi Se-jwa's father and five uncles from the merit roster and confiscated their lands and slaves. He later harshly banished the surviving sons and grandsons of the five brothers for life. Wives, concubines, daughters, daughters-in-law, and grandsons became slaves. Clansmen and members of families related by marriage then in office were stripped of their office warrants and the men were banished to remote areas. Before long, Yi Se-jwa's four sons were beheaded and a younger brother, Yi Se-gol, was enslaved. When Yonsangun recalled it was Yi Se-gol who had encouraged his kisaeng to refuse to play the harp at a palace banquet, Yi was beheaded as well. All this because of a simple slip of the hand and a spilled goblet of wine. Not long after the Yi Se-jwa incident in 1504, a member of a clan that had furnished husbands for the royal princesses of Sejo and Songjong submitted a confidential report to the king concerning the death of Lady Yun, King Songjong's second wife and Yonsangun's mother. Yonsangun was only four-years-old at the time of her death and knew nothing of what had actually happened. The tragedy reportedly began when Lady Om and Lady Chong, two of Songjong's concubines, accused Lady Yun of acting with excessive jealousy and inconsistency in matters related to the royal household. King Songjong responded by ordering the queen deposed, reduced to the status of a commoner and, in the end, poisoned.

The report concerning Lady Yun's death sent Yonsangun into a rage and he ordered the punishment of everyone living and dead even remotely connected with his mother's death. Both Lady Om and Lady Chong along with their offspring were stricken from the royal house roster. Their daughters were banished and their husbands were divested of office warrants. The king confiscated their parent's property and ordered them beaten and banished, including one woman's eighty-one-year-old father. The two women were immediately seized and beaten to death, allegedly by Yonsangun himself. Their corpses were torn apart, salted and cast into the open. Later, the king ordered the homes of the two women razed and had ponds dug on the sites. Their remains were denied burial and their bones were pulverized and strewn. Yonsangun commanded two of their sons, Prince Anyang and Prince Pongan, one of whom was the king's half-brother, beaten then banished.

During the initial stage of Yonsangun's vicious purge against the government, he laid down a naked challenge to his opponents in a conversation with the Royal Secretariat. After acknowledging the great number of officials sentenced to crimes and the fact that his government no doubt regarded his actions as tyranny, Yonsangun stated, "Of yore it was said:  To make others stand in awe is to command their obedience. Today's officialdom looks upon their sovereign as so much loose straw. Hence this turn of events."The king was deadly serious in his efforts to stamp out "contempt for authority" and the Royal Secretaries knew it. They blamed the sentenced officials for having "themselves fashioned their crimes," adding, "Who would dare say this is tyranny?"  Who, indeed. The response was everything Yonsangun could have hoped for.

Grasping the opportunity at hand, Yonsangun began a second purge that resulted in the death or banishment of hundreds of Merit Subjects as well as numerous members of the rural literati who had managed to survive the "history purge" of 1498. Once begun, this second purge ran its course with unprecedented cruelty and ferocity. Yonsangun had the official records searched for the names of every high official who participated in the events surrounding his mother's deposition and death. The corpse of Yi P'a, a Fourth State Councilor under King Songjong, and a leading figure connected with the death of Lady Yun, was dug up, dismembered and publicly displayed. His remains were denied burial and his bones were pulverized and scattered. The government confiscated Yi P'a's property, converted his house site to a pond and erected a stone marker listing his crimes. His family and relatives suffered the same fate as that unleashed against the family of Yi Se-jwa. The king ordered the bodies of five other deceased high officials of the time disinterred and reburied as commoners and had their sons banished. Minister Yun P'il-sang lost his office warrants and property and was banished together with his sons.

With his appetite for revenge whetted, Yonsangun ordered the records searched again for participants. This time he expanded the scope of his instructions to include officials of the Samsa, the Board of Rites, the Royal Secretariat and various other offices. Sixteen men, living and dead alike, received punishments that ranged from dismissal to banishment. Numerous others suffered Yonsangun's retribution for a variety of offenses. A disrespectful palace eunuch was executed. Three female slaves were beheaded for talking about happenings at the palace and their parents and brothers were assigned to duties at the most remote government outposts. Three palace attendants were executed by dismemberment for uttering disrespectful words. Two former members of the OSC and a number of Censorate officials received death sentences for making allegedly groundless and personally motivated charges of immoral conduct against two members of a prominent yangban clan.

The royal blood-bath continued throughout 1504, and the list of victims ran into the hundreds. No sooner had Yonsangun finished avenging his mother's death than he turned his attention to those who had criticized him or his staff, or who had otherwise spoken or behaved in some manner that could be taken as impinging upon his dignity and sovereign authority. Yonsangun's anger reached far beyond officials of the Samsa. Regardless of the position a man held in the government hierarchy, chances were good that sooner or later Yonsangun's attention would turn to some matter with which they were connected. In one instance, two minor officials and a Classics Licentiate were executed by dismemberment for going on a picnic at the time of national mourning for Yonsangun's recently deceased grandmother.

Driven by a desire to severe the channels of opposition in government, Yonsangun dug up past affairs, identified the prime antagonists, and routinely meted out death sentences. To protect themselves, many accused officials willingly implicated the dead. Yonsangun knew of this ploy, but still he pursued his quarry and not even the dead escaped his anger. Past crimes, real or imagined, rose from the grave to haunt the living as the king brandished his authority and had the graves of the accused opened and their corpses mutilated. In some instances he even confiscated their property and enslaved their wives and children. Officials of the State Tribunal, well aware of the unsubstantiated nature of the charges against the dead, remained silent, largely on grounds they could not endure killing the living.

About three months into his purge, Yonsangun issued a statement to the Royal Secretariat giving an appraisal of his actions to date and his intentions for the future. The statement acknowledged that his past actions had no doubt shocked the country, but

"... the corruption of mores is such that benevolent rule is powerless to effect reformation. What we have been doing recently comes close to being tyranny, but how is it possible to rectify mores otherwise?"

Cloaked in the vain hope that the king might consider he had already achieved his goal, the Royal Secretaries replied,

"In our view, already mores have greatly changed and among your subjects high and low none is not transformed - all are serving you with proper reverence."

In his response, Yonsangun stated that it would take ten or more years to tell whether mores had really changed. He gave every indication that the purge would continue.

Yonsangun's year of terror intended to make the point that government could only function properly and effectively by drawing firm lines of authority, separating the functions of each department, and defining the chain of command through the Six Boards and the High State Council to the sovereign at the top. He believed that a king's discretionary power should be unlimited and that his actions should always be beyond reproach. Not satisfied with anything less than strangling the concept of "loyal opposition," Yonsangun went to extreme, even paranoiac, lengths to insulate himself from private censure. He issued royal decrees that prevented private discussion of public business or discussions among students. He banned visits among government personnel and prohibited government officials from visiting anyone but their parents, brothers and sisters. He even announced severe penalties for those who divulged Choson's internal affairs during embassy missions to China.

Yonsangun used more than sheer terror to bring an end to "contempt of higher authority." He halted the Royal Lectures sessions, renamed the Office of Royal Lectures then, in the end, abolished the office altogether. The censoring bodies in government fared little better. The king set forth new procedures that required every Censorate memorial to carry notations that specified not only who proposed each point, but who concurred in raising it. After stripping the Censorate of its limited veto power over low-level appointments, Yonsangun abolished the Office of the Censor-General and the Office of Special Counselors. He restricted the established practices of other government agencies to such a degree it left the king virtually immune to criticism. The Royal Secretariat was warned not to "discuss matters" and to keep to its only function of processing communications. Even historians were ordered record only personnel and other administrative matters.

The purge came to an end not because Yonsangun had run out of potential targets, but because he finally concluded he had made his point. After debilitating key government agencies and frightening government officials into silent impotence, Yonsangun moved to strengthen his palace apparatus and increase the economic resources at his disposal. To fill his depleted treasury, he ordered the repossession of all lands and slaves awarded to Merit Subjects, beginning with the first list of King T'aejo. The majority of slaves and other properties confiscated from the purge victims were turned over to the Palace Supply Office. Many monks and nuns were defrocked and pressed into service in the royal palace.

Driving the need for additional resources was a single project that had an almost inexhaustible potential for draining the state treasury;  the creation of a private royal hunting preserve. Beginning on the palace grounds adjacent the palace, Yonsangun first pushed the preserve eastward beyond the East Gate. To accommodate westward expansion, he seized the land and dwellings of some 20,000 commoners on the outskirts of Seoul and erected a palisade around the entire grounds. When completed, his private preserve extended some twenty miles west from Seoul, more than halfway to the port of Inchon. Yonsangun once ordered that no one so much as mention the royal preserve's existence to Ming Chinese envoys then on their way to Seoul.

In September 1506, after nearly two years of pure terror, rumors spread through the capital that some of the king's victims had escaped and were raising forces in the provinces against Yonsangun. A group of opportunistic court ministers who survived, or in some cases abetted the purges, decided it was time to act and banded together against the king. It is surprising the attempt did not come sooner. The plotters enlisted the help of key military men and other government officials in Seoul and positioned troops in front of the palace gate. Faced with such a challenge, palace guards and the royal staff quickly deserted Yonsangun. Under a royal order from the Dowager Queen Yun, armed troops deposed the king and compelled him to give up the badges of royal office. The ministers then went to the palace residence of eighteen-year-old Prince Yok, Yonsangun's half-brother and the second son of Songjong. After persuading him to accept the crown, they ministers enthroned the young prince as King Chungjong.

Banished from Seoul, Yonsangun died within months of leaving the capital. Historians have vilified Prince Yonsan and to this day they do not refer to him as "King." Yonsangun correctly perceived the evils of his society and times, but his attempts to change the moral fabric of his country were too self-indulgent, too cruel, and too filled with petty tyranny. Unfortunately, he not only failed to institute corrective reforms, but his attempts actually sanctified the very evils he sought to eliminate. Yonsangun, perhaps the most detested monarch in Choson's long history, left a political legacy that had far-reaching effects, for it sowed the seeds of yet another purge.