Ch 14 - Western Contacts

The School of Practical Learning

Factional battles in Seoul led to an increased interest in establishing private academies in Choson. Educated men seriously looked for solutions to social ills. The new knowledge that flowed from Peking to Seoul stimulated ideas among Choson's literati which laid the foundation for a new approach to scholarship and thought known as Sirhak.

Factional rancor within the Yi government remained somewhat subdued during most of the period the Dutch were held in Choson. King Hyojong's death in 1659 set off another round of factional battles, this time over the issue of mourning rites to be observed by Queen Mother Cho, King Injo's second legitimate wife. Song Si-yol, Hyojong's former tutor and the leader of the Westerner faction, argued that since Hyojong was not the biological son of Queen Cho, regulations provided she need only mourn him for one year. Yun Hyu, a daring, self-assertive scholar and Ho Mok of the Southerner faction argued that since Hyojong had taken the throne in place of his half-brother, Crown Prince Sohyon, he had become, in effect, the son of the Queen Cho. Therefore, she should mourn him for the full three years, just as regulations provided for the relatives of one's immediate family. The seemingly trivial nature of the argument masked the real issue at stake between the Westerner and Southerner factions in this fight;  the struggle for power and prominence in the royal court.

Yun Hyu achieved political office late in life. The remarkably independent-minded Southerner believed it foolish to blindly follow any doctrine without criticism;  even the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi. After being appointed to a government office, Yun tried to implement his belief that all ideas and practices should be judged strictly on their merits. Conservative members of the Westerner faction led by Song Si-yol were so scandalized by Yun's behavior they hounded him from office and ultimately executed him. Song Si-yol's arguments won out over the Southerners and the Westerner faction retained its secure hold on political power in Seoul. The Southerner faction patiently waited for its next opportunity to challenge the Westerners.

The death of King Hyojong's wife in 1674, triggered another round of factional infighting. This time, the factions split over how long the Dowager Queen Cho should mourn her daughter-in-law. King Hyonjong, Hyojong's son, sided with the Southerners, and helped displace the Westerners from power. When King Hyonjong died that same year, he left the throne to his fourteen-year-old son, who reigned as King Sukchong. The appointment further destabilized Choson's weakened the government and intensified factional struggles between the Southerners and Westerners until the young monarch became old enough to chose sides.

The Southerners split almost as soon as they gained power, arguing over the issue of how severely to treat members of the Westerner faction, who wasted little time in mounting a challenge. Six years later, presumably in reaction to the discovery of a plot to usurp the throne, the Westerners regained power and conducted a great purge against the Southerners. In 1689, King Sukchong, long without an heir to his throne, proposed to name the newborn son of his favorite concubine, Lady Chang, as the Crown Prince. The reaction was immediate and predictable. A fiery dispute arose between the Westerners and the Southerners in which the Southerners triumphed. In this dispute, Song Si-yol lost his life. The victory of the Southerner faction was short lived. Just five years later, the Westerners regained power and eliminated the Southerner faction from Choson politics once and for all.

After eliminating the threat from the Southerner faction, the Westerners split into two permanent groupings:  the faction of the Old Doctrine, Noron led by Song Si-yol, and the faction of the Young Doctrine, Soron under Yun Chung. The prolonged political conflict drawn along factional lines led to the emergence of certain dominant families, particularly among the Noron faction, lineages who retained their grip on power for generations. The effect of such concentrated power in Choson's Neo-Confucian society had a serious impact on the social and economic position of the entire yangban class. The dominant families of the Noron became quite adept at manipulating the national examination system and the appointment process to ensure that preference was given their children. Faced with such a corrupted system, unless a man belonged to the faction in power, he had little hope of passing the exam, no matter how hard he tried. Even if he somehow managed to pass the examination and even though officially he was supposed to receive an appointment to government office, he could never be sure that one would be forthcoming.

Choson's central government exercised strong control over local society through a system of magistrates appointed to each county and district by the king to educate the local population and collect taxes. Many of Choson's Neo-Confucian literati, either temporarily or permanently out of office and unable to depend on the government for income, turned their attention to enlarging their own estates and establishing local power bases as members of a sub-lineage or as inheritors of a particular scholarly tradition. Government magistrates could not function effectively without the assistance and cooperation of these local yangban and the various agencies under their control. At the heart of this local power structure was the sowon, a combination shrine, private study, school, and social gathering spot for local scholars. Chu Sebung, the Prefect of P'unggi in Kyongsang Province, established one of the first sowon in 1543, and dedicated his shrine to An Hyang, the revered scholar who first introduced the works of Zhu Xi to Choson. After Yi Hwang took over the sowon, he used his considerable influence to secure royal patronage for the academy, since it was also a shrine to a Confucian sage. Over the years, state patronage in the form of land grants, slaves, grain, cash, and books gradually shifted from regional schools to the sowon, which led to a proliferation of these small tax-free estates.

The sowon, built near their residences in the countryside away from the political life in Seoul, became a favorite retreat for scholars and other yangban out of favor at court and a meeting place for factional associates. Operating outside the authority of the state, Choson's yangban used their sowon not only to carry on the traditional teachings of Neo-Confucianism, but to educate their children and pass their deeply held factional animosities from generation to generation. After 1550, the government issued royal charters to the sowon, which became a highly-prized goal that added honor and prestige to the institution. Beginning in 1644, the central government instituted a new system through which local literati had to petition the Board of Rites for approval to establish a new sowon and Confucian shrine. During King Sukchong's reign, the number of private academies in Choson grew to 274, nearly half of which had royal authorization and most of which were concentrated in Kyongsang Province near Seoul.

The creation of the petition system heightened the interaction between the local literati and the central government. Over the years, Choson's sowon developed a complex set of ritual, political, and financial ties with the provincial and central government, especially with the royal court in Seoul. The very act of founding a sowon became a politically charged ritual act where success depended more on the political and ritual acceptability of the Confucian worthies to be enshrined than on any commitment to Confucian ideals or educational excellence. In the atmosphere of sudden power shifts that marked the early period of Sukchong's reign, each successful faction attempted to eliminate its rival's power base by shutting down their sowon. Private academies opened and closed at an astonishing rate until the Noron faction was able to bring some semblance of stability to government.

The reaction against political domination by the Noron faction and a few powerful clans took other forms. Many of those barred from any meaningful role in government lost faith in the justness of the Yi social order and harbored great resentment against it. Many members of the Southerner faction, long excluded from important government positions, became determined, even zealous government critics and attacked the bureaucratic preoccupation with either Chinese literature or the speculative side of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism. They were quick to criticize views at odds with the results of their own studies, regardless of how hallowed and sacred those views were. Their common ground was pragmatism;  no conclusion could be reached regarding he worth of anything unless it was proven by undisputed facts. They had no inclination to follow past traditions or accept the views of their predecessors without challenge. Choson's numerous social ills demanded that society's most educated members seriously reflect on possible solutions.

The well-entrenched Jesuit mission at Beijing, with its close contacts in the imperial court, made the Qing capital the cultural mecca of the Asian world, a "marketplace" for Western thought and technology and a conduit to other nations through the annual diplomatic and tribute missions that visited Beijing. It was inevitable that copies of the numerous writings produced by the Jesuits would reach other countries. Chinese culture, not Chinese commerce attracted Choson to the Celestial Empire and men of scholarly achievement and literary talent coveted the chance to be appointed a member of a tributary embassy to Beijing. Members of these embassies often took their sons or nephews with them to broaden their education and intellectual outlook. The annual pilgrimages and frequent extended visits to China by scholarly men became an indispensable cultural and educational institution for Choson's intellectual elite and assured Choson a constant stream of information and knowledge about the latest Chinese intellectual trends.

Choson's close cultural ties with China proved invaluable and its envoys became the Yi dynasty's merchants of knowledge and its link with the Western world. While in China, Choson's envoys eagerly sought personal contact and friendship with prominent Chinese scholars. Their favorite pastime was ransacking Beijing bookstores for new books such as the Hai guo ti ji, Wei Yuan's illustrated gazetteer of maritime countries. The first Western texts to reach Choson reportedly came at the end of King Sonjo's reign when a Choson envoy to the Chinese court returned with a European world map and a copy of Chonju-sirui, "True Principles of Catholicism," written by Matteo Ricci. The books carried home by members of Choson's tributary embassies gave the Hermit Kingdom its first hazy glimpse of the Western world.

Over the years, the Catholic cathedral in Beijing became a favorite attraction for numerous Choson envoys who were impressed by the statues and paintings on exhibit. It was there they first heard the stirring sounds of Western music. Through such simple beginnings, a slow but steady stream of information about Western science and religion began to flow from Beijing to Seoul. The first significant encounter with western knowledge occurred in 1630, when the Italian Jesuit Johannes Rodriguez met Chong Tu-won, a Choson envoy visiting Beijing. Father Rodriguez presented Chong with a map of the world, books on calendar science, astrology, geography, and European culture. He also gave him a telescope, a chime clock and a musket, all of which Chong presented to King Injo when he returned to Seoul the following year.

When the Manchus occupied Beijing in 1644, they brought Choson's Crown Prince Sohyon to the Forbidden City as a hostage. During the year he spent as a hostage in Beijing, Prince Sohyon visited the Eastern church (Tung-tang), where he became acquainted with the German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell (Tang Jowang). The young Qing emperor Daizong had recently named the Jesuit priest, a trained astronomer, to head the Beijing astronomical bureau, where he succeeded in replacing the old-style Chinese calendar with a more accurate system. Prince Sohyon developed a close relationship with the celebrated theologian, astronomer and mathematician, who not only gave him a new view of astronomy, but taught him the main tenets of Catholicism and presented him a large number of Western books written in Chinese, all of which he took back to Seoul when the Manchus granted him permission to return to Choson at the end of the year.

Stimulated in part by the influx of Western ideas from China, ideas emerged among Choson's literati which laid the foundation for a new approach to scholarship and thought known as Sirhak, the School of Practical Learning. Concerned with virtually every branch of learning, Sirhak scholars demanded an end to empty formalism and concern with ritual trivialities and a return to the true spirit of Confucianism. This broad approach to Choson's problems was, in terms of prior history at least, original. Sirhak scholars did not limit their pursuit of knowledge to politics and economics, but extended their inquiries and contributions to virtually every branch of learning, including the Chinese classical studies, historiography, geography, natural sciences, agriculture, architecture, and many other fields. They also displayed an active interest in Western technology and science and were quite impressed with the Western techniques of observation and induction used to obtain scientific knowledge.

Sirhak scholars pioneered the use of inductive reasoning in their studies and advocated numerous administrative and economic reforms for Choson. They first addressed themselves to the country's agricultural problems. Yu Hyong-won, usually thought of as the patriarch of the Sirhak school, was firmly convinced of the truth of the Confucian adage that agriculture is the basis of government. After years of studying the local society, Yu strongly promoted the development of a sound agricultural economy based on an independent and self-sufficient farmer. He advocated a "public land system" wherein the state would hold title to the land and allocate a fixed acreage to each farmer. He was also a strong advocate of the importance of developing commerce. He proposed to redistribute the land to all members of society to create a broad base of farmers who would not only till government land, but would also contribute taxes and services to the state;  the classic ideal of an agricultural state.

Following in his footsteps was Yi Ik, an out-of-office yangban whose father was an envoy to Beijing in 1677. Yi had access to a number of books on the West, including some of the translations brought back to Choson by Chong Tu-won. One of the more interesting texts he read was a copy of Matteo Ricci's Kiho Yuanbun, the 1607 translation of the "Original Text of Geometry" based on the Latin version of "Euclid's Elements." The techniques used to manufacture cannon and the intricacies of Adam Schall's astronomy utterly fascinated Yi, who described Schall's work on the calendar as perfection and suggested that it should replace the one then used by Choson. He also remarked that Chinese paintings showed nothing like the use of perspective in Western art, a technique unfamiliar to contemporary Asian artists.

As a practitioner of Sirhak, Yi Ik extended his inquiries in both breadth and depth and established a distinct school of thought. Yi Ik admitted the superiority of Western science and technology and even suggested that Confucius would have embraced many of the ideas had they been known in his time. While most men in Choson had no idea the world is round, and thought the sun went to rest in the sea at night, Yi readily accepted the idea that the earth was round. The most significant repercussion of this new knowledge was a revision of Choson's view of the world. Yi asserted that Western maps had to be accurate since they had been drawn from actual observation. Western maps of the world convinced Choson scholars of its shape and size and forced many to admit that China was not the center of the world after all. Furthermore, as Japan had recently discovered, Choson occupied but a small corner of it.

A scholar whose work was almost encyclopedic in scope, Yi Ik laid down the main principles of his proposed reforms in a work entitled, "Record of Concern for the Underprivileged," which set forth his views on the full range of the Yi dynasty's institutions. Yi proposed an "equal field system," one that prohibited merchants from owning land and protected the peasant by guaranteeing each peasant household the minimum amount of land in perpetuity. Another of Yi's proposals suggested that slaves be included as farmers who could be taxed, thereby spreading the economic base of the country. As ever more disciples began to support Yi Ik, Sirhak slowly emerged as the Yi dynasty's dominant school of thinking.

Perhaps the most comprehensive approach to institutional reform was that of Chong Yag-yong, a scholar who admired Yi Ik and expanded his approach in a most comprehensive manner. Based on personal experience and investigation, Chong analyzed and compiled almost all aspects of Practical Learning in the late Choson Dynasty and is ranked among the greatest of the Sirhak scholars. Building on information he obtained from Beijing at great cost, Jean Terrenz's "Descriptions of Ingenious Devices," Chong designed new pulley mechanisms that found practical use in building he fortifications at the town of Hwasong (Suwon).

Chong Yag-yong's proposals for reforming the government structure, local administration, and the judicial system were far reaching at the time. He urged the adoption of a "village land system," through which the land would be commonly held and cultivated by the village. At harvest time, the crop would be divided on the basis of the labor actually performed by each individual. The desire behind each of these proposals was to foster a more healthy agriculture-based society by maintaining the official class and those who farmed the land in basic harmony, abolishing social status distinctions, providing equal opportunity for education, and selecting officials on the basis of merit.

King Yongjo ascended the Choson throne in 1724 in the middle of a fierce and bloody struggle between the Soron and Noron factions, from which the Noron emerged victorious. The continuing dominance of a single, powerful faction seriously threatened the king's authority, once maintained solely by the delicate equilibrium among various rival factions. King Yongjo addressed the alienation of the aristocracy in Yi society by winning support from faction leaders to support a policy of impartiality that attempted to accord equal favor in official appointments to men of the four principal factions. The political armistice that followed accorded the Noron faction primacy, the Soron faction a supporting role, and left some room for political appointees from the Northerner and Southerner factions . A new equilibrium was reached among the yangban officials, royal authority was enhanced, and political stability returned to government.

Choson's financial crisis of the seventeenth century was a thing of the past by the time King Yongjo reached the Phoenix Throne. A more traditional society began to reassert itself. While his policy of impartiality did nothing to eradicate the root causes of factionalism, it dramatically reduced factional strife. The increased opportunity for government appointments from the four factions opened a floodgate of backlogged successful examination candidates and further increased the number of yangban seeking government office, including a number of Sirhak scholars. Yongjo's modest success opened the way to the brightest and most creative period of the late Yi dynasty.

Under state patronage, the compilation of writings and books triggered a burst of intellectual brilliance and creative activity that was in some ways comparable to the earlier reign of King Sejong. An attempt was made to equalize the country's tax burden and renovate the transportation system. The construction of three new coastal granaries in Kyongsang Province extended the maritime grain transport system into that area for the first time. Numerous land surveys were carried out to make maps as accurate as possible. The science of cartography was greatly improved by perspective and drawing to scale;  techniques learned from Chinese translations of Western geographies. This led to the compilation of atlases an the production of large folding maps whose accuracy began to approach modern scientific standards. Major works produced during Yongjo's reign included a comprehensive one hundred-volume encyclopedia, legal compendiums, supplements to the ceremonial code, updated and improved administrative codes and manuals, a new compilation of court music, new works in military science, and texts on agriculture, behavior, and general education.