Ch 15 - A Crumbling Dynasty

When it Rains, it Pours

In a nation politically weakened, financially burdened, and preoccupied with protecting its tightly controlled economy and the status of its aristocracy, social unrest and frequent natural calamities such as famines, floods, and epidemics combined to produce a period of deep unrest in virtually every corner of the kingdom.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, entire provinces in Choson were plagued by major outbreaks of disease that appeared about every twelve years. Hundreds of thousands of people died in nationwide epidemics that broke out at roughly fifty year intervals. During the first half of the 19th century, a series of natural disasters ravaged Choson. In 1812 and 1813, the country faced a drought and famine that reportedly killed upwards of 4.5 million people. Even if this estimate is wrong by a factor of four, the death toll was still horrendous. Great floods occurred in the southern provinces between 1810 and 1819 and the entire kingdom suffered widespread flooding in 1820. Hwanghae Province suffered major flooding in 1822, Kyongsang in 1823, Cholla in 1824, Hamgyong in 1829, and Chungchong Province in 1832. A catastrophic cholera epidemic from China ravaged the entire peninsula in 1821 and 1823. The accumulated medical knowledge of the time proved to be virtually useless against the disease which took the lives of nearly one million people. Even nature, it seemed, had turned against the Choson peasant.

Politically weakened, financially burdened and preoccupied with protecting the status of the aristocracy and a tightly controlled economy, the central government provided no relief from the natural disasters that plagued the country. The Yi government directly controlled a large segment of the nation's industry and its policy of tight economic control literally stagnated industrial production in Choson. The Department of Industry controlled both the supply of raw materials and the volume of production. Nearly half of all industrial workers were employed in more than thirty types of government-owned and controlled industries. Among the most important industries were silk-spinning, metal working and decorative pottery. The factories located in Seoul and the surrounding provinces existed to produce consumer goods and luxury articles, but their production output was intended only for the ruling class, not for the general public.

For over two thousand years, Korean ceramics represented the major artistic achievement of an extraordinarily rich culture. Pottery workers in Choson were famed for their high degree of technical skill, especially in the artistic glazing they put on their ceramics. Much of the world's great ceramic art owes its beauty to techniques first developed by Korean craftsmen. As a matter of official policy, Choson's central government kept all technical production skills and techniques as state secrets to prevent them from spreading to the general public. The effects of this policy were devastating. Keeping the techniques secret made it virtually impossible for anyone to learn the method of making this type of pottery. All the old masterpieces were never signed by their creators and individual creative genius went unrecognized. Ceramic pieces were attributed, not to an artist, but to a specific kiln, such as a people's kiln, an official Imperial kiln, or a kiln reserved by law for the nobility. In later years, neither the government nor the Choson people managed to preserve the skill and the country never fully recovered the beauty and originality of its pottery making techniques. In a like manner, the specialty of manufacturing the beautiful blue bricks and tiles used to cover the roofs of the palace and temples was lost forever. Only a few skilled laborers ever knew the techniques involved, and they were strictly watched by the government.

The Choson government not only put tight controls on its industrial skills, it also exacted heavy taxes from anyone who invented new manufacturing techniques. A Buddhist priest learned a method to manufacture writing paper. The excessive taxes imposed on him forced the priest to stop production altogether. A farmer in south Cholla Province discovered a way to raise mandarin oranges, but when government taxes became too oppressive, he destroyed all his orange trees in disgust. Such restrictions, along with the rigid social setting in Choson hampered much progress and effectively barred many gifted artists and craftsmen from active participation in industry.

Choson's peasants reacted as best they could to the growing impact of a developing monetary economy and the seemingly endless greed and corruption of local province officials and their ajuns who grew fat on illegal extortions. When it was possible, they took refuge in those organizations that were allowed to exist such as the mutual aid societies, or kye. In those instances where price incentives existed, new handicraft industries developed as villagers banded together to form specialty villages, commercial enterprises that produced such items as brassware or pottery.

The handicraft industry, though a small segment of Choson's total economy in terms of output and the number of laborers involved, provided an outlet for many artisans and craftsmen to break away from government control. Some craftsmen, using their own capital, began to produce and sell goods on their own. Furriers and knifemakers, for example, produced and sold fur neck pieces and decorative knives in direct competition with government-licensed merchants. Pig iron artisans managed to develop their own monopoly on the manufacture and sale of cooking cauldrons. The same kind of thing occurred with the makers of brassware.

At its core, Choson was still a country based on the family economy and many privately controlled industries flourished in the rural countryside where all essential articles for daily living were made by family members. Almost every family made its own clothing materials - woven hemp cloth, cotton and silk. The village blacksmith manufactured simple agricultural tools like hoes, sickles, hatchets, and saws. For the farmers however, the ruinous tax burden administered by a corrupt government forced them to desert their land in despair. Lands not seized by some local yangban or the royal clan were left destitute and the irrigation systems that made Choson's rice culture possible fell into disrepair.

Peasants reduced to tenant farming lived lives of grinding poverty, scratching out a precarious existence farming hillsides in remote, mountainous areas of the peninsula. During those years when the harvest was poor, thousands died of hunger as famine swept the land like a wildfire. Large numbers of peasants faced the inevitable and abandoned their villages, wandering the countryside with no place to call home. Some took to the upland areas and survived as "fire-field people," moving from place to place with no fixed place to live, burning off vegetation and farming the hilly ground as best they could. It was perhaps because of this particular activity that numerous and frequent forest fires ravaged the countryside, laying waste to million of acres of timber. Not even Choson's growing population of landless farmers were safe from the tax collector, whose ever-grasping hands reached out to levy taxes from the small harvest of these hill farmers. As a result, a steadily increasing number of disaffected Choson peasants poured into the cities, fled to the mountains, or migrated across the northern border into the Chien-tao Region of Manchuria or into the Russian Maritime Territory.

The chaotic social conditions of this period are reflected in the fact that Choson's national census records no longer reflected the actual population. In 1807, the census reported a total of 1,764,504 households and a total population of 7,561,403 people. Thirty years later, the census showed only 1,578,823 households and a total population of 6,755,280 people. Even allowing for the impact of natural disasters, a decrease of 185,461 households and 806,123 people is an incredible event. Not all of the dramatic difference between the two census records can be attributed to deaths alone, however. It is more likely that most of the "missing people" were either homeless wanderers, emigrants to Manchuria or the Russian Maritime Territory, or had become bandits.

Social unrest and frequent natural calamities such as famines, floods and epidemics combined to produce a period of deep unrest in virtually every corner of the kingdom. In their desperate search for alternatives to their bleak lives, many peasants turned to religion for comfort and relief, while others turned to open rebellion or banditry. Their appeals to the district magistrates either went undelivered or fell upon deaf ears. In Cholla Province, where most of the land was controlled by absentee landlords, the troubles faced by the peasants went entirely unnoticed. In Chungchong Province, notorious for the strong-arm extortions of local yangban, tenant farmers had no hope for relief. Since the government frequently refused to heed a petition from a peasant and was extremely reluctant to reverse the decisions or actions of a local magistrate, there was little a farmer could expect from seeking a government redress of his grievances. With little recourse to improving their lot in life, discontent among the peasants soon reached the point of violence throughout Choson. They did not remain passive for long.

Inflammatory posters, banners and streamers emblazoned with anti-government slogans began to appear across the country, usually hung from trees. Fortune tellers and diviners became openly critical of government officials, some going so far as to predict the downfall of the Yi dynasty. Even folk songs took on an ominous and menacing tone. At first, many peasants vented their anger by turning to banditry and disturbing the peace on all sides. Armed bandits flourished in the provinces and soon became a rampant problem. Gradually, the lawlessness became organized and smaller independent groups banded together to form larger, more powerful organizations as disgruntled peasants swelled their ranks. Very often, what began as a local disturbance grew and spread, frequently taking on the characteristics of a large-scale revolt.

Beginning around 1800, the entire peninsula was torn with revolts both large and small as a rash of popular uprisings broke out in Choson, all naturally centered around the peasants. Groups of men on horseback armed with muskets roamed the countryside, while other equally well-armed men took to small boats and pillaged the rivers and coastlines. The leadership for these revolts was usually provided by disgruntled elements of the yangban and chanban class. The larger groups often took their name from the area they controlled, like the "West River Gang," the "Old Han Commanderies Gang" and the "Pyongan Province Gang."

Pyongan Province was home to more successful civil service examination candidates than any other province in Choson, yet because of the government's selective discrimination against most Pyongan scholars, there was a substantial population of unemployed and yangban and chanban in that province, many of whom were gravely disturbed by the state of affairs in Choson. Suffering the pressures of a severe famine and the accompanying rise in the number of landless wanderers, the population of Pyongan Province was in a volatile mood. It is no surprise then, that the first notable large-scale rebellion was born in the hearts of the people of Pyongan Province. In 1804, the Pyongan Province Gang attempted to get the attention of King Sunjo's court by boldly attaching a "Secret Account of Conditions in Pyongan Province" to each of the four main gates of Seoul. Nothing came from this escapade, except perhaps an increased government sense of distrust of the people from Pyongan. A wild, roving gang could not hope to accomplish what was needed. In the mind of Hong Kyong-nae, a resident of Pyongan Province, what was needed was a full-scale revolt.

Hong Kyong-nae was a fallen yangban. Discontented, resentful and thoroughly frustrated by his inability to pass the civil examinations and secure a government appointment, he used his considerable talent for leadership to assemble a group of kindred souls in the area who shared his feelings of rebellious anger. For three years, under the pretext of assembling laborers for mining operations, Hong Kyong-nae gathered and trained a rag-tag band of rebels and fellow conspirators. The group drew its strength from across the entire social spectrum and included peasants, discontented merchants, private traders, and prosperous chanban with a background in local civil and military service.

Hong Kyong-nae's carefully planned and well-organized rebellion erupted in 1812. As it was planned, the rebels were to strike simultaneously throughout the province, taking all the principal towns of Pyongan Province in a single blow. Once the province was under their control, the rebel army intended to march on Seoul. Hostilities began with a multi-pronged attack against government offices near the cities of Kasan, Pakchon and Kwaksan. Within eight days, a total of eight cities north of the chongchong River fell under rebel control. The thrill of rapid victory faded just as quickly as it came. The government reacted as soon as it received reports of the rebellion by dispatching troops across the chongchong River with orders to quell the uprising.

When government troops defeated a rebel force in the village of Songnim-ni near the city of Pakchon, Hong Kyong-nae withdrew his 3,000-man rebel force to the walled-town mountain fortress of Chongju. Government troops retook the rebel-held towns in Pyongan Province, consolidated their strength, and quickly turned against Hong Kyong-nae in Chongju. Although outnumbered nearly three-to-one, Hong's rebels did not give up easily and managed to withstand a government siege for one hundred days. Hong was killed during the final assault on Chongju and many of the surviving rebels were taken prisoner. Hong Kyong-nae's name became a rallying cry for discontented people all over the country.

The Hong Kyong-nae Rebellion lasted only five months. Although it never achieved its goal, it did much to fuel deepening feelings of popular discontent in Choson. It plainly indicated that corruption and oppression had gone beyond tolerable limits. Numerous small-scale revolts and uprisings continued throughout the country almost without interruption in the years that followed. There was also an ominous increase in banditry and piracy in the countryside. In 1813, the government was forced to suppress an uprising on Cheju Island led by the Yang clan. In 1816, a Buddhist monk named Haksang, though nothing more than a common thief, began representing himself as a former comrade of Hong Kyong-nae. For the most part, these uprisings were born of frustration and discontent, spontaneous in nature and localized. The attacks were usually directed against corrupt and oppressive local government officials. Rebels killed local functionaries, set fire to government buildings and, on the whole, wrought a considerable amount of physical damage. Long beleaguered by government abuses of power directed by a few powerful clans or the royal in-law lineages, these rebel attacks also represented a direct attack against the very nature of yangban society itself.