Pre-modern Korean democracy

By Mark Peterson

Last week I wrote about a specific document I would like to tell you more about. It is a petition and shows a degree of democratic action in that it was signed by numerous people of the county involved in the action. Last time I wrote about the uniqueness of the signatures, and the fact that Koreans only used the dojang (stamp or seal) after the Japanese period, but in the Joseon Kingdom, they would sign documents.

That was last week. This week I want to write about the content of the petition and look at what it reveals about Korean cultural values, many of which are alive and well in Korea today.

The petition was drawn by the "scholarly community" within the county and it was addressed to the county magistrate. It recommended that a monument or gate be erected for a certain family for their exceptional character and exemplary behavior, not for one individual but for 10 individuals over a five generation period.

Eight were exemplary filial sons, one was a faithful widow and one was a loyal subject. Any one of these could have been the cause for erecting a stone monument honoring the righteousness of the person's actions, but here, there were eight filial sons, one loyal subject and one faithful widow being honored all at once.

Any village that has any claim to fame will have at least one monument to a prominent former resident of the village, an ancestor of current residents who distinguished themselves in one of three ways ― filial piety, loyalty or female fidelity. And only these three values were the basis for erecting such monuments. These were primary Confucian values.

The first of the five generations, the progenitor of all the others, was one Jeong Su-jing who was described as particularly respectful to his parents, and was also loyal to the court in that he helped put down an insurrection in 1728. He stood loyal to the king against of a group of rebels who challenged the legitimacy of King Yeongjo, who in the fourth year of his reign was accused of the poisoning death of his brother, the former king.

Gyeongjong died young, after only four years on the throne, and the rumors began to multiply that Yeongjo had poisoned his brother. The rebel group wanted to depose the king, but in the end, the rebellion was suppressed and the rebel leader was drawn and quartered with body parts posted around the countryside to show what happened to rebels.

Jeong Su-jing's foundation in morality was said to have started with his loyalty to the king. His son, Jeong Se-gwan, was also notably respectful of his father. And grandson, Jeong Chi-yeop was said to be as good an example of filial piety that "everyone in the county called him Jeong Hyoja" ― literally Jeong, the filial son.

And the great grandson was such a good example that he was compared to the great filial sons of Chinese folklore ― a real honor to be compared to the classic heroes of filial piety.

In the next generation, two brothers were heroic in serving their father, and then in the fifth generation, each of those two brothers had a son who serve their fathers heroically.

In addition, in the third generation, there was a woman who was widowed young, and served her parents-in-law to the end, and provided medicine heroically, for a dying father-in-law.

What kind of heroic action? Most often it had to do with efforts to try to save a dying or ill father or mother. The heroic action often involved trying to find curative medicines. Sometimes this meant finding herbs.

At other times, it might involve cutting some of one's own flesh from the thigh or the glutes to provide healing medicine. At other times, the son or daughter-in-law would cut their finger and bleed into the mouth of the ill parent, providing them with living blood, in the belief that this was the best, though desperate medicine. A kind of pre-modern blood transfusion.

Now comes the twist in the story. The family being so honored, or proposed to be honored, was not a yangban family ― they were hyangni. The hyangni were the clerks, the hereditary class of administrators at the local county office. There was a similar class in Seoul, called the jungni who provided clerking skills for the central government.

I use the word "class" advisedly. It was a class of people who only would marry within that class. They could not marry upward with yangban and they would not marry downward with commoners.

The petition to honor this family was truly unusual because generally, the yangban did not like the clerks. The yangban officials would always be assigned to places away from their own homes, but the hyangni clerks were always there, at the county office and knew everyone and everything about the past and present. And they would often get the bribes.

This petition says in the first line, that it is a petition from the "scholars in the county", meaning the yangban of the county. And they were asking that one of their clerk class be honored. If it had been a yangban family, it would have been honored numerous times already. But here, with a surplus of virtue, even in a lesser class family, it was time to petition a monument for them.

The county magistrate wrote on the petition, that he agreed and would forward the petition to Seoul for action.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.