Lessons from Jeong Mong-ju

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Mark Peterson

Lessons from Jeong Mong-ju

Posted : 2023-04-03 16:29

Updated : 2023-04-03 16:29

By Mark Peterson

On my recent trip to Korea, I visited, for the first time, the grave of Jeong Mong-ju, the famous Goryeo official who chose to die rather than support the upstart Joseon Kingdom in 1392. It's always good to visit the site of important events like the homes or graves of important historical figures. I learned a lot from the visit.

I learned several things about him from the visit to the gravesite. I even made a video about the visit for my Frog Outside the Well YouTube channel, as well.

The first striking thing I found was that the tombstone there was very old-looking, and different from the ones from the Joseon Kingdom. The inscription praised Jeong Mong-ju as the "Defender of Goryeo" and said it was erected by ― to my surprise ― King Taejong, the man who, as Yi Bang-won, the crown prince, killed Jeong. I'm not sure whether he was personally involved in the actual killing, but it was under his direction that the assassination took place.

I thought it remarkable that he who ordered the execution was the one who erected the memorial stone praising Jeong. Was this a kind of penance for the murder? This says a great deal about Korea's handling of political affairs through violence. First, we must note that Korea did not have many changes in dynasties since Korean dynasties lasted longer than other dynasties. And when there was a change of dynasty, the political turmoil, compared to all other countries, was remarkably limited. Few were killed at the change of a dynasty.

It's common in Korean folklore to hear the change of dynasty described as a revolution, and that a new aristocracy came in to replace the old aristocracy. Nothing could be further from the truth!

When you look at Jeong's tomb, and at the stone erected by the king who killed him, and realize the tomb is built on a grand scale, almost the scale of a king, it says that Jeong was not some upstart traitor to be vilified in the history books and punished root and stem ― that his sons and posterity be stricken from service in the kingdom, that they all be persona non grata. That was not the case at all. Jeong's son and grandson served in the new dynasty's government. And a great-granddaughter married a man from the prominent Yeonan Yi clan, and he became a very powerful figure at court. Yi Seok-hyeon and his posterity were also honored at the tomb site of Jeong Mong-ju. In fact, it may be because of that relationship with the Yeonan Yi that the tomb was located where it is, on the southern outskirts of Seoul, not in Gaeseong where Jeong lived, nor in North Gyeongsang Province where he was born.

It was a remarkable thing to learn that Jeong's descendants ― both through the Jeong surname and through his daughter's descendants with the Yi surname, and through other descendants with other surnames (heirs to the Jeong legacy through the daughter's lines), all had representatives that served in the Joseon government ― the government that Jeong gave his life opposing.

This underscores the fact that the transition from Goryeo to Joseon was peaceful. Very few died. Jeong Mong-ju was one of the few. And he died of his own volition, refusing to turn his back on the Goryeo king. He reportedly said, there are not two suns in the heavens; there cannot be two kings on the throne. Furthermore, he authored the famous "sijo," a Korean traditional poetic form:

Though I die, and die again; though I die one hundred deaths.
After my bones have turned to dust, whether my soul lives on or not,
For my King, the loyalty of this single red heart, how can it ever fade away?

Another factor that jumped out at me from visiting his grave was that in early Joseon, and well past middle Joseon, Korea did not have the male-dominant family system that we often think of as the traditional family system of Korea. The male domination was really only the last 200 years of the long, 500-year kingdom. For most of the Joseon period, inheritances were, by law, shared equally between sons and daughters in the household, and marriages were on equal footing ― sometimes taking up residence in the wife's village and sometimes taking up residence in the husband's village. The all-important ancestor ceremonies were hosted in rotation, from the daughters' houses to the sons' houses, each taking his or her turn.

The terms "oeson" ― grandson through a daughter's line, and "oeharaboji" ― maternal grandfather were probably not in vogue. The daughter's descendants were as important as the son's descendants and both lines, all lines, were kept in the "jokbo" ― a genealogical chart. It was only in the 18th century that the jokbo become an all-male-line document.

The visit to Jeong Mong-ju's grave taught me, and retaught me, important lessons about the singularity of Korean history. It was a nice visit. Thank you, Jeong Mong-ju.

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