Persecution and Rehabilitation of the Kaesŏng Wang in Early Chosŏn Korea

• In Event: Violent Upheavals, State Legitimation, and the Evolving Politics of Elite Families in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

In early modern Korea, the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) virtually exterminated the progeny of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), the Kaesŏng Wang, only to rehabilitate them. Systematic nature of the Chosŏn state’s massacre of the Wangs in May 1394 and hunt for survivors (1394–1413) was such that over ninety percent of some thirty thousand living Kaesŏng Wang are descendants of a single individual. While offering insights on the persecution, previous studies leave a range of relevant questions unanswered, including: defining the royal Wangs as a group; the number of victims; whether some survivors indeed changed their surname, as traditional sources claim; reasons for the state’s effort to secure a new line of Wangs to perform sacrificial rituals (chesa) to the Koryŏ dynasty; difficulties associated with the search; changing patterns of presence of the Wangs in Chosŏn officialdom; and their standing in local society. Recovering from a population bottleneck, by the mid-sixteenth century, the Kaesŏng Wang as a descent group featured scholar-official lines that differed little from the Chosŏn aristocracy as a whole, the yangban, though social backgrounds of those using the Wang surname became increasingly diverse. Moreover, an emerging body of subversive narratives expressed sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the Chosŏn dynastic founder and his supporters. Overall the post-Koryŏ plight of the Kaesŏng Wang allows ample room for analyzing the nature of medieval-to-early modern transition in Korea as well as narrating a story of human interest.

Author

• Eugene Park, University of Pennsylvania