Abstract
Eugene Park is a familiar name to anyone studying Chosŏn society. With this book he offers us a kind of “sequel” to his previous investigation, the engrossing A Family of No Prominence, with an even more thorough and extensive exploration of another family during the Chosŏn era and beyond. Only this time, rather than a family of no prominence, the object of study is none other than the royal Wang clan, the ruling family of the preceding Koryŏ Kingdom. Park traces the descendants of Koryŏ’s monarchs after the establishment of Chosŏn, extending across all 500 years of that kingdom’s history to the present day. Peppered throughout are snippets from unofficial histories, family stories, and oral history. This is not a quantitative history. Rather, it is a blend of one (admittedly large and extended) family’s microhistory against a broad macrohistorical backdrop of political and social change over the 500 years of the Chosŏn Kingdom.
Park’s book is divided into five chapters, each covering roughly a century, plus a prologue and epilogue. The book begins with the reign of Chosŏn’s founder, T’aejo (r. 1392−1398), and proceeds through the centuries up to the present-day living descendants of the royal Wang family. Chapter 1 addresses the immediate aftermath of the dynastic transition. Park details how the male members of the Wang clan who were close to the line of succession (within two generations of a Koryŏ king) were persecuted and almost totally exterminated by T’aejo, including one former king whose writ of execution explicitly acknowledged he was not even aware of the plot for which he was to die. (Female clan members were ignored.) Originally, five members were spared to serve as ritual heirs, with the senior of these receiving an appropriate title and parcel of land (over the objections of the Censorate), though they were likewise eliminated in the following reign. Many royal Wangs abandoned the surname to avoid being swept up in the persecution. In stark contrast, those Wangs who were far removed from the royal line of succession survived and even thrived, at least in their local areas. In 1413, once he and his dynasty were secure, King T’aejong (r. 1400−1418) did an about-face and issued an edict ending the persecution. By 1417, men holding the royal Wang surname were no longer being reported to the court.
Chapter 2 focuses on the court’s use of the royal Wang lineages (plural, as there were multiple, sometimes competing claims of descent from different Koryŏ monarchs) to bolster the new dynasty’s legitimacy in the sixteenth century. Shifting the blame for the bloody persecution from T’aejo to his conniving officials, mid-Chosŏn rulers appointed a royal Wang descendant as the official heir to carry out rituals at the state shrine to the founder of Koryŏ. This heir received a high-ranking though politically impotent post. Whenever the heir’s lineage ended, the court gave careful consideration to the appointment of a replacement, a process which reveals the changing social mores of Chosŏn. In 1452 and 1485, an illegitimate son could serve as heir without complaint, but in 1540 this had become unacceptable, so the court was forced to scour the country for a proper, legitimate heir. By the sixteenth century, some Wang lineages had become relatively successful, if not extraordinarily so, in terms of wealth and success on the civil service examinations, most prominently the Kaesŏng Wang lineage. At the same time, lineages began emerging from obscurity to claim descent from Koryŏ, which the Kaesŏng Wang often disputed. Other lineages had sunk to chung’in (“middle people”) status or even to commoner status.
Chapter 3 deals with the seventeenth century, which saw the Wangs’ overall position decline in accordance with the general exclusion of lineages outside the capital from political power. Even as the Wangs lost influence outside their local areas, the central government further solidified their ritual heir’s position, ensured the continued upkeep of the shrine and of Koryŏ royal tombs, maintained the Wang clan’s exemption from military service, and showed an increasing willingness to exalt the fallen kings of Koryŏ. Outside the government, scholars likewise exhibited an increasing willingness—if only elliptically and in privately circulated unofficial writings—to challenge T’aejo’s virtue and legitimacy in overthrowing and then persecuting the Wangs. Yet, in another complication to the story, members of the Wang lineage did not hesitate to come to the defense of Chosŏn when the Japanese invaded in the 1590s and the Manchus did the same thirty years later. It seems that whatever their feelings about the end of Koryŏ and the legitimacy of Chosŏn, none among the Wangs countenanced cooperation with the invaders in the hopes of restoring their family to the throne.
In Chapter 4 Park discusses the eighteenth century and the strong monarchs Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo, who attempted to get the Wangs into substantive government positions. Despite their efforts, the clan’s fortunes largely conformed to those of the other lineages outside the central twelve or so centered on the capital: token offices and placating ranks and titles, at best. Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo further promoted and championed Koryŏ loyalists, granting posthumous offices and other benefits to their descendants. While the government continued to exalt T’aejo’s seizure of the throne as just, people more and more openly expressed sympathy with the suffering and injustice of those who were killed in its aftermath. Undoubtedly sensing the climate of the time, the Kaesŏng Wang lineage judged the time was right to publish its first comprehensive genealogy (a mark of aristocracy in Chosŏn) in 1798. For comparison, another prominent lineage, the Andong Kwŏn, had first done so in 1476!
Chapter 5 wraps up with the end of Chosŏn and the beginning of modern Korea, arguably the Wangs’ most favorable period in all Chosŏn. As part of his attempt to shore up royal power after 70 years of decline, the Taewŏn’gun (ruling unofficially in place of his minor son Kojong from 1863−1873) lavished attention on Koryŏ sites and shrines. The Wang shrine superintendent was raised to (potentially) the sixth rank, a significant echelon in the court bureaucracy. In this period, five Wangs of the Kaesŏng lineage passed the civil service examination, which had not happened for any Wang since 1613. In 1867, a Kaesŏng Wang was promoted to Third Minister of War, an office carrying a higher rank than the clan had ever achieved. King Kojong, once he had come of age, personally conducted sacrificial rites at Koryŏ royal tombs. One can only speculate what the Wang descendants felt as they joined with a descendent of the usurper of their family’s throne to pay respects to their own royal ancestor.
Even as revolts and upheavals—the 1882 military revolt, the Kapsin Coup, the Tonghak Rebellion, the Sino-Japanese War—raged around them, the Wangs continued to supply candidates for shrine superintendents without interruption. In July of 1898, as part of Kojong’s modernization efforts, funding for shrines to past worthies were severely curtailed, with the Koryŏ founder’s shrine losing 50%. By the first decade of the twentieth century, with Japan firmly in control of Korea, the shrine’s supporting land became subject to regular taxation, and superintendents became a private concern of the Kaesŏng Wang clan, no longer state-appointed officials, though the Government-General did financially support rituals performed there. The book ends with a series of vignettes exploring the fates of some members of the lineage in the colonial period and beyond. Some resisted the Japanese while others worked with them; the majority perhaps simply tolerated them. Not until the 1990s could Wangs in North Korea openly take pride in their connection to the “feudal” dynasty of Koryŏ, while in the South, the Kaesŏng Wangs compiled genealogies declaring once and for all that the last kings of Koryŏ were legitimate, no matter what the kings of Chosŏn had said about the matter. Some Wangs maintain the taboo against marrying anyone from the Chŏnju Yi clan—the clan of Chosŏn’s founder—though even this remnant of dynastic struggle appears to be on the way out. The epilogue is an interesting choice, though some may wish for a more traditional conclusion.
In chapter 1 Park briefly compares court violence against the Wangs to contemporary dynastic change in Japan, China, and the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire. While acknowledging the paucity of data, Park tentatively suggests that, somewhat paradoxically, having somewhere to run actually decreases the chance that a deposed royal line will be exterminated by its replacement. That is, in China and Asia Minor, where it was easy for a royal relative to escape the new ruler’s power, that new ruler was obliged to treat such relatives with dignity, whereas with Japan and Korea, no such decent treatment need be extended, since the family had no escape from the persecution. This conclusion is tantalizing, if understandably provisional given the limitations of the evidence. This reviewer can only hope that more such comparisons are entertained seriously by Park and other scholars in the future, in order to draw conclusions based on more grounded and robust data. Park also further complicates our understanding of Chosŏn Neo-Confucianism, as the literati both demanded and condemned proper respect for the fallen dynasty on Confucian grounds. The official Wang heir held his position often not because he was the most senior member of the lineage but because his was the highest status in the family, not exactly the proper “Confucian” way to determine a family heir. Further, while state support for the Buddhist Ritual of Water and Land was swiftly ended so that honoring the fallen Wangs would be done by Confucian rites, unofficial performances of the Ritual continued to draw crowds of supporters across status boundaries.
No scholarly work is entirely free of shortcomings and limitations. This reviewer missed comparative analysis in the discussion of the gradual rehabilitation of the titular “progeny of fallen royals.” The praise lavished on Ming loyalists by Qing writers from Qianlong’s reign on leapt to mind as a similar case, and this reviewer wonders if looking at these two cases side-by-side (and undoubtedly others) might have been fruitful. Park makes use of a number of neglected sources, such as unofficial histories or memoirs and oral history, but these accounts are presented without much analysis, leaving this reviewer waiting, in vain, for Park’s critical evaluation of them. More trivially, there are a few somewhat problematic statements given recent scholarship that questions certain truisms in Chosŏn history. Examples include p. 82, where Park writes that a factional dispute in 1591 left Korea unprepared for the Japanese invasion that would devastate Korea the following year. Nam-lin Hur has made a strong case that the Chosŏn military’s unpreparedness problem ran much deeper than a few months’ preparation would have been able to rectify. There is also a passing reference on p. 166 to “the Taft-Katsura Agreement.” Kirk Larsen and Joseph Seeley have compellingly argued that no such agreement existed, or at the very least, it is so thickly shrouded in myth that it bears little resemblance to how it is imagined today. In light of this, the supposed “agreement” can no longer be taken as a given without taking into account the cloud of exaggeration, distortion, and uncertainty that surrounds it.
But these minor issues do not take away from the book’s value. It deserves a place in the library of any scholar of Chosŏn politics and/or society, historical memory, and family history and genealogy. The book is appropriate for graduate students and perhaps an advanced fourth-year seminar on premodern Korea. Its razor-sharp focus on the travails of the different Wang lineages and level of detail would make it challenging for students not already familiar with the Chosŏn era.