Miniseries Four: Schrödinger's Prince

Welcome to my fourth mini-series, this one will be properly mini, in that it only covers one subject, at least on the main feed. This first episode will give you a little look at the world our subject, Crown Prince Sado, lived in. This is the first series to take place outside of Europe, and I'm really looking forward to it. Korea is a place near and dear to me, and I'm really happy to have to chance to share a bit of it's history with you all. Fair warning before we start, this series does not have any semblance of a happy ending. It actually may be upsetting for some, so please be aware of that before you start.

Transcript:

Mini-Series Four: Schrodinger’s Prince 

Welcome to the fourth mini-series. This series will take us to Korea, which is a country close to my heart. I was lucky enough to live outside of Seoul in Bucheon for two years and in both cities on the island of Jeju for two years. To make it very clear this was all in the Republic of Korea, often referred to as South Korea. I only mention this because I get asked a lot. The closest I’ve ever been to North Korea is well, on the border, it’s pretty easy to get tours of the Demilitarised Zone, or DMZ/DMZ (Darling I’m going to say it both ways, that’s why it’s there twice). I taught English to preschool and primary aged children. Despite this connection I, sadly, didn’t take the time to study Korean history while I was there, so I’m looking forward to using this episode and future episodes with subjects in Korean to learn a bit more. Anyone who speaks Korean will have heard the one Korean vowel I struggle with, eo, this is despite more than fourteen years of practice, I’m sure I’ll get it one day. Thankfully the rest of the alphabet is not a struggle for me, so mispronunciations should be far fewer than in episodes with a lot of French names and places. Oh, and to make it clear, I will use South Korean pronunciations throughout, mainly because those are the ones I know. 

Before I get too excited telling you all about Korea I should probably share this mini-series’ subject. Crown Prince Sado was the only surviving son of King Yeongjo of Sado. Yeongjo was the 21st ruler of Joseon and his reign lasted 51 years, from 1724-1776. This will be a two part series with a special episode about Sado’s senior wife, Lady Hyegyeong  for Patrons in the Heir Apparent and Usurped tiers. If you’re interested in becoming a Patron visit patron.com/passedpod. I have three tiers, Heir Presumptive which is $2 US per month and includes ad-free episodes, Heir Apparent which is $5 US per month and includes special episodes, and Usurped which is $15 US per month and allows the patron to commission their own special episode. All levels include early access to comics and This Too Shall Passed episodes. 

As with all series though I like discussing a bit about the area I will be covering before getting on to the subject. For those who don’t know, until 1945 there was only one Korea, at least there had only been one Korea since 1392 or so. The country has gone through a few different names, and has been ruled by multiple dynasties. So, the Korea I’ll be talking about in this properly mini mini-series will be a country that covers the entire peninsula and Jeju island as well as multiple smaller islands. By the time of this series, the 1700s, the use of hangul, the script used natively to write in Korean was widespread, at least among those who could read and write. It was used mainly by and for women though. Men could read it, but when they were writing to each other of for records they still used Chinese script. Hangul was ‘invented’ by Sejong the Great, personal name Lee Do. Sejong was the fourth ruler of the Lee Dynasty and acceded to the throne after his father’s voluntary abdication. While his father had abdicated the elder king still ruled in all but name. I will be doing a later mini-series on this family because Sejong should never have been king, his two older brothers should have. After Sejong’s father died he was finally able to lead. Sejong was bothered that many of his people couldn’t read or write due to the use of hanja, Chinese characters. If you’ve ever studied these, you know it’s a lot more work than learning an alphabet, I’m speaking from personal experience here. Plus, Chinese and Korean are not analogous languages when it comes to pronunciations. Sejong thought he could do better. Now he didn’t personally invent the alphabet, at least it’s highly unlikely that he did, he instead assigned a group of highly educated men to design it. Now, there is a tiny chance Sejong did invent it himself, but that would have been a lot of work for a person who was ruling a kingdom. The alphabet wasn’t widely used until the late 16th century due to classism, yeah, it’s a pretty shocking issue. We should count ourselves lucky that the Romans and Greeks used alphabets, it may not be perfect, but it was helpful for the spread of writing in Europe. Scholars are not 100% sure how hangul was invented, because rulers that followed Sejong suppressed it and early records were destroyed. It’s possible that some letters were borrowed from the Tibetan script square Tibetan. There is also the possibility that it borrowed from Chinese script, much like hiragana and katakana. Under Japanese rule the use of Korean in general was suppressed and hangul in particular. Thankfully the language and alphabet survived. 

This alphabet is actually rather impressive, it’s quick and easy to learn to read. As someone who could already read the syllabic writing systems of hiragana and katakana I was able to learn to read hangul from street signs in less than two days, and then furthered by knowledge over my four years. I actually make sure to refresh my knowledge regularly. If you’re curious street signs are written in Hangul and the Latin alphabet, I’m not some natural polyglot. People who can read already can usually learn to read hangul within a week, I’ve watched three year olds learn to read hangul. Even those who struggle with reading can learn it rather quickly. Now, I do need to emphasise, this isn’t the Korean language, that takes just as long as other languages, but learning to read the things you can’t yet understand is so much easier than English (or say French).

While on the topic of language, the word for king, wang, is also a word that can be applied to a queen regnant. Unlike, say English, where the word queen literally means ‘wife of the king’. This would be similar to what I discussed in Empress Matilda’s episodes, we should just use the word king for the ruler regardless of sex. 

(If you hear this you are listening to an AI stolen copy of this Passed episode. Please visit passedpod.com for links to this show by it’s creator, Veronica Fortune)

Compared to France and England, where the last three series focused Korea is a bit different, especially in the royal family. One of the biggest things is there’s less of an issue, well, making issue. Kings can have more than one wife, we usually refer to the less senior wives as concubine, but that word in English has a negative connotation. These women though are better described as noble consorts, they were a junior wife. The senior wife is referred to as queen, and a king could have up to three noble consorts in addition to his queen, at least in the period we’re looking at. I’ll use the two most famous examples in English history Henry I and Henry VIII, in the former’s case it could mean that any of his mistresses could have been his official junior wife and their children could have been in line to rule. In Henry VIII’s case it means he could have just taken a second wife without needing his first marriage dissolved. It’s important to note I’ve also moved ahead about two hundred and fifty years in history, the subject for the next few episodes was born in 1735 which is 232 years after the death of our last subject, Elizabeth of York. 

Names are something I don’t want to ignore. I will be using the traditional Korean naming system, surname first, given name second, because, well, that’s what I’m used to using and it’s appropriate. Once a person is introduced I’ll likely use just their given name, but sometimes titles or full names will come in. There’s another complication when it comes to names. Royals have a few of them, a personal name, which for men is often known, this would be the name a parent would call their child or an intimate would call a friend and the name they would use before acceding to the throne. Once king (or in rare cases queen), a sovereign has a regnal name. This is the one used on official documents. Finally, once a ruler dies they receive a posthumous name. I will keep it simple, I’ll share all the names of people, at the right time, so posthumous name after they’ve died, but reference the name that will bring up the person I’m talking about easiest on Google or Wikipedia. Again, I’m not a huge fan of the later, other than their copyright-free pictures, but it’s a good place to look for a quick reference or to discover where to find out more if you’re interested in a subject. It’s something to remember that even though I’ll be using the easiest to find name this likely wouldn’t have been the name used by a person’s family or friends. I shouldn’t forget to tell you, during the time period were looking at, and even today, women didn’t take their husband’s name when they married. So in Lost Jacob’s list really included only Jin, not Sun, because Sun’s surname was Park, not Kwon. This is actually a bit of Confucianism, a person’s name is a gift from their parents, and changing it is an insult. Children, traditionally, took their father’s surname. Today that has changed, parents can give their children either parent’s surname and many are starting to. Oh, and I’m not going to explain generational names in this episode. I might do a This Too Shall Passed on it eventually or I may wait until a later Korean episode. 

There’s one more thing about names. While most Korean surnames are a single syllable (I’m not going to get into longer surnames in this episode), there are other names that a person will know, these are clan names. So, surnames like Kim, Lee, and Park (or Kim, Lee, and Park as will be heard outside of Korea) are common, much like Smith and Jones, each person also has a clan name. For Kim, which is the surname for 21% of the population of Korea, there are almost 350 clan names, or bon-gwan. Gimhae is the most common bon-gwan for the surname Kim, there are two Andong bon-gwan, Gu and Shin. The reason I bring this up is there is a cultural practice of avoiding marrying someone within the same clan, despite the fact that in say the Gimhae Kim there are over four million members and the likely hood of two members being related and not knowing is negligible. 

How is this negligible you ask? Because, traditionally each generation of a family is recorded in a jokbo (족보), a genealogy book that outlines the past members of a family. This is an in-family record. It thought makes it really easy to check if two people are related. There are copies of these registers going back hundreds of years. From 1953 until 2005 in South Korean, and ongoing in North Korea, the government kept a register called the Hojeok (호적). This register was the legal and formal version of the jokbo. It was removed from South Korea in 2005 due to being, well, sexist, since it had requirements for certain men to register children, not allowing children to be registered under their mother’s family, and various other outdated reasons. Today a parent can register their child in a personal registry. 

Now that I’ve given you a bit of an overview of Korea I should probably tell you who the focus for this properly mini mini-series is and then put them in historical context before getting to the episode. Crown Prince Sado was the second son of King Yeongjo, he was born seven years after the death of his older brother. Neither of King Yeongjo’s queen consorts had known issue, Sado was instead the son of King Yeongjo’s second royal consort. 

The reason I chose Sado has nothing to do with Sado himself, per se. Instead I chose him due to his wife, Lady Hyegyong. In fact, my source for these next few episodes is Lady Hyegyong’s memoirs, translated by JaHyun Kim Haboush. Yes, this is better than any chronicler, no matter how close they were to the throne. Lady Hyegyeong was in the inner circle, and her account of events is pivotal to our understanding of the time period. I, and every single Korean researcher, recommend this book and this translation, if you’re not fluent in Korean. 

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong are four seperate volumes, each serves a different purpose. The first covers her life with Prince Sado. The second is written due to her brother and uncle being accused  of crimes and executed, her brother converting to Catholicism and her uncle for disloyalty.  The third focuses on her son, who would become king after his grandfather’s death. The fourth focused, in greater detail, on Sado’s life. The episode will mainly use the first and fourth volumes. 

I actually want to talk about JaHyun Kim Haboush was from Korea, as her name hints, I’m using the Western style of naming for her, because that’s how she chose to publish in English. I’ll be including a link to the Columbia Spector’s post following her death in 2011 (https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/02/07/korean-professor-haboush-remembered-love-new-york-culture/). Dr. Kim Haboush was a professor at Columbia for the last 11 years of her career. I think the world should be grateful that she translated this book because, in addition to her love of Korean history she was a Chinese language scholar with a deep knowledge of Confucianism and neo-Confucianism. This is important because Lady Hyegyong was living during the third generation of neo-Confucianist thought. This means that while Dr Kim Haboush was translating this work she could put things within the proper historical context. She also looked into the feminine context of Lady Hyegyong’s life. This is a life different from anything most people living could imagine gilded cage would be an understatement. I’ll be using a few other sources as well, of course. Dr. Haboush has a few other books that are rather useful, have a look through all of her work if you’re interested in Korean history. The History of Korea by Homer B. Hulbert is great as well, it’s more than a hundred years old, but it’s a good read. It has an old-timey feeling to it. 

While I earlier discussed hangul, the script used in modern times to write Korean, during the period of Crown Prince Sado’s life, Chinese script, called hanja in Korean, was still used in the court. This was basically an issue of classism. Being able to write in hanja was seen as the more educated option. Lady Hyegyong wrote in hangul. Her writings would actually be seen as a rallying point for Korean culture in future generations, especially during the time of the Japanese Empire’s control of Korea. One more thing to note, during this time Korea was not called Korea, honestly, in Korea it’s still not called Korea. The area we’ll be looking at is called Joseon, in Korean  대조선국. The dynasty was called the Lee Dynasty. If you’re curious the name for Korea in Korean is 한국.

With that note I need to discuss the what was going on in Korea before Crown Prince Sado was born. About one hundred years before Sado’s birth Korea had dealt with two invasions from China, oddly, each from a different dynasty. Both invasions, while repelled, were devastating to both the Korean economy and the social structures. But, these invasions solidified Joseon as a place in its own mind. The second invasion also led to long-term peaceful relations with its neighbours. Oddly enough, the second invasion led to a change in the ruling family in China, not Korea. Since I’ll be covering other periods of Korean history later I will focus on those then. This period, the one covering Sado’s father and son, was a bit of a renaissance for Korea. Stable reigns, with minimal internal discord, and then comes Crown Prince Sado, who was actually the bit of chaos in the mix. This isn’t the story of one of the potentially great leaders whose life was cut short by disease. Instead we’ll be looking at someone who could have been as chaotic as Charles II of Navarre, but who never had a chance to rule.

I don’t want to tell you Sado’s full story before it’s his episode. But I do want to discuss his father a bit. King Yeongjo (영조), known as Prince Yeoning prior to his ascension is the reigning name of Lee Geum (이금) was the longest reigning monarch of Joseon, he had a reign of almost 52 years. This will be rather lucky when I get to his son’s story. Yeongjo wasn’t meant to rule, his older brother, Gyeongjong (경종), was only 35 when he died in 1724 after ruling for four years. Both kings Yeongjo and Gyeongjong were sons of king Sukjong who had reigned for almost 46 years. As you can tell from those numbers this should have been a rather stable period, but king Sukjong had dealt with factional politics throughout his reign that bled into his oldest son’s reign. This may have led to the death of king Gyeongjong. There were those in court who felt that Yeongjo should have been named king because there was rumour that he had been named by their father at the end of his life as his successor. Instead, the elder brother succeeded. As I mentioned, king Gyeongjong had a short reign, only four years. 

Yeongjo, while the son of a king, was also the son of, well, a common maid, to be even more correct she was a slave. His mother, born Choe Dong Lee (최동이), known to those who were polite, and this podcast, as Lady Choe. Lady Choe had joined the palace as a water carrier at the age of seven. At some point, well after the age of seven, likely around 19, she impressed the king with her kindness towards his exiled queen, Inhyeon. If you watch K-drama you may have heard of her. Apparently Inhyeon had gone into exile to protect Sukjong, Lady Choe had been one of her servants prior to this and missed her mistress, she was marking the exiled queen’s birthday. Sukjong was touched by this servant’s devotion. Due to this, and probably other reason, she was pretty and young, Sukjong and Lady Choe began a relationship. They had two sons, one who died young and the future king, Yeongjo. Being the son of a water girl is not the usual route for one to become king. Think back to even Henry I, who didn’t name any of his illegitimate sons as heir. This is the big difference when multiple women can be consort, there are fewer illegitimate children, at least at a noble level. Yeongjo was adopted by Queen Inwon, his father’s fourth queen. Yeongjo wasn't actually able to acknowledge his mother officially for the early part of his reign, she was eventually allowed to be recognised as his mother. Oh, adoption is another thing I should mention quickly. In royal traditions, not unlike the Romans, adoption could occur to assure a certain preferred heir ruled, it also connected the sons of consorts to the kings senior wife, his queen. It could also happen posthumously, which I will got through in the coming episodes. 

I’m about to get into a slightly complicated bit of 18th century Korean politics, I hope you’ll bear with me. Just like with European royal courts, Korean royal courts had factions, politics is just the same thing with different names, right? The complication that makes this a bit more interesting is multiple consorts for the king. Think of how influential a mistress could be in Europe, Alice Perrers during the reign of Edward III, or Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, better known at Madame de Pompadour. Now imagine these mistresses are legal wives, and the way for selecting a wife is to have the noble families of the country put forth their eligible daughters. Yeongjo’s adoptive mother, Queen Inwon had been born into a family who supported the Soron faction, but after Sukjong’s death switched to the Noron faction. Queen Inwon would live well into her adoptive son’s reign. The Noron faction (which my spell check keeps wanting to change to moron faction, it was not) was ignored during the short reign of Gyeongjong, he favoured the Soron faction. It was suggested after Gyeongjong’s death that the Noron faction may have poisoned him, but food poisoning is just as likely. There is one other faction that may come up, the Namin faction, often called the Southerns (Namin literally means south people). The Soron faction even tried to kill Yeongjo, and make it look like a hunting accident. I’m not joking when I say politics looks similar all over the world, same script, different actors. His adoptive mother protected him throughout this period. Oh, and while the name of each of these factions are location they aren’t locations throughout Korea, but within Seoul. These will come up a little in the upcoming episodes, but it’s not something to worry about. 

On the 16th of October 1724 Yeongjo became king, following the death of his brother. He was two weeks away from his 30th birthday and became the 21st ruler of Joseon. He had been married to his first wife for three years upon his ascension, though they would never have any children. He’d had a consort prior to his wife, by whom he’d had three children, two princesses, and of course, most importantly for a monarchy a son. His oldest son, Crown Prince Hyojang (효장), personal name Lee Haeng (이행) was five and appointed Crown Prince the year after his father’s ascension. It’s important to note the Hyojang is his posthumous name, but it’s the easiest way to find him when searching online. The king had his young heir married, at the age of eight to an eleven year old noble girl, Jo Hyosun. Sadly for the king, this first son died at the age of 12. Much like the European monarchies I’ve discussed earlier high infant mortality is to be expected, but losing a child once they reached adolescence was rare. Hyojang’s death was devastating to his father. Hyosun would only live until she was 35, and her death saddened her father-in-law greatly. 

It would be six and a half years before Yeongjo had another son, Sado, the subject of these upcoming episodes. Yeongjo had a total of twelve daughters from his four consorts. Neither of his queens had issue. Six were born between the births of his sons; three of those daughters were born after his first son’s death and prior to his second son’s birth, I think it would give Henry VIII some perspective. Sadly two of those daughters were short lived. Since I don’t want to talk too much about Crown Prince Sado, I’ll share a few more notes about his father’s reign before starting on his story. 

Yeongjo’s reign was one of stability. The first few years though were a bit rough. The faction that had supported him, the Noron, took out their frustration of being ignored during his brother’s reign on their rival faction, the Soron. There are records of a thousand people a year being killed for the first few yeas of his reign just due to this factional rivalry. Yeongjo’s reign had one out of date thing of note, prohibition, the king banned the production and imbibing of spirits, yeah, he was a bit of a kill joy. This was possibly the earliest prohibition on alcohol at a national level. Oddly, despite this ban wine is mentioned multiple times in his daughter-in-law’s memoirs. 

I’ll see you all next week for Prince Sado. Before I go a huge welcome to my newest Patron, Michael.