⑧ Seonjo — The Ultimate in Cowardice, and the Starting Point of Joseon's Fall

A Complex About Legitimacy, and the Start of a Cowardly Reign

I consider Seonjo the most cowardly king in the whole of Joseon's history — perhaps in all of Korean history. Trace today's pro-Japanese collaborationist legacy, which still weighs on our society and our thinking, back through time, and you arrive at Seonjo as its starting point. Seonjo was born in 1552 and became king in 1567, at the age of fourteen. When King Myeongjong died without an heir, Seonjo became the first king in Joseon's history not descended in the direct royal line. It may well be that this very complex over his own legitimacy is what drove him to so much of his cowardly behavior.

The Gichuk Purge: Turning Political Debate into Slaughter

Seonjo turned Joseon's factional politics from a forum for legitimate debate into a killing field where survival meant destroying one's rivals. With no real evidence, he had Jeong Yeo-rip, a scholar respected throughout the Honam region, branded a traitor, triggering the Gichuk Purge; through Jeong Cheol, a member of the rival Westerner faction, he had roughly a thousand Easterner scholars killed over three years, from 1589, on nothing more than accusation and suspicion. The purge itself ended in May 1591, but the poison of factional strife it unleashed would plague Joseon's politics until the dynasty's very end.

Seonjo's Absurd List of Meritorious Subjects

A year later, on April 13, 1592, the Imjin War broke out. Twenty-six years into his reign, a king who had spent his time on little but power games abandoned the capital, Hanyangseong, just twenty days after the war began, and fled to Uiju Fortress on the border with Ming China — weighing, even then, whether to cross over into Ming territory entirely if things grew worse. It was around this time that word of Yi Sun-sin's victories began arriving from the southern coast, and the mood of the war slowly began to shift, thanks to the righteous armies and to Prince Gwanghae, who led a shadow court in the king's absence. Later, with Ming forces entering the war and the Japanese retreating, Seonjo was able to return to Hanyang. Yet even before the war had truly ended, he had General Kim Deok-ryeong, supreme commander of the righteous armies, beaten to death on a fabricated charge of treason, and had Admiral Yi Sun-sin thrown into the prison of the Uigeumbu and tortured. Seonjo's cowardice and misconduct knew no end. When the roll of meritorious subjects was drawn up after the seven years of the Imjin and Jeongyu Wars, he named eighty-six "Hoseong" merit subjects — those who had escorted the king to Uiju — and only eighteen "Seonmu" merit subjects, those who had actually distinguished themselves in battle, plus five more for suppressing a rebellion. Among the eighty-six Hoseong honorees were even palace eunuchs and the grooms who had led the king's horse. Meanwhile, countless leaders of the righteous armies received no recognition at all in the Seonmu list — not even Gwak Jae-u, one of the most celebrated righteous-army commanders in Korean history. Seonjo recorded that the greatest reason for the war's victory was his own act of traveling to Uiju to bring in the forces of Ming China, "the parent nation" — and on that basis, he named even the grooms who tended his horse and the eunuchs who dressed him as first-class meritorious subjects of the war. It is precisely because of this that, a mere forty years after the Imjin and Jeongyu Wars ended, the righteous armies that had once risen up in such numbers were nowhere to be found when the Manchu invasions came.

Why were these many righteous armies nowhere to be found during the Manchu invasion of 1636?

Seonjo's Cowardice Toward Yi Sun-sin

Seonjo's cowardice extended to Admiral Yi Sun-sin as well — though here I want to share something less widely known. Just as he had killed General Kim Deok-ryeong, supreme commander of the righteous armies, Seonjo had also meant to kill Admiral Yi. But after Won Gyun annihilated the Joseon navy at Chilcheollyang, Seonjo reinstated Yi Sun-sin as Naval Commander of the Three Provinces. In the decree of reinstatement he wrote, as if lamenting his own conduct, "What can I possibly say for myself" — yet at the same time, he assigned Admiral Yi a court rank lower than the very subordinate naval commissioners who served under him, below the senior second rank he had held before. He restored the Admiral's post, but demoted his actual rank. It would be the equivalent, today, of appointing someone Chief of Naval Operations while giving him the same two-star rank as the ship captains serving under him.

Why Seonjo Was the Starting Point of Joseon's Fall

Let me close by stating plainly why I consider Seonjo the starting point of Joseon's fall. To Seonjo, his own people did not matter. All that mattered to him was his own survival and his own power. That such a man could be king, preside over a war that killed at least a million of his own people, treat with contempt the sacrifices of the people who fought to defend their nation, credit his own survival to Ming forces he had brought in, and revere Ming China as a "parent nation" — how could a nation ruled in that spirit not fall, three hundred years later? Nearly every Joseon king after Seonjo continued to serve Ming, and later Qing, China as a parent nation while treating their own people with the same contempt. There is no denying that Seonjo was where Joseon's fall began.

When I think of the million Joseon people who died in the Imjin War, my heart aches. But what aches and grieves me even more is what I believe Seonjo truly killed: our people's own spirit.

👉 Next post: ⑨ The Battle of Noryang — A Final Requiem for a Million Lost Souls

— Momcheolhak