When Gen. Ch‘oe had thus been disposed of, Gen. Yi turned to the king and said “It was impossible to carry out the plan of conquest. The only thing left was to come back, banish the man who gave such bad advice and make a new start. We must now be firm in our allegience to the Ming emperor, and we must change back to the Ming costume.”
The emperor, hearing of the threatened invasion, had sent a powerful army into Liao-tung, but now that the invaders had retired he recalled the troops.
We can easily imagine how the king, who had never been balked of his will, hated Gen. Yi. The moment an opportunity occurred he called about him eighty of his most trusted eunuchs, armed them with swords and sent them to kill the obnoxious dictator. But they found him so well guarded that the attempt proved abortive.
It will be remembered that this king was the son of Sin-don and was therefore not of the royal stock. So now the courtier Yun So-jŭng told Gen. Yi that they ought to find some blood relative of the Wang family, the genuine royal stock, and put him on the throne. To this the dictator assented. As a first move all arms were removed from the palace. The king was left helpless. He was ordered to send away one of his concubines who had formerly been a monk’s slave but he replied “If she goes I go.” The generals went in a body to the palace and advised the king to leave the capital and retire into private life in Kang-wha. This was a polite way of saying that he was banished. He plead[plead] to be allowed to wait till the next day as it was now well along toward night. And so this evil king took his concubines, which he had always cherished more than the kingdom, and passed off the stage of history[history]. He it was who most of all, excepting only his father, helped to bring about the fall of the dynasty.
Gen. Yi now, in 1388, was determined to put upon the throne a lineal descendant of the Wang family, but Cho Min-su with whom he had before conferred about the matter desired to put Chang, the adopted son of the banished king, on the throne. Gen. Yi demurred, but when he learned that the celebrated scholar Yi Săk had favored this plan he acquiesced. The young king wanted to give Gen. Yi high official position but he was not anxious to receive it and it was only by strong pressure that he was induced to take it. So the records say, but we must remember in all this account that hero worship and desire to show the deeds of the founder of the new dynasty in the best light have probably colored many of the facts which occurred at this time.
As this king was never acknowledged by the emperor nor invested with the royal insignia, his name is dropped from the list of the kings of Koryŭ. Neither he nor his foster-father were given the regular posthumous title, but were known, the father as Sin-u and the son as Sin Chang.
An envoy was dispatched to Nanking telling of the banishment of the king and the appointment of his successor. Cho Min-su who had been instrumental in putting this new king on the throne was not so modest as the records try to make us believe Gen. Yi was. He now held almost unlimited power. It spoiled him as it has spoiled many another good man, and he gave way to luxury and ere long had to be banished, a victim of his own excesses.
Reform now became the order of the day. First they changed the unjust and shameful manner of appointing officials that had prevailed under the banished king. The laws respecting the division of fields was changed, making the people more safe in the possession of their property. The defenses of the south were also looked to, for Gen. Chöng Chi went south with a powerful force and scored a signal victory over the corsairs at Nam-wŭn. Gen. Yi T‘ă-jo was now general-in-chief of all the royal forces. His first act was to have the banished king sent further away, to the town of Yö-heung; and at the same time the banished Gen. Ch‘oe Yŭng was executed. The old man died without fear, at the age of seventy. He was not a man who had given himself over to luxury and he had many good qualities, but he was unlettered and stubborn and his crime in desiring to attack China brought him to his death. The records say that when he died he said “If I am a true man no grass will grow on my grave,” and the Koreans say that his grave in Ko-yang is bare to this day and is called in consequence “The Red Grave.”
The emperor’s suspicions had been again roused by the new change of face on the part of Koryŭ. The celebrated scholar Yi Săk stepped forward and offered to go to the emperor’s court and smooth things over. Gen. Yi praised him highly for this act of condescension and he was sent as envoy. He took with him Gen. Yi’s fifth son who is known posthumously by his title T‘ă-jong. He was destined to become the third king of the new dynasty. He was taken to China by Yi Săk because the latter feared that Gen. Yi might usurp the throne while he was gone and the son would then be a sort of hostage for good behavior on the part of the father. The two great men of Koryŭ, when it fell, were Chöng Mong-ju and this Yi Săk. They were both men of education and experience and were both warm partizans of the Koryŭ dynasty. They were loyal to her even through all the disgusting scenes herein described, but their great mistake was their adherence to the Mongol power when it had plainly retired from active participation in the affairs of Asia. Yi Săk now sought the court of China not so much with a view to helping Koryŭ as to find means to get Gen. Yi into trouble. But to his chagrin the emperor never gave him an opportunity to say what he desired to say about the great dictator.
The questions the emperor asked gave no opportunity to mention the topic nearest his heart. His chagrin was so great that when he got back to Koryŭ he spoke slightingly of the emperor, to the great displeasure of the court. The king himself desired to go to Nanking and do obeisance to the emperor but was forbidden by the latter.