The following year beheld events that were to result in another violent revolution and in the driving from the seat of power the No-ron party and the reinstatement of the Nam-in. It all grew from the king’s taking a concubine, Chang, who soon gained complete ascendency over him. A rumor arose that the queen was to be deposed and when Han Söng-u expostulated with the king, the latter flew into a passion and drove him away. The following year the concubine presented the king with a son, the most unfortunate thing that could have happened, for, the queen being as yet childless, it served to put the king more entirely under the influence of the concubine. Trouble followed immediately. The king said “I am now forty years old and have no son by the queen. The people are getting uneasy. As I have gotten a son by a concubine I intend to make him Crown Prince, and anyone may object at his peril.” In this way he threw as it were a torch into a powder magazine. The No-ron party who were in power, were in arms at once for they knew that the opposition had been using the concubine to undermine their influence. Memorials poured in from all sides reminding the king that he was still young, that there was no need of haste in appointing the queen a successor. These memorials the king answered by banishing the senders. Even Song Si-ryŭl who had entered a mild protest, was stripped of rank and sent outside the city. The Nam-in party then stepped once more into power. From the Prime Minister down all offices were again turned over to them. Song Si-ryŭl was banished to Quelpart, but the Nam-in were not content with that, and demanded his death. So he was summoned back to Seoul. Posthumous honors were given to many of the Nam-ins whom the king had ordered killed at the house of Hŭ Jŭk.
Not long after this the king began to make preparations to put away his queen. To this end he made the following statement. “For a long time I have been aware of the queen’s jealous disposition and evil mind, and I have borne with it patiently but now I can endure it no longer. Since I have taken the concubine Chang it has been still more unendurable. The queen and the concubine Kim have been putting their heads together in an attempt to frighten me into putting away Chang, but I saw through the plan. Now what shall we do?” Time and again the officials came pleading for the queen, but the king was utterly deaf to all they had to say. He piled unjust accusations upon her without deigning to give a single proof. Large numbers where banished and a few killed outright because of their intercessions with the king. The most notorious case was that of Pak T‘ă-bo whose name has passed into a proverb. He with two others memorialized the king begging him to drive away the concubine and retain the queen. The king’s rage knew no bounds. He came out and took his seat in front of the In-jŭng Gate of the Chang-dŭk Palace and had the man brought before him. When asked why he had written the memorial he answered, “Because of the treatment the queen has received.” The king then ordered red hot plates to be passed along his limbs. Still he would not express sorrow. Then bowls were broken into small pieces and the fragments were piled up on the mans already burned limbs, a plank was placed across them and men stood on either end of it and jumped up and down. The pieces of pottery were of course ground into the man’s legs. As he still remained firm he was tied with a rope and hoisted to the top of a high pole in a cruelly painful position. As he still remained unmoved he was banished to the south. His aged father accompanied him as far as the river and there he died of his wounds. This, so far from stopping the flood of petitions, only increased it, for immediately 16,000 men with Chöng To-gyŭng at their head sent in an appeal and likewise all the country scholars and all the students of the Confucian school. But every petition was returned by the passion-blinded king.
In the fifth moon of the year, 1689, the king deposed the queen, stripped her of all her[her] titles, degraded her to the level of the common people and sent her back to her father’s house, not by way of the great gate of the palace but by a side gate, in a white sedan chair, the badge of a criminal. Concubine Chang was proclaimed queen and her father became a prince. We will remember that the aged Song Si-ryŭl had been ordered back from Quelpart to meet his fate at the capital, but even the popular sympathy which a public execution at Seoul would have aroused was denied him, for the king sent a draught of poison to be administered on the way, and so in an obscure country village the grand old man drank the deadly potion and passed away. Some of his followers who afterwards memorialized the king in regard to him were killed or banished, together with the deposed queen’s relatives. The following year the son of the newly appointed queen was made Crown Prince.
Chapter XI.
Heavy tax remitted.... a tendens novel.... the wheel of fortune turns.... the queen restored..... sorcery.... Puk-han built.... mourning.... a weak king.... a lucid interval.... terrible reprisals.... a desecrated tomb.... contact with the West.... king’s suspicious death.... enemies killed.... party strife put down.... seals for Japanese.... prohibition of manufacture and sale of wine.... a powerful conspiracy.... preparations for defense.... Ch’ung-ju falls.... rebellion put down with a heavy hand.... honors distributed.... mining prohibited.... incipient rebellion.... reforms.... reservoirs.... use of wine interdicted.... bureau of agriculture.... important secret service.... dress reform.... cruel punishments stopped.... a new war vessel.... honest measurement.... imperial tombs.... monument to the dead political parties.... musical instruments.
Each year a large Chinese embassy visited Seoul, and it was customary to feed them from silver dishes, which were given them as presents when they returned to their own land. This expense was met by a tax on the people of Song-do. While the king was making a small tour in the country he arrived at Song-do and there he asked about this tax. The people replied that they had to sell their very children to meet it, for it amounted to 1,200 bags of rice, 900,000 cash, 3,000 bags of other grain, 3,000 pieces of cloth as well as other things. The king listened to their petition and remitted the tax.
Only five years elapse before we find the king making another complete change in his household, by driving out the new queen, who had been the concubine Chang, and reinstating the old queen in her rightful place again. These sudden and complete changes of face in the king would have been amusing had they not been accompanied by the shedding of so much innocent blood. The king had tired of his new queen. He seems to have been one of those men who require a periodical outbreak of some kind, but who in the intervals are perfectly quiet. The time had come for such an outbreak and Kim Ch‘un-t‘ăk was the instrument by which it was brought about. He had bought himself into the good graces of the palace women, and as a first step toward the accomplishment of his plans he wrote a book in which was illustrated, in romance form, the evils of putting away the true wife for a concubine. The copy of this book which was given to the king materially hastened the catastrophe. The Nam-in were in power but they looked with concern upon the king’s growing antipathy toward them and they urged him to put the too bold novelist out of the way; but the leaders of the No-ron party, knowing that all depended on a quick, decisive blow, went in a body to the king at night and urged him to follow the evident bent of his inclinations. This he proceeded to do by banishing the brother of queen Chang, and with him the leaders of the Nam-in party. Then once more the No-ron stepped to the front and prepared to enjoy the good things. High posthumous honors were given to Song Si-ryŭl and to the deposed queen’s father and to many others of the No-rons who had perished during the last outbreak. The king, to save his “face,” called the deposed queen back little by little. He first put her in a little palace in An-dong; then he transferred her to the “Mulberry Palace,” and finally brought her to the palace proper. The woman Chang was again reduced to her former place and a stringent law was made that henceforth no royal concubine should ever be raised to the position of queen. The martyr Pak T‘ă-bo was given posthumously the title of Prime Minister. The reinstated party tried to induce the king to kill the concubine, but, as she was the mother of the heir apparent to the throne, he could not consent. A slave of this concubine’s resorted to a clever trick in order to turn the tables on the No-ron party. Enticing to his house a slave of one of the leaders of the No-ron party, he got him intoxicated and then stole from him his name tag, a piece of wood which each person was supposed to carry and on which his name was written. This he took and dropped beside the grave of the father of the concubine[concubine] where it was discovered that a fetich had been buried. This was to show that a No-ron leader had resorted to the black art to win back his way to power. The king, however, looked into the matter, discovered the fraud and killed the prime mover in the plot, a Nam-in leader. Many others were also banished.
Four years passed without any events of importance, and then the queen became afflicted with boils and expired. The records tell us that that night the king dreamed that the dead queen came to him with her garments covered with blood. To his enquiries she made no answer except to point toward the apartments of the concubine Chang. The king arose and went in that direction, and his ears were greeted with the sound of laughter and merriment. Wetting his finger in his mouth he applied it to the paper window and soon made a peep-hole. There he beheld the concubine and a large company of sorceresses engaged in shooting arrows into an effigy of the queen and making merry over having done her to death by placing a fetich under her room. This was the signal for another of the king’s periodical outbreaks. In spite of her being the mother of the Crown Prince, he poisoned her and killed all her sorceress companions. A host of the Nam-in party also met their death. The almost incredible number of 1,700 people are said to have met their death as a result of this disturbance. There must have been in connection with it a sort of “star chamber,” or secret tribunal where many went in but none came out, for we are told that a few years later a secret prison in the palace was abolished.
The year 1711 was marked by the building of the great mountain fortress of Puk-han among the mountains immediately behind Seoul. There had been a fortress there in the ancient days of Păk-je. It is an almost ideal place for a place of retreat, being surrounded with very steep mountains.