When this king died in 1720 the custom was first inaugurated of having the whole people put on mourning clothes, and wearing them for three years in honor of the dead king.
The new king, known by his posthumous title of Kyöng-jong Tă-wang, was the son of the disgraced and executed concubine Chang. By this time the so-called Nam-in party had practically passed off the stage of history; its leading men had all been killed and it had left the field to its two great rivals the No-ron and So-ron, although as we have before said the No-ron was overwhelmingly predominant.
King Kyöng-jong was a man of feeble intellect and he took no interest in the affairs of government. He merely served as a center about which factional fights went on. It is said that his mother, the concubine Chang, when about to be led to execution, said to him, “If I am to die you must die with me,” and at that she struck at him with an improvised weapon, a piece of wood. She succeeded only in wounding him, but it was in a portion of the body that rendered it impossible for him ever to have an heir. He swung like a pendulum back and forth between the Noron and Soron parties, agreeing with whichever happened for the moment to gain his ear. This caused the Noron party some uneasiness and they desired to see the reins of government in more responsible hands. They warmly favored the king’s brother as a candidate for the throne. The king was always ailing, for he never thoroughly recovered from the wound which his mother had inflicted, and he was unable to perform the ancestral rites. He was also afflicted with sores on his head, so that for months at a time he was unable to wear the headband which is such a distinctive mark of the Korean. The Noron leaders induced someone to memorialize the king asking him to make his brother his heir. They all added their advice of the same tenor, and finally induced him to consult the Queen Mother about it. She entered heartily into the plan and the decree went forth that the king’s brother was heir apparent. This was like a thunder-bolt among the Soron ranks. The whole transaction had been carefully concealed from them, and now a man who could not, under the circumstances, be other than a warm friend of the Noron party was heir to the throne, and every Soron was in danger. They stormed and protested and memorialized but to no avail. The appointment of an heir was like the laws of the Medes and Persians, unalterable. But the Noron people knew the weakness of the king and they feared what might take place in some unguarded hour when the enemy might get the king’s ear, and so they played a bolder game still. They asked the king to resign in favor of the heir. He promised to do so, but the unguarded hour which the Norons feared came, and the promise was not kept. Not only so, but when it was whispered in the king’s ear that the Norons were trying to usurp the power the worst fears of that party were realized. They were driven from power and the Sorons came up smiling. But the king who liked quiet and repose had one lucid interval when he said, “There is no love of country in all this; it is simple party prejudice and thirst for blood.”
At the head of the triumphant party were Cho T’ă gu, Ch’oé Kyu-sŭ and Ch’oé Sŭk-hang. They began the performance of their official duties by bribing the palace women and eunuchs to kill the heir to the throne. The plan was to shoot him “by mistake” while pretending to hunt for a white fox which they said was haunting the palace. The heir was informed however and took measures to insure his own safety. He asked to have two of the palace women killed and two of the eunuchs, but the king himself was in mortal fear of the Sorons, whom he had brought back to power, and he dared not do so. Thereupon the heir said “I will resign and go out from the palace and become one of the common people.”
The Noron party were not idle. They knew that the Sorons would soon be hunting their heads, and so they attempted to take the offensive by assassinating the king; but, as usually happened, they were betrayed, and terrible reprisals followed. Twelve of the Noron leaders were beheaded and hundreds were beaten to death or banished. It is gravely stated that in this one connection eighteen hundred men lost their lives.
The close of the king’s second year witnessed a severe famine on the island of Quelpart and the king sent thither 7,000 bags of grain and remitted the tax of horses, for which that island has been from time immemorial celebrated.
The desperate state of affairs at this juncture is well illustrated by two incidents. First, the king was so enamored of the Soron party that he took Mok Ho-ryong, their leader, outside the gate one night and sacrificed a white horse and, tasting its blood, swore that until time’s end Mok Ho-ryong’s descendants should hold high office under the government. Second, the Soron officials went to the shrine of the great Song Si-ryŭl and tearing the tablet from its place, dragged it through the filth of a dung-hill. Meanwhile we hear nothing about the people and the country. The government was not for them and they probably cared as little for it as it did for them.
But even these sanguinary scenes could not entirely stop the march of enlightenment, for we learn that at this very time foreign clocks, barometers and water-hose were being brought into Korea from Peking where they had been introduced by foreigners. This was done by the envoy Yi I-myŭng who met missionaries in Peking. He had a conversation with them on the subject of religion and professed to find great similarity between Christian doctrines and those of the Chinese classics.
The fourth year of this unfortunate king, 1724[1724], opened with a reform that augured well. It consisted in the destruction of all the convents outside the city gates, especially outside the West Gate which was at that time about half a mile west of the present New Gate. The reasons are not specifically given, but these convents had obviously become dangerous to the morals of the people, and hot-beds of sedition. But the king was not permitted to continue his reforms, for he died in the eighth moon, of poison, it is said, administered in a shrimp salad. It is further alleged that it was the work of his brother, probably on the principle that he was the one to gain most by the king’s death. But we may well doubt the truth of the rumor, for nothing that is told of that brother indicates that he would commit such an act, and in the second place a man who will eat shrimps in mid-summer, that have been brought thirty miles from the sea without ice might expect to die. Of course all the Soron officials were willing to believe the heir did it and one of them advised that a silver knife be stuck into the king’s dead body, for it is popularly believed that poison in the system will tarnish silver; but it was not done. There was no way to prevent the hated heir assuming his royal prerogative, which he did the same year, 1724.
The new king, known by his posthumous title of Yŭng-jong Tă-wang, now entered upon the longest and one of the most brilliant reigns in the annals of the present dynasty; a reign which proves, so far as circumstantial evidence can prove, that he was not guilty of the murder of his brother. As may be surmised, his deadly enemies, the Sorons, were driven from office and the Norons reinstated. It is probable that the king found it impossible to restrain the Norons from taking revenge upon their enemies and we are told that a thousand men were killed each year for some years. That this was done in spite of the king, rather than by him, will be seen from the strenuous efforts which he made to destroy the lines of party demarcation.