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Voice from the North
RESURRECTING REGIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH THE LIFE AND WORK OF YI SIHANG (1672-1736)
By Sun Joo Kim Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8381-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Remembering Yi Sihang, a Local Elite of Significance
This chapter offers an in-depth description of Yi Sihang's personal and familial connections and networks. I naturally introduce the names of many people who were mostly not figures of high achievement, not characters of dynastic importance, and thus not known in the general history of Korea.
Yet they were members of a family, a village, a lineage, and a larger regional elite community to which they were necessarily tied and related, socially and culturally. Without naming these people who have been ignored as unworthy and thus erased from historical memory, their lives cannot be reconstructed and tracked down in meaningful ways. I therefore examine "trivial" writings such as short biographies (haengjang), tomb stele inscriptions (myogalmyong), and genealogies. These types of writings are inevitably private, and possibly skewed to glorify the persons and families written about. Yet they can also be seen as "public" in that they were written with the idea that someone else would eventually read them. Although northern genealogies in particular have been criticized as fraudulent, careful readers can find obscure clues in them that lead to hidden meanings and a better understanding of the cultural contexts and social milieu in which the persons concerned lived. These records can thus shed considerable light on social and cultural lives at the individual, familial, and local levels.
Remote Ancestors
Yi Sihang was born on 1672.10.20 to the Suan Yi descent group residing in Unsan, P'yongan Province (see Map 2). Members of the Suan Yi descent group have long claimed that their apical ancestor is Yi Kyonung, who was designated a "merit subject" (kongsin)—the highest honor awarded by the Koryo court—after assisting Wang Kon (877–943; King T'aejo, r. 918–943) in unifying the country and founding the Koryo dynasty. Yet it seems there is no historical record that bears the name of this ancestor and verifies his accomplishments. It is also unclear what Yi Kyonung's clanseat (pon'gwan) was, because the clanseat of Suan originated from Yi Yonsong (?–1320), who served three Koryo kings—Ch'ungnyol (r. 1274–1308), Ch'ungson (r. 1298 and 1308–1313), and Ch'ungsuk (r. 1313–1330)—and who earned the title of Lord of Suan (Suan-gun) in the early fourteenth century. Yi Yonsong is a historical person, for his name appears several times in the History of Koryo (Koryosa). He was apparently a native of Suan (in Hwanghae Province in Choson), which was originally a hyon but was upgraded to a kun in recognition of his merit. He earned fame for his loyalist death on behalf of King Ch'ungson. Much later, in 1662, he was enshrined in the Yonggye Academy (Yonggye sowon) in Suan, which received a royal charter in 1708. Yi Sihang recorded the history of this royal chartered private academy, in which he illustrated Yi Yonsong's lofty character, spread of Confucian scholarship, benevolent administration, and loyal death. Other ancestors whose names can be verified from historical records are Yi Inu, who commanded troops against the Red Turbans in 1358, and Yi Susaeng, one of the seventy-two Koryo loyalists who refused to acknowledge and serve the new Choson dynasty but hid in Tumun-dong, Kyonggi Province after the fall of Koryo in 1392.
Three prominent scholar-officials in the late Choson lent prestige to earlier editions of the Suan Yi genealogy by writing prefaces to them, in which they also acknowledged the historical origin of the Suan Yi descent group from Yi Yonsong. Kim Yu (1653–1719) wrote a preface to the 1715 edition when he was the governor of Hwanghae Province. A recognized disciple of Song Siyol (1607–1689) and Pak Sech'ae (1631–1695), Kim Yu was a good friend of Yi Sihang (see Appendix A) and later assumed the position of director (taejehak) of the Office of Royal Decrees (Yemun'gwan) and of the Office of Special Councilors (Hongmun'gwan), one of the most prestigious bureaucratic positions in Choson Korea. In the preface, Kim mentions that he himself is related to the Suan Yi lineage through his maternal line (oeye), and praises the family for knowing the value of genealogy and unstintingly underwriting the publication of its genealogy. The preface to the 1781 edition is by Nam Hyollo (1729–?), the headmaster (taesasong) of the Royal Confucian Academy (Songgyun'gwan) at the time. Nam was a descendant of Nam Chae (1351–1419), a merit subject for his assistance in the founding of the Choson dynasty, whose maternal line was from the Suan Yi. Nam recognizes that the Suan Yi is a renowned lineage from ancient times and that its clanseat originates with the Lord of Suan. Hong Sokchu (1774–1842), the director of the Office of Special Councilors at the time, is the author of the preface to the 1832 edition. Hong notes that this edition consists of twenty-two volumes, making it more extensive than any other prominent lineage, and attributes the growth of the Suan Yi lineage to the virtue (tok) accumulated by its progenitor, the Lord of Suan, who died for the king. Hong's connection to the Suan Yi lineage came from his grandfather Hong Naksong (1718–1798), who was the director of the aforementioned Yonggye Academy, the royal chartered private academy where the Lord of Suan was enshrined.
All three authors mention that they initially declined the requests from Suan Yi members to write a preface to the genealogy. In the case of Hong, he turned down several requests before he agreed. It was very common for lineage representatives to seek a preface and/or postscript to their genealogy from high court officials and renowned scholars, who often declined such requests, whether courteously or disdainfully. It is nevertheless unusual for the Suan Yi lineage to have these three very eminent scholar-officials agree to write a preface. Apparently, its members successfully called on friendship and blood relations as well as intellectual connections, no matter how remote. In the late Choson period, a written genealogy was not just a record of a family's past and present but an important site of memory—one that defined the status of its commemorators, as well as of the living members of the lineage, at the time of compilation. The greatness of ancestors, whether invented or not, affected the status of their descendants. A genealogy is clearly a private record, yet its public nature cannot be overlooked. Thus these prefaces written by renowned public figures had the effect of authenticating the history and honor of this lineage.
As Hong Sokchu remarks in his preface, the branches of the Suan Yi lineage grew in number, with the majority of descendants of the Lord of Suan moving out of Suan to other parts of the Korean peninsula, in particular to P'yongan and Hwanghae provinces, from which twenty-three out of twenty-six Suan Yi munkwa passers emerged during the Choson dynasty. Yet, although their numbers increased, the Suan Yi did not do well in establishing themselves as central elites. Yi Yonggyon, whose place of residence is unknown, earned his munkwa degree in 1429—the only person from the Suan Yi to do so before the seventeenth century. The social and political downfall of the Suan Yi lineage in the early Choson period may have had to do with the loyalist position taken by its late Koryo ancestors.
The revival of the lineage—which in any case failed to raise the family to prominence— was spearheaded by the branch that moved to Unsan, which in 1652 produced the first munkwa passer since Yi Yonggyon in 1429, followed later by five more munkwa passers. It was Yi Sindong, a grandson of Yi Susaeng, who began to reside in Unsan after he was banished for a "trivial" crime he committed during the reign of King Songjong (r. 1469–1494), when the policy of population relocation (samin) was very strict. Late Choson northerners often recalled that it was the early Choson relocation policy that had led their ancestors to the land they made their adopted home, and the Suan Yi descent group in Unsan is no exception. As was often the case for move-in ancestors (iphyangjo) who founded a new residence removed from their original clanseat, Yi Sindong does not appear in any other historical sources. Genealogical records on Yi Sindong's son and grandson also cannot be verified from other sources, leaving the traces of family history murky until the early seventeenth century, and thus making the connection between late Koryo figures and those in the seventeenth century uncertain. Although the compiler of the 1683 Suan Yi genealogy notes that most family records were lost during the Japanese (1592–1598) and Manchu (1627 and 1636) invasions, there is room to doubt that Yi Sihang and his descent group were an offshoot of the lineage of Yi Yonsong. However, if the family origin of Unsan's Suan Yi descent group was in fact very obscure, it would have been impossible for its members to forge marriage ties with established local elite families in Chongju, Yongbyon, and even P'yongyang from the seventeenth century on. As noted earlier, members of the Suan Yi lineage probably did not fare well politically because of its ancestors' loyalty to the preceding dynasty, and thus did not leave historical records traceable in the seventeenth century, when its descendants tried to reconstruct the history of their progenitors in the early Choson period.
Unsan
Unsan (Figure 2) is located in northern P'yongan Province, north of Yongbyon and northeast of Chongju, along the Ch'wi River, a tributary of the Ch'ongch'on River. It was a county, a garrison (chin), or a part of another county during the Koryo and the early Choson periods, and was finally designated a county under the supervision of a junior fifth grade magistrate (kunsu) from the early fifteenth century on, except for a few years between 1459 and 1462. Being located in the mountainous inland region of northern P'yongan Province, Unsan was difficult to reach and its land was very barren, able to support only about a hundred households in 1459. A county had to have enough land and people—the two most important sources of revenue—to stand as an independent administrative unit. Lacking these resources, court officials recommended that Unsan be abolished and incorporated into Yongbyon, a recommendation the king evidently accepted.
However, the court soon realized that a county was needed there for strategic reasons. The route between Yongbyon and the counties along the middle reach of the Amnok (or Yalu) River was often used by Chinese diplomats as well as Choson officials, and it was inconvenient for them not to have a county between the two areas because the distance was too far. For defense purposes it was also undesirable to leave this vast area without an administrative and defense system. In 1462, the court recognized that there were 76 households of local clerks (hyangni), 6 households of county servants (ilsu), 52 public slaves, and 497 other households in Unsan, which could support a county apparatus. Therefore, the court restored Unsan as a county that year.
In the late Choson, Unsan was still recognized as a critical defense point should Qing (1644–1911) from north of the Amnok River cross the river in its middle and upper reaches, where the water was shallow, and move south toward P'yongyang and then Seoul. The vast area between the Isan and Ch'angsong county seats and Unsan was an administrative and defensive vacuum, so Yi Sihang even proposed establishing a new county in this strategically important area around the Kuksa Pass.
The number of households in Unsan must have fluctuated greatly in the fifteenth century. According to the Veritable Records of King Sejong's Geographic Survey (Sejong sillok chiriji), compiled in 1454, there were only 225 households with 2,763 people residing there. Wet field was almost nonexistent (only 2 kyol); dry land consisted of 4,354 kyol, which seems to have been inflated substantially. The land was cultivable but not fertile. It was mountainous, and thus materials such as animal skins, mushrooms, and ginseng were among its tribute items. There were an iron mine and a couple of ceramic manufacturers. There were no indigenous surname groups (t'osong) in Unsan, although there were twelve moved-in surname groups (ipchinsong). The surname groups recorded in this early Choson government document must have represented local elites of the given county, for it was still not prevalent for commoners to have surnames at the time. The Suan Yi was not one of those moved-in surname groups, but this fits the above story that Yi Sindong first moved to Unsan during the reign of King Songjong in the late fifteenth century. Although the Augmented Survey of the Geography of Korea (Sinjung tongguk yoji sungnam), compiled in 1530, still does not show the Suan Yi in its entry of surname groups in Unsan, the Cultural Geography of Korea (Yojidoso), a publication of 1757–1765, does. In a nineteenth-century gazetteer, one surname group from the Sejong sillok chiriji has disappeared and five new descent groups, including the Suan Yi, have been added.
Unsan was a strategic point and also a transportation hub, connecting counties along the coastal areas and those far inland and along the middle reaches of the Amnok River. This must have given people in Unsan some alternatives to making a living from agriculture alone. In the late fifteenth century, supplying salt to those counties in the hinterland was a serious concern for the court; boatmen transported salt by river from the coastal region to Unsan, from which it was distributed overland to other inland counties. Salt was traded for rice or other grain, which then was stored in Unsan's granary for military provisions. Unsan's terrain was hilly but not without land for dry cultivation. In 1501, an inspector from the capital noted that there was rather a large amount of uncultivated land in Unsan. Yi Sindong and his descendants may have taken advantage of the opportunities to reclaim this unoccupied land and to trade in goods such as salt.
The population of Unsan grew to 8,419 (3,297 males and 4,402 females) in 1,741 households, according to the 1759 cadastral survey, showing a huge increase compared to the early Choson. The 1872 gazetteer reports 2,383 households and 14,179 people (9,159 males and 5,020 females), probably relying on the 1870 survey. The data on arable land are alarming—696 kyol of dry land and 14 kyol of wet field in the late eighteenth century. This had changed to 830 kyol of dry land and 13 kyol of wet field about a century later. The increase in wet field in the late Choson is understandable, but dry land decreased significantly from the mid-fifteenth century. Scholars have found that the amount of arable land recorded in the Sejong sillok chiriji, especially for P'yongan Province, was extremely high, and explain that this may have included land to be reclaimed. At any rate, the average land possibly cultivated by each household (with an average of six people per household) calculated from the 1872 record was 0.35 kyol. Analysis of the 1845 tax rosters of two districts in Chinju, Kyongsang Province, shows that taxpayers cultivated on average about 0.25 kyol in one district and 0.26 kyol in the other. It is difficult to compare the economic well-being of people living in Unsan and Chinju using these numbers because we do not know how many people on average Chinju taxpayers had in their households, and the topographical and climatic conditions of the two districts are very different. Although Unsan residents seem to have worked more land, what they produced from their hilly land in a cold climate was probably of less value than crops produced in smaller but more fertile wet fields in Chinju.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Voice from the North by Sun Joo Kim. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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