Concubine descendants in Joseon era

By Kyung Moon Hwang

In my previous column, I wrote of the wide-ranging implications of concubinage in Korean history, up to the most recent times. Now I would like to follow up with a focus not on the concubines themselves but on their children and descendants, or seoja, whose significance in the traditional social and family system was even greater.

In the Joseon era, particularly toward the latter half, the seoja (or seoeol or seopa, two other common terms, though with slightly different nuances) made up a large population, which is understandable, given that concubinage itself was a widely practiced institution.

What forged these concubine descendants into a distinctive social status group was legal discrimination and the accompanying social prejudice against them.

Due to the particular way Korean officials in the early Joseon Kingdom chose to interpret Confucian teachings, the seoja, along with the descendants of remarried widows and other “unchaste” women, became prohibited from taking the state civil service examination.

This effectively blocked the path toward the singular elite calling in the country, the government bureaucracy, and enabled the spread of this discrimination into other social realms, including the family.

Concubines’ children carried a lower status within their own households, which made for very awkward and unhappy circumstances. And despite the lack of any legal basis, the seoja were denied becoming successors to their fathers’ lineages, as adoption of nephews for this purpose gradually became the norm.

One can imagine the pain that this caused these children, a trauma that undoubtedly was passed down, as their own descendants bore this mark of social segregation. Indeed such difficulties became expressed in some of the most renowned folk tales of the Joseon era.

The “Tale of Hong Gil-dong,” for example, features the seoja son of a powerful official who runs away from home and returns later as the leader of a group of righteous bandits. And the most famed story of all, the “Tale of Chunhyang,”

centers on a seoja girl whose hardships begin with the social expectations of being a concubine’s daughter.

Despite all of this discrimination against them, some seoja eventually emerged as figures of great accomplishment and influence. (One assumes that, despite the prejudice, the odds of this happening were in their favor, given their swelling numbers.) Heo Jun, praised as Korea’s greatest medical innovator and the author of “Dongui Bogam” (Encyclopedia of Korean Medicine), was a seoja who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries.

And in the 18th century emerged Bak Je-ga, one of the core members of the “Northern Learning School” who laid out a systematic analysis of Joseon’s social ills based on economic principles.

Bak Je-ga was also one of the Royal Library’s (Gyujanggak) “four librarians” of seoja status appointed directly by one of the great sage kings of Joseon, Jeongjo.

This is actually where the story of the seoja gets even more interesting. For Jeongjo himself was a seoja, as were his two predecessors and indeed, all of his successors to the throne for the rest of the Joseon Kingdom.

In an extraordinary irony, every Joseon monarch from 1720 to 1910, or nearly the last two of the five centuries of that longest-running of Korea’s dynastic reigns, was a concubine’s descendant. This is because, like King Jeongjo, they were all, with one exception, the descendants of King Yeongjo, who reigned from 1724 to 1776.

The exception was King Gyeongjong, Yeongjo’s older half-brother who, like Yeongjo, was the son of a lower-status concubine who happened to catch the eye of their father, King Sukjong.

Gyeongjong, perhaps due to the childhood stress of having to live through the execution of his mother, Lady Jang Huibin, survived only four years on the throne (1720-1724) before his death. Yeongjo, who succeeded him, had to surmount vocal challenges to his legitimacy due to suspicions that he had actually poisoned his half-brother. But likely just as damaging was Yeongjo’s status as an “illegitimate” son of his father.

In more than 50 years as the king, Yeongjo eventually overcame both of these strikes against him and turned into what most historians consider one of the greatest Joseon monarchs. One has to wonder, however, how much the strains of battling the questions over his legitimacy affected his approach to rule, and how much this tormented him in his private life.

These issues have become dramatized in the newly released film, “Sado” (The Throne), which dramatizes the searing psychological struggles in Yeongjo’s relationship to his troubled son, whom he put to death by suffocating him in a rice chest.

Notwithstanding this famously tragic episode, Yeongjo did more than anyone to bring greater fairness to the political process, which included abolishing legal and institutional discrimination that had long victimized concubines’ descendants.

This spirit continued with his successor, his grandson Jeongjo, but in mirroring the fate of the long running seoja movement to overcome their stigma, such reforms soon weakened once Jeongjo died. This was despite the fact that his successors in the 19th century were technically all seoja themselves.

As monarchs, they were of course never referred to this way (at least openly), but it is somehow fitting that this identity, a social and legal construct, pervaded not only the masses but the royal family as well.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).