Royal control of court

By Mark Peterson

Today, I want to go into more detail on point number 8 in my series of ten evidences for Korea having a peaceful and stable history. Actually, I have revised my list and included at number 9 Korean slavery. Yes, slavery. Korea has the longest held, unbroken chain of slavery of any country in the world. But we will look at that next time. This time, I want to emphasize number eight, which was civilian control of the military and add to that concept of civilian control, the idea that the king relied on the civilian government and did not yield control to the military or to the eunuchs. At the outset, I must add that Korea did have one weakness in its civilian control of the court, and that was the influence of the royal in-laws.

Last week's article listed the "Top Ten" evidences of Korean history as remarkably and uniquely peaceful and stable. If differs from the list I posted several weeks ago when I began this series. We will look at the new item, number 9, slavery, next week. And therefore in this article, I will write more about the stable governments of traditional Korea by combining what was once two items: the balance of civilian and military control and the control of the court by the king and the civilian officials in his court.

Last week I wrote about the preeminence the civilian officials at the court. The passing of the "munkwa," civil service exam was the highest honor in Joseon society. Actually, achieving a high government office, was a higher honor, but the access to government positions was through passing the munkwa. The second highest honor was passing the "sama" exam (which came in two parts: "saengwon," and "jinsa"), we can call it the secondary civil service exam. The third level exam was the mukwa, the military exam. There was a clear pecking order.

Korean genealogies, "jokbo," show an interesting phenomenon. A line of descendants, over several generations, will have some success in the exam. There are times when a father and son will pass the exam. And there are times where brothers will pass the exam. Over time, we see successful lineages will have a representative pass the exam every generation, or every other generation, or every fifth or tenth generation. Such a line of descent will spread out over the generations, but some of these lines are clearly munkwa lines ― that is, they have members over time pass the exam. At the same time, there are lines of fathers to sons to grandsons and onward that have success in the mukwa, the military exam. Within a jokbo we can see munkwa lines and separate mukwa lines. They don't crisscross.

The thing that is interesting is that once a line starts to pass the military exam, almost never will the descendants in that line pass the munkwa civil exam! This is not just an esoteric choice for taking an exam. It has ramifications on the ground. Social interactions were determined by which line one belonged to. Marriage relationships were tied to which branch one belonged. Civil exam-passing family segments, would intermarry with other civil exam-passing families. And military lines would intermarry with other military lines.

And one more aspect of this tradition that can be seen in the genealogies is that at times there is a line of civil exam passers that after several generations of success in the civil exam, one line within the descent group will find success in the military exam. And thereafter descendants can only find success in the military exam. Never again will a descendant of the first man to diverge from the civil tradition and pass the military exam find success in the civil exam.

Both traditions, civil and military were part of the "two ranks and files" of the "yangban" ― the common word for an aristocrat, or gentleman.

The king relied on his civil exam passers. The highest ranking officials, the Prime Minister, and his Vice Premier of the Left and Vice Premier of the Right, were predominantly civil exam passers. However, the Joseon court very cleverly maintained prestige for the military exam passers. As mentioned last time, half of the counties were set apart for having a military magistrate. These counties were not on the frontiers. There was no reason that each county had such a designation; it was arbitrary, but it was for the sake of having a balance of plum assignments between the civil and military officers.

After the Choe military dictatorship in the early Goryeo period, Korea never surrendered ruling authority to the military again, until the time of Park Chung-hee.

And finally, though Korea had eunuchs in the court, the eunuchs never took over administration. In China, the eunuchs had great power and often controlled the emperor, or a lazy emperor virtually abdicated decision-making to the eunuchs. But in Korea, the king and the civilian officials kept control of the government for centuries.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.