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Memoirs of a Korean Queen

Korean Culture

Series Editor: Chung Chong-wha.

Anglo-American Studies Institute

Korea University

First published in 1985 by

Kegan Paul International

This edition first published in 2011 by
Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Yang-hi Choe-Wall 1985

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0052-2 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0052-2 (hbk)

Publisher's Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be
apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright
holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been
unable to trace.

Contents

Preface

This book is a revision of a thesis submitted some years ago to the Australian National University in Canberra as part of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. The thesis, Hanjung nok with Introduction and Annotation, is housed in the University Library. Those readers who desire a fuller translation with detailed annotations and appendices are referred to it.

Both Professor A. L. Basham, then Head of the Department of Asian Civilizations at the Australian National University, and my thesis supervisor Dr K. H. J. Gardiner encouraged me to rewrite the work and adapt it for the general reader, and I am grateful to them for their help and guidance.

My most heartfelt thanks are also due to Dr J. Brewster for her great help with the revision and subsequent composition. I am particularly indebted to her.

Finally, my acknowledgements would not be complete without special reference to my family. My husband, Ray, gave his constant support and invaluable co-operation. My children, Dai kyu and Mikyung, showed a marked degree of patience during the preparation of both thesis and book. Without it, this book could not have been written.

Yang-hi Choe-Wall

For Ray

Editorial Notes

In order to keep the narrative as clear as possible, most important official titles are given English translations. Persons mentioned in the text are listed with dates, offices held and other details in maps are provided of the Court at the time of King Yngio, as an aid to following the many references to places.

All Korean words used in this narrative are transliterated according to the system of McCune-Reischauer.

In this translation the mark has been translated as throughout.

Introduction

The memoir of Lady Hong of Hyegyng Palace (Hanjung nok, 1796) is one of the rare historical examples of literary composition by a Korean woman of the Yi dynasty (13921910).

A product of neo-Confucian court society of the late eighteenth century, this autobiographical memoir gives a vivid account of court life in the time of King Yngjo (reigned 17251776). Not only a touching description of the tragic incidents involving Lady Hong's family, it is also a valuable disclosure of the rigidity of the royal court, as well as a vital historical source. Its elegant prose and insight into human behaviour is seldom found in works by male authors of the same period. The memoir is also one of the few works of the time written in han'gl, the Korean alphabet. It is a significant and precious record of the life of one who was compelled to obey the discipline and etiquette of the court, as decreed by the male rulers who were moulded by neo-Confucian philosophy.

Born the daughter of the president of the state council, Hong Pong-han (17131778), Lady Hong (17351815) became the wife of Crown Prince Sado (17351762) when she was ten years old. At the time of her wedding, the crown prince was in line to become the twenty-second king of the Yi dynasty. Isolated from the world outside the palace walls, she led an austere existence, with few consolations. Yet, despite her initial apprehension, she gradually became accustomed to the strict etiquette which the court imposed. For the first ten years of her marriage, her life was relatively stable and she bore the crown prince two daughters and a son later to become King Chngjo (reigned 17761800). She was happy as a wife and mother, but her well-being was later shattered by tragic circumstances she was powerless to prevent.

Lady Hong's memoir shows that, as a woman of the court, she held an inferior position. Despite this, her fortitude and extreme devotion to her family, especially to a husband who was increasingly mentally unstable, under the onslaught of King Yngjo's growing anger, rank her as an outstanding woman of her time. The crown prince's early death, at the hand of his father, is dealt with in the memoir with the controlled emotion and compassion which permeates the whole of her work. Despite the suffering and tragedy she had to bear, she remained a model of Confucian virtue.

All record of the crown prince's death, known as the Imo Incident, after the year in which it took place (1762), was deleted from the diary of the royal secretariat at the request of King Chngjo. Privately-written accounts of the incident were subsequently produced which gave different descriptions of it. Lady Hong's memoir was begun in 1796 when she was in her sixtieth year, and completed when she was seventy-one. This translation is based on the first three chapters of the collated Ilsa and Karam manuscript collections, reprinted under the title of Handyung nok, in Seoul in 1961. The Imo Incident was recorded to inform Lady Hong's grandson, young King Sunjo (reigned 18001834), of the facts of the tragedy that had befallen his grandfather, and thus to condition him from blaming her family, which had been unjustly accused of being the prime instigator of the killing.

Like most upper-class women, Lady Hong's education rested heavily on a thorough indoctrination in the requirements of virtuous conduct as laid down in the Chinese classics. The twentieth-century reader is fortunate that despite the restrictions placed on her by Confucian ethics, she learned to read and write and that her memoir has survived to give us a remarkably clear insight into an important period of Korean literature.

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