Tag: Joseon Dynasty

Slaves, Bastards, and Bureaucrats | The Fall of Joseon, Part 19 (1801-1803)

King Jeongjo is dead, his reforms are on life support, and the woman holding the throne is making moves that will shape Korean politics for the next century. This episode covers the regency of Queen Dowager Jeongsun, the brief window of slave emancipation and anti-discrimination reform, and the rise of the Andong Kim clan — the family that turned “marrying into the monarchy” into a full-contact governing strategy.

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Credits
Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey
Music by Soraksan
Top Tier Patrons
Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Ashley Wright
Edward Bradford
Boram Yoon
Chad Struhs
Stewart MacMillan
Louise Dreisig
The Year Joseon Almost Reformed Itself
King Jeongjo died in the summer of 1800, and within about six months, his successor had burned most of what he’d built.
That’s not entirely accurate, but it’s how it felt to anyone who’d been paying attention. Jeongjo had spent twenty-four years threading an impossible needle — using the Gyujanggak Royal Library as a brain trust, cultivating a practical-learning movement called silhak, playing the Byeokpa and Sipha court factions against each other with enough skill to keep either from getting too comfortable. He’d modernized the military, protected the persecuted, and at least partially shielded Korea’s growing Catholic community from the worst impulses of the Confucian orthodoxy. When he died, he was fifty-two years old, and the throne passed to his eight-year-old son.
The boy who became King Sunjo had no real power, which meant someone else had to hold things together. That someone was Queen Dowager Jeongsun — the widow of King Yeongjo, Jeongjo’s grandfather, which made her Sunjo’s great-grandmother by marriage and placed her at the top of the court hierarchy. She was also a member of the Gyeongju Kim clan, politically positioned well to the right of anything Jeongjo had stood for, and she had been waiting a very long time.
She moved fast. The Catholic persecution that had been building since 1791 became a full crackdown in 1801. Hundreds of Korean Catholics and foreign missionaries were executed. Jeongjo’s careful management of that particular crisis — keeping the violence contained, maintaining plausible deniability, protecting at least some of his reformist allies — was over. The Sipha faction that had supported him was out. The Byeokpa conservatives were in.
And then, almost immediately, Jeongsun did something that surprised everyone.
The Slaves-and-Bastards Reform
In January 1801, the regency government issued an edict freeing 66,067 government-owned slaves. This was not a small number. Joseon’s slave system had existed in various forms since the early dynasty, and the nobi — the enslaved class — had at various points accounted for somewhere between a third and nearly half the total population. The scale had shrunk considerably by 1801, but freeing tens of thousands of people in a single decree was still a significant act.
The limitations were equally significant. “Government-owned slaves” meant exactly that. Private slavery — slaves owned by yangban aristocratic families, by temples, by institutions — was untouched. The reform freed the people the state had directly owned; it did not touch the people that powerful families had owned for generations. Whether this was a principled half-measure or a pragmatic concession to the elite families whose cooperation Jeongsun needed is probably not a distinction that mattered much to the people it didn’t apply to.
The second reform was more conceptually ambitious and practically even more constrained. Also in 1801, the regency changed the law governing who could sit the gwageo — the civil service examination that was, in theory, the primary path to official government positions and, by extension, to everything that went with them: income, status, protection, the ability to participate in the apparatus of the state. Previously, men born out of wedlock were excluded entirely. The 1801 law opened the examination to them.
The gwageo had been the formal gatekeeping mechanism of Joseon’s ruling class since the dynasty’s founding, and in practice it went back further than that — the exam system itself was inherited from the Goryeo dynasty, where it had already developed the same pathologies it carried into Joseon. Legacy mattered. Connections mattered. The best teachers, the best study materials, the informal networks of preparation and mentorship — all of these clustered around established yangban families in the capital and in a handful of historically powerful regional centers. A rural candidate sitting the exam against someone whose family had been running the bureaucracy for five generations was not competing on equal terms, regardless of what the rules said.
Opening the examination to those born out of wedlock was, in principle, a meaningful change. In practice, the establishment simply refused to recognize the results. The resistance was sufficient that the 1801 reform essentially sat on paper for more than two decades. It took a formal petition from literati in 1823 — twenty-two years later — to produce anything resembling actual implementation. Which raises the question of what “reform” means when the institutions being reformed have enough structural power to ignore what they don’t like.
The Examination Nobody Could Actually Pass
The gwageo’s corruption wasn’t a secret. It was practically a feature. Elite families in Seoul and in places like Andong had been gaming the examination system for so long that the gaming had become the system. There were informal quotas that benefited established clans. There were networks of recommendation that functioned like legacy admissions at universities — the official rules said one thing; the unofficial practice said another. The gap between what a well-connected candidate in the capital could access and what a talented but unconnected candidate in the provinces could access had been widening for generations.
This had consequences that compound over time. The bureaucracy produced by this system was, by definition, a bureaucracy staffed primarily by people whose families already ran the bureaucracy. Fresh thinking was not particularly welcome. Practical expertise — the kind that the silhak scholars were trying to cultivate — was actively devalued. A government that selects for itself, from among itself, across enough generations will eventually stop being able to do anything except govern itself, which is a different activity than governing a country.
The 1801 reforms gestured at this problem without doing anything serious about the structural conditions that created it. You could now, technically, take the exam regardless of your birth circumstances. What you could not do was change the fact that everyone who graded the exam and controlled advancement through the bureaucracy came from the families that had always controlled those things.
The Andong Kims Arrive
The family that would come to define the next century of Joseon politics had been powerful for a long time before they became dominant. The Andong Kims traced their lineage back to the Goryeo dynasty, and in the city of Andong — a historic center in North Gyeongsang Province, about three hours southeast of Seoul — three major clan shrines still stand today, monuments to families who have been important in Korean government and business for somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand years. They are not subtle about it.
Queen Dowager Jeongsun needed allies, and the Andong Kims were available. She appointed Kim Gwang-ju of the Gyeongju Kims to multiple ministerial positions, but the more consequential alliance was with the Andong branch. When King Sunjo reached the appropriate age for marriage, he was matched with the daughter of Kim Jo-sun, a powerful Andong Kim patriarch. This made Kim Jo-sun the king’s father-in-law, which in the logic of Joseon court politics made him one of the most powerful men in the country, and made his extended family a quasi-governmental institution.
The practice has a name: sedo jeongchi. Literally something like “in-law governance” or “powerful family politics,” it describes the system by which the family of the queen — and specifically the queen’s father’s family — effectively ran the government while the king occupied the throne in a more ceremonial capacity. The king was still the king. He could still be appealed to, still issued edicts, still performed the rituals. But the real decisions — appointments, dismissals, policy, the daily exercise of administrative power — flowed through the in-law family and their networks.
Jeongsun’s regency formally ended in December 1803. By that point, Kim Jo-sun had so thoroughly seeded the government with Andong Kim allies, relatives, clients, and dependents that the transition from regency to nominal royal rule barely changed anything. Sunjo was in charge. The Andong Kims were running things. This arrangement would persist, with brief interruptions and changes of dominant family, for most of the rest of the dynasty.
What Gets Built on a Rotten Foundation
The sequence of events from 1800 to 1803 is, in retrospect, clarifying. Jeongjo’s reform program was not killed by a single act of counter-revolution. It was dismantled piece by piece while the official record showed it being replaced, in some cases, by reforms that looked more radical than anything Jeongjo had attempted. Freeing tens of thousands of slaves sounds, on paper, more dramatic than anything on Jeongjo’s agenda. Opening the civil service examination to a previously excluded class sounds progressive. What it was, structurally, was a set of concessions that didn’t threaten anyone who actually mattered — while the networks, appointments, and institutional arrangements that made genuine change possible were quietly disassembled.
The gwageo was left intact. Private slavery was left intact. The Gyujanggak’s influence was curtailed. The silhak scholars who had provided the intellectual infrastructure for reform were sidelined. The factions that had competed to keep the court from being captured by any single clan were replaced by a system explicitly designed for capture. All of this happened in about thirty-six months.
The frustration that built up over the following decades — among people locked out of the exam system, among communities exhausted by elite extraction, among religious communities that found official Confucianism increasingly hollow — eventually found expression in the Donghak movement, the grassroots religious and political uprising that would become one of the defining crises of the late Joseon period. The line from 1801 to Donghak is not a straight one, but it runs through the same terrain: a ruling system that had perfected the mechanics of its own reproduction while losing the capacity to do anything else.
The Andong Kims are still in Andong. The shrines are still there. The families are still, in various ways, prominent. History, in Korea as elsewhere, has a long memory for these things.

October 11, 2026
The Museum That Won’t Tell You Its Own Story

Joe visited a brand-new free museum in Seoul’s Insadong neighborhood, built directly on top of a six-year archaeological excavation. What the dig exposed was a layer of the city dating to the late 1500s, essentially Seoul right before the Japanese invasions of 1592 destroyed it. The Insadong Urban Heritage Exhibition Hall opened in July 2026 and tells, in its own frustratingly indirect way, the story of what daily life in this corner of Joseon-era Seoul actually looked like.

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Credits
Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey
Music by Soraksan
Top Tier Patrons
Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Ashley Wright
Edward Bradford
Boram Yoon
Chad Struhs
Stewart MacMillan
Louise Dreisig
The Museum That Won’t Tell You Its Own Story
There is a new free museum under Insadong in Seoul. It opened in July 2026, sits in the basement of the G1 Tower on the edge of what used to be one of the city’s most interesting neighborhoods, and was built on top of six years of archaeological excavation. The dig exposed bronze hand cannons, metal movable type cast in both Hanja and Hangeul, the remnants of a sophisticated water clock, astronomical instruments, and a clay jar that someone buried deliberately underground sometime in the late 1590s.
The museum’s signage will tell you that drainage channel section five measures approximately 21.5 meters in length, with an internal width ranging from 120 to 170 centimeters.
Both of these things are true. Only one of them is useful.
The Alley Behind the Main Road
To understand what this museum is actually about, you need to know what used to stand here. The Insadong-Gongpyeong area sits on top of one of the original features of Seoul’s city plan, a network of narrow back alleys called Pimatgol. The name translates roughly as “alleys to avoid the horses,” which tells you more about Joseon-era social dynamics than any heritage interpretation panel in the building does.
When the Joseon Dynasty established Seoul as its capital in the late 14th century, the city was designed according to strict Confucian principles. One of those principles required commoners to stop whatever they were doing and prostrate themselves whenever a member of the aristocracy passed on the main roads. This was ideologically coherent and operationally impossible in a functioning city, so the early planners created a parallel system: narrow corridors running behind the major thoroughfares where ordinary people could work, trade, and move around without constantly dropping to the ground every time a yangban rode past.
The Pimatgol became commercial corridors. Potters, metalworkers, printers, and craftsmen of various kinds set up workshops. It was the part of the city where things actually got made and sold, running quietly behind the official street plan that performed a different, more Confucian version of the same city. Over the centuries, the Pimatgol were built over, redeveloped, partially demolished, and eventually buried so thoroughly under successive layers of construction that their original character was lost entirely. What Insadong is today, a tourist street full of craft shops that has been steadily replaced by chain stores and shopping malls, is the most recent version of a neighborhood that has been erasing itself for decades.
What the Gongpyeong Rule Produced
Around 2016, the Seoul government established a regulation requiring any construction project in the Gongpyeong area, which includes the Insadong neighborhood, to conduct proper archaeological excavation before breaking ground. This has produced a small cluster of underground museums in the area that most visitors to Seoul walk right past. There is one in the basement of the Grand Seoul building. There are ruins visible under a glass floor just outside the Kyobo bookstore. The D Tower at Sungnyemun has one accessible directly from the metro. And now there is this one, under the GI Tower, which is the most substantial of the group and the most recently opened.
The excavation here took six years. When it was complete, the team made a deliberate choice about which layer of the city to expose and preserve. Seoul has been continuously inhabited and continuously rebuilt for over six centuries. There were many layers to choose from, all the way up to the 20th century. They chose the late 1590s.
That choice is the whole story of this museum. It just doesn’t say so anywhere obvious.
Seoul Right Before It Burned
The Japanese invasions of 1592, known in Korean history as the Imjin War, began when Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s forces landed in Busan and moved north at a pace that left the Joseon court scrambling. Seoul fell within weeks. The palace complexes were burned. Gyeongbokgung sat in ruins for the next two and a half centuries. The commercial and residential districts of central Seoul, the neighborhoods where ordinary people lived and worked, were destroyed and then rebuilt on top of their own ruins, keeping the same basic street grid but starting fresh above whatever had been there before.
This means the late 1590s layer is, in an odd way, the clearest record of daily life in Joseon-era Seoul that survives anywhere. Everything above it was reconstructed after the invasion. Everything in it was either deliberately hidden, abandoned in place, or burned where it stood. The archaeologists chose it specifically because almost nothing from that moment exists anywhere else. As one of the researchers explains in the museum’s video interviews, the only section of the exhibit where the actual context gets communicated, there is a particular obligation to preserve what little remains from this era.
What the museum should probably open with is this: you are looking at a neighborhood that was alive in the 1590s and destroyed shortly afterward. The objects you see were buried, stockpiled, or abandoned by people who knew what was coming. This is Seoul at the edge of catastrophe.
Instead it opens with drainage channel section five and its internal dimensions.
The Jar
The most compelling object from the excavation is a clay jar found buried intentionally underground in what appears to have been a workshop or commercial building along the Pimatgol. Inside: metal movable type. Some of it cast in Hanja, the Chinese character system that served as the official written language of the Joseon court and educated classes. Some of it in Hangeul, the Korean alphabet invented in the 15th century under King Sejong and subsequently resisted by much of the yangban class, who viewed it as a vulgar script unworthy of serious use.
Finding Hangeul movable type in a commercial workshop suggests that artisan-class use of the script was real and practical in ways the official historical record tends to underplay. The museum notes, briefly, that the type was cast to replicate specific calligraphic styles, which means someone cared enough about Hangeul printing to commission work with aesthetic standards. It then moves on.
The bigger question the jar raises is not what was in it but why it was underground. This was not material swept into a corner during a fire or knocked off a shelf in a panic. It was deliberately placed, sealed, and buried. Nearby, the dig found bronze hand cannons gathered into a stockpile along with other metal objects. The archaeologists in the video interviews are clear: this looks like someone hiding valuables before a known disaster. Given the layer and the timing, that disaster was the invasion.
The picture this produces is specific. Someone in this workshop district in the 1590s, with enough warning or enough fear to act deliberately, put the most valuable portable materials into a container and put that container in the ground. Then did not come back for them. The jar sat there for four centuries until a construction project in 2016 triggered an excavation requirement, and someone finally dug it up.
Joe compared this to Pompeii on the podcast, which is a considerable overstatement. But the underlying idea is right. This is a frozen moment, a neighborhood caught between its last ordinary day and whatever happened next. That is the story the museum has to tell. It is a good story. It is also almost entirely absent from the panels on the walls.
What the Signage Gets Wrong
Korean museum signage has a specific failure mode, and this museum, despite being brand new, reproduces it faithfully. The panels describe objects and structures in technical detail: dimensions, materials, construction methods, spatial relationships. They are the kind of text that would allow a competent engineer to reproduce what they are looking at. They do not explain why any of it is significant, what the people who made and used these things were doing, or how the physical evidence connects to any larger historical event.
One panel Joe read on the podcast describes a building uncovered in the excavation: its plot size relative to neighboring buildings, the position of its gatehouse, the layout of its courtyards, the configuration of its main hall and wings, the presence of an elevated wooden floor, the location where a pottery jar containing metal type and astronomical instruments was unearthed. All factually correct. None of it tells you that this building was probably destroyed in 1592 or that the jar was hidden deliberately or that the astronomical instruments point to a workshop involved in timekeeping technology that was sophisticated for its era.
This is not a problem unique to this museum or even to Korean museums generally. Heritage interpretation is a discipline with decades of research behind it, and the consistent finding is that visitors engage with stories, not inventories. People want to know who lived here, what they did, what happened to them, and why it matters. The answer to all four questions exists in this excavation. It just requires watching the video interviews near the back of the exhibit rather than reading the wall panels near the front.
What Is Actually Worth Seeing
The astronomical instruments are genuinely interesting. The dig produced a double-sided device used to track solar movement on one face and stellar movement on the other, allowing users to determine the time of year through observation of both the sun and specific stars. A video in the exhibit demonstrates how it worked, and this segment is clearer and more engaging than anything on the walls.
The water clock is more impressive still. This was not a simple drip mechanism. The version reconstructed from the remnants found at the site had moving figures and bells that struck at specific intervals, something closer in complexity to a mechanical clock than to a bucket with a hole in it. The museum has a video showing the mechanics, and for anyone interested in the history of technology in East Asia, it is worth pausing on.
The Joseon-era map displayed in the museum, showing the original layout of the Pimatgol and the surrounding neighborhood, gives a useful spatial sense of what this part of the city looked like before the invasion and before centuries of redevelopment. The channel running through the Pimatgol, the workshops lining it, the relationship between the back alleys and the main thoroughfares, all of it is legible on the map in a way that the physical ruins in the floor, viewed from above without context, are not.
The museum takes about thirty minutes. It is free. It is worth visiting, especially if you go in already knowing the story the signage refuses to tell you.
Insadong Urban Heritage Exhibition Hall, GI Tower basement, Insadong, Jongno-gu, Seoul. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 6pm. Last admission 5:30pm.

September 3, 2026
When Love Meets Politics | Fall of Joseon, part 14

King Sukjong’s reign, beginning at just 13 years old, was a turbulent time for Joseon, marked by power struggles, love affairs, and the downfall of factions. His relationship with concubine Lady Jang became the focal point of one of the most dramatic political upheavals in Joseon history. When Sukjong named Lady Jang’s son as Crown Prince, it sparked a fierce backlash from the West Faction, leading to their eventual purge from the court. The episode also explores the rapid rise and fall of the South Faction, driven by internal royal feuds and Sukjong’s emotional entanglements. Factionalism, love, and royal power struggles took center stage as Sukjong navigated a court deeply divided, reshaping the future of Joseon in the process.
Fall of Joseon Series
The Execution of Deposed Queen Yun
Psycho Prince Yeonsan
The Literati Purge of 1519
Battle of the In-laws: The Rise and Fall of Kim Anro
Purging the Literati (1545-1565)
Rise of the Scholar Elite (1560s-1580s)
Imjin War, part 1
Imjin War, part 2
Imjin War, part 3
What Happened in Korea During Shogun?
The Bastard Prince
King Injo: Factionalism, Rebellion, Factionalism
Joseon Korea vs. Qing China: A Kingdom Caught Between Loyalty and Survival

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Credits
Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey
Music by Soraksan
Top Tier Patrons
Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Ashley Wright
Edward Bradford
Boram Yoon
Chad Struhs
Stewart MacMillan
Louise Dreisig
When Love Meets Politics: The Fall of Joseon, Part 14
In 1689, the Joseon court was rocked by a political earthquake that would reshape the dynasty’s future. King Sukjong, who had ascended the throne at just 13 years old, inherited a kingdom divided by factional strife. His personal life became intricately tied to the kingdom’s political fate when he fell in love with his concubine, Lady Jang.
Sukjong’s love for Lady Jang became more than a royal affair—it triggered a dramatic purge of the West Faction, a powerful political force within the court. When Sukjong named her son as Crown Prince, the West Faction, led by influential figures like Song Siyeol, vehemently opposed the decision. Sukjong, however, stood firm, and his decision set off a chain of events that led to the West Faction’s downfall and the rise of the South Faction.
The political fallout didn’t stop there. Sukjong’s emotional entanglements, along with his deepening bond with Lady Jang, led to a series of actions that alienated other factions. Lady Jang’s rise to power, her eventual promotion to queen, and the birth of her son as Crown Prince triggered more than just a political shake-up—it exposed the deeply entrenched factionalism that plagued Joseon politics. Sukjong’s court was a battleground where love, loyalty, and ambition collided, forcing the king to navigate a treacherous political landscape shaped by infighting, betrayal, and the pursuit of power.
However, Sukjong’s reign wasn’t solely defined by Lady Jang. The South Faction, which had emerged victorious in the purge of the West Faction, eventually faced its own downfall, and once again, it was royal family tensions that led to its collapse. Sukjong’s relationship with his queens, the political infighting within the royal court, and the shifting balance of power within the factions created a volatile environment where loyalty could change on a dime. The result? A period of intense factional warfare that set the stage for the further decline of the Joseon Dynasty.
This episode reveals the inner workings of a court consumed by power struggles, with personal relationships and political factions intertwining in a way that would have profound consequences for the future of the kingdom. Sukjong’s reign is a testament to how love and power can shape the course of history, especially in a court as divided as Joseon’s.
May 22, 2025