Why this book, and what a distortion costs

We meet all kinds of history and heritage as we go, the writer says, and we often take two attitudes. One is the value of keeping a thing because of the years it has seen — like a grandmother’s glasses, worth little in themselves, but dear as a remnant. Some heritage also stays beside us with a present use, the way a classic still teaches.

When we take in a wide past, we add our own reading, and sometimes that reading is political. There may be no single right interpretation, the writer grants, but if political intent has bent the record, it ought to be set straight.

That is why Yu Bong-hak’s The Dream of King Jeongjo caught the writer’s eye: it looks hard at distortion, and it tries, from the sources, to say what Jeongjo hoped to do. The king reigned from 1776 to 1800. Those years stay in that frame. After his secret letters came to light, talk of poisoning grew louder.

No sudden break, and a long illness

The usual story, the writer says, is that a king called a sage died, and Joseon politics fell at once into the dark of in-law rule. Yu’s book, as the essay reads it, will not accept that break. Jeongjo’s reforms, the writer thinks, were solid, and whatever turn came after him was not a sudden drop. Later ages have distorted parts of those reforms, yet the current he sought went on in politics, culture and society.

The writer sides with Yu in thinking the poisoning story cannot stand. Jeongjo had been ill for a long time, and the illness grew worse before he died, so a death by disease is the sounder reading.

Yu also looks at the Byeongin Gyeonghwa of 1806, the sixth year of King Sunjo, five years after Jeongjo’s death. After the Byeokpa of the Noron fell, the Sipa, led by the Bannam Pak and the Andong Kim, came in, and that, the notes say, was the real start of in-law politics. If the king had been poisoned, the writer reasons, the incoming Sipa would have had cause to press the charge; the Byeokpa, even so, did not push the claim, and that silence is taken as a sign that there was no poisoning.

Letters, novels, and a memorial in 1806

The roots of the story, the notes say, lie in late-Joseon tales among the Yeongnam Namin, and in tales from the Yeongnam region in the Japanese period. Popular history and novels did more than historians to make it feel like a settled fact. Scholars who have supported it have argued that the found letters raise the possibility. Lee Deok-il, of the Hangaram Institute, has pressed the case in a book on royal poisonings, and has said that the letters, as records of Jeongjo and Shim Hwan-ji, are not enough to prove that Shim did not poison the king, noting that even in illness the king does not speak of dying, nor ask a favoured minister to prepare for what would follow.

Lee In-hwa, in Everlasting Empire, has also treated the suspicion, and has said it is not fully cleared. In his account the letters of the time were as ordinary as a telephone, and colloquial wording does not prove closeness; a king who had ruled for twenty-four years could send a warm letter even to a rival. Yu, as the essay reads him, answers that many such claims mistranslate a line in the records or lift only a part.

Supporters often say that Shim Hwan-ji tried to protect the royal physician Shim In, who was executed after the king’s death. Yu points to the Veritable Records of King Sunjo: that claim, he argues, is a partial, wilful reading of a memorial by Pak Yeong-jae in 1806, when the Sipa were driving out the Byeokpa. Sunjo called the memorial reckless and stripped Pak of office. Other passages in the records, the notes add, show Shim Hwan-ji pressing for Shim In to be punished by the law. A further claim — that Queen Jeongsun’s immediate promotion of Shim Hwan-ji was unlawful — is also, in Yu’s reading, rejected. Those years stay in 1806 and in the reign as the notes give it.

The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student essay on Yu Bong-hak’s The Dream of King Jeongjo, the poisoning debate, and the writer’s reading of a distorted history.
2. Reign years 1776 to 1800, and the Byeongin Gyeonghwa of 1806, left in that frame.
3. Counter-claims as the notes record them, from Lee Deok-il and from Lee In-hwa’s Everlasting Empire, answered from Yu’s reading of the Veritable Records.

Last updated: 14 November 2026