The Joseon founders, the notes say, claimed that King U was not King Gongmin’s son but Shin Don’s. The writer asks whether that was really so. Goryeo kept itself an independent dynasty after a bitter struggle, yet it was a vassal of the Yuan, and could not escape interference. The Yuan reached deep into the succession, and held the right to appoint army commanders and officials of the Jeongdong Branch Secretariat. Under Gojong, whom the notes call the fifth-generation ancestor of King Chunghye, the military regime resisted Mongol armies for decades. Some Goryeo people took office at the Yuan court, worked in the imperial household, or became spouses of Yuan royals or powerful men, and so put a brake on their own king’s power.

Shin Don, the notes ask, had been a slave in a mountain valley, a burial monk who handled corpses: how did such a person enter government, purge the powerful, and push reform? His life before politics is veiled; almost all that remains is a fragmentary biography in the “Traitors’ lives” of the Goryeosa. Was he really a traitor? The book, they say, is the story of Shin Don and Gongmin’s passionate lives at the end of Goryeo. Gongmin hired less by birth than by practical skill and loyalty, and, after successive wars, by military ability. He did not ignore Confucian learning, but was not bound by its logic. Clerks, local functionaries, commoners, and people of slave birth entered office; even farmers, artisans, and merchants. Meritorious men were many, the treasury was empty, and posts were few, so offices were increased two- or three-fold as cheomseoljik, extra posts for those with merit.

While the military regime was on Ganghwa, the notes say, the land was ravaged, and many were killed or taken. The Sambyeolcho, once part of that regime, resisted on Jindo and Tamna, and were put down by Goryeo and Yuan forces together. King Chungnyeol, after Wonjong, had to wring out people and goods twice — in his accession year and in his seventh year — to support joint expeditions against Japan. Choi Yeong was a general who did not fear death. War, for him, was victory or death; soldiers had to choose the advance, for a retreat brought his sword at once to the neck. He did not hide; he charged at the front. His army had to win, and, the notes say, always did. The three marshals disappeared, and the army came into his hands. The notes stop there.