Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan)

Jeong Yak-yong, often called by his pen name Dasan, lived during the late Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1897. He is widely regarded as the greatest figure of Silhak, the name later given to a group of Korean scholars who argued that Confucian learning should deal with practical problems: land, taxes, law, technology and the welfare of the people.

He was a brilliant official and engineer in his youth, a victim of political and religious persecution in his middle years, and an astonishingly productive writer in exile. His works range from commentaries on the Confucian classics to studies of geography, medicine, language, music and poetry. Modern scholars estimate their total at about 500 volumes (gwon).

Dasan wrote in Classical Chinese, the language of scholarship throughout East Asia at the time. His best-known book in Korea today is Mongmin simseo, a guide for local magistrates that is still read as a model of public ethics.

Jeong was born in 1762 in Majae, a village on the Han River east of Seoul. His family, the Jeong clan of Naju, belonged to the Namin (Southerners), a political faction that had been largely excluded from power for much of the eighteenth century. His father, Jeong Jae-won, served as a local official. His mother came from the Haenam Yun family, descendants of the poet Yun Seon-do and the painter Yun Du-seo.

He had three older brothers, Jeong Yak-hyeon, Jeong Yak-jeon and Jeong Yak-jong. Through his family and friends he met the ideas of Yi Ik (1681–1763), whose writings on practical reform inspired many Namin scholars, and, in 1784, Catholic books from China introduced to him by Yi Byeok, his eldest brother’s brother-in-law. Western learning (Seohak), which included both Christian teachings and European science, fascinated many young scholars in these years.

He married in 1776, passed the lower civil service examination (jinsa) in 1783, and passed the higher examination (mungwa) in 1789. King Jeongjo, who was trying to strengthen royal power and to bring talented men from outside the dominant faction into government, took a strong interest in him.

King Jeongjo (reigned 1776–1800) is remembered as one of the most learned and reform-minded kings of Joseon. He created the Gyujanggak, a royal library and research institute, and gathered young scholars around him. Jeong was one of his favourites.

When Jeongjo decided to build a new fortified city at Suwon, near the tomb of his father, Crown Prince Sado, he asked Jeong to help draw up plans. Jeong studied Chinese and Western works on fortification and machines, including an illustrated Chinese book on Western mechanical devices from the royal library. He designed a crane (geojunggi) using pulleys and other lifting devices, which helped the workers move heavy stones. Hwaseong Fortress was built between 1794 and 1796 and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

He also served as a secret royal inspector (amhaeng eosa) in 1794, travelling in disguise to check on local officials, and as magistrate of Goksan in Hwanghae province from 1797. These experiences showed him how ordinary farmers suffered from corrupt clerks and unfair taxes, and they later shaped his writings on local government.

Jeong’s connection with Catholicism was both a source of ideas and the cause of his downfall. In the 1780s he read Catholic writings and took part in the early Catholic community. When Catholicism was banned and its followers attacked by opponents of the Namin, he was repeatedly accused. In 1797 he submitted a memorial to the king explaining that he had once been attracted to the new teaching but had abandoned it. Whether he ever returned to the faith later in life is disputed: some Catholic accounts written in the nineteenth century say that he did, while many historians regard this as unproven.

When Jeongjo died suddenly in 1800, the young King Sunjo came to the throne under the regency of Queen Dowager Jeongsun, who was allied with factions hostile to the Namin. In 1801 the government launched a major persecution of Catholics, the Sinyu Persecution. Hundreds were killed, including Jeong’s brother Jeong Yak-jong and the first baptised Korean Catholic, Yi Seung-hun, who was Jeong’s brother-in-law. The persecution also served to remove political rivals.

Jeong and his brother Yak-jeon were exiled, Jeong first to Janggi on the east coast. Later that year, a Catholic named Hwang Sa-yeong, the husband of Jeong’s niece, was arrested with a letter written on silk asking the bishop in Beijing to seek Western military help for the Church. The scandal led to new interrogations. Jeong was sent to Gangjin, in the far south-west, and Yak-jeon to the island of Heuksando.

At first Jeong lived in a small room behind a tavern in the town of Gangjin, which he named Sauijae, “the room of four proprieties”: clear thought, a solemn appearance, few words and careful action. He later stayed at a Buddhist hermitage and at a student’s house, and in 1808 he moved to a thatched cottage on a hill overlooking Gangjin Bay, in a place called Dasan, “tea mountain”, from which his best-known pen name comes. He lived there until his release in 1818.

At Dasan Chodang (the thatched cottage of Dasan) he built a library, laid out a small garden with a pond, carved the character jeong (丁) on a rock, and drew water from a spring. He taught local young men and organised them in research and copying, which helps explain how he produced so much. He formed friendships with Buddhist monks, including Hyejang and the tea master Choui, and exchanged letters with his brother Yak-jeon, who wrote a pioneering study of fish and sea life, Jasan eobo, on Heuksando before dying there in 1816.

His letters to his sons from exile, urging them to study, keep the family’s dignity and never give up despite the family’s ruin, are among the most moving writings of the period. The present building at Dasan Chodang is a reconstruction with a tiled roof, built in 1958; the site was designated a Historic Site of Korea in 1963.

Jeong’s three most famous works on statecraft are known together as “il-pyo i-seo”, one memorial (pyo) and two books (seo). Gyeongse yupyo (roughly “A Bequeathed Memorial on Ordering the World”, 1817) is a plan for reorganising the whole central government, the land system, taxation and the military, inspired by the ancient Chinese classic the Rites of Zhou. It was left unfinished, and he called it a “bequeathed memorial” because he could not present it to the king.

Mongmin simseo (Admonitions on Governing the People, 1818), in 48 volumes, is a practical handbook for county magistrates. Its twelve parts, each divided into six articles, follow the magistrate from taking up his post, through disciplining himself, serving the state, caring for the people, and managing personnel, revenue, rites, military affairs, justice and public works, to relief of famine and leaving office. It is full of concrete cases, showing how clerks cheated farmers and how an honest official could stop them.

Heumheum sinseo (roughly “A New Book on Careful Judgment”, completed around 1819 and prefaced in 1822) deals with homicide cases. Its title comes from a phrase meaning to be careful and reverent when judging. It collects Chinese and Korean cases, discusses forensic examination and warns magistrates against careless or cruel judgments. Together these works show Jeong’s belief that reform had to reach from the court to the village.

Jeong also left some 2,500 poems, many of them written in exile. Several describe the lives of farmers and fishermen with bitter realism. The best known, Aejeoryang (“Lament for a Severed Manhood”, 1803), tells of a poor man in Gangjin who mutilated himself in despair after officials demanded military tax for his newborn son and his dead father, a practice that was illegal but common. Jeong declared that a poem which does not grieve for the times and resent corruption is not a true poem.

His curiosity extended to medicine, geography and language. Magwa hoetong (1798) gathered Chinese and Korean knowledge on measles and related diseases, a subject that touched him personally because several of his children died young. Abang gangyeokgo (1811) examined the historical geography of ancient Korean states, and Aeon gakbi (1819) corrected common errors in the use of words and characters. He also studied music, rites and the organisation of the military.

This range was not scattered curiosity. For Jeong, all these fields served one goal: understanding the world accurately so that government could relieve real suffering. His scholarship moved constantly between ancient texts and the concrete details of everyday life.

Jeong was deeply concerned with land. In an essay on land (Jeollon, written in 1799) he proposed the yeojeon system, in which villages of about thirty households would farm land together and divide the harvest according to the labour each family contributed, so that only those who worked the land would receive its fruits. Later, in Gyeongse yupyo, he developed a more gradual reform based on the ancient well-field (jeongjeon) system.

In short essays such as Wonmok (On the Origin of Rulers) and Tangnon (On King Tang), he argued that rulers originally arose from the people, who chose leaders to settle disputes, and that a ruler who failed the people could legitimately be replaced. The essays have often been compared with European ideas of popular sovereignty, although Jeong wrote within a Confucian framework and did not call for abolishing the monarchy.

On human nature, he rejected the Neo-Confucian view, associated with Zhu Xi, that human nature is identical with a cosmic principle (li). He argued instead that human nature is a set of inclinations or preferences (the theory known as seonggiho-seol): people naturally take pleasure in goodness and are ashamed of evil, but they have the freedom to choose, and virtue is achieved only by practice. He also emphasised a personal, watchful Sangje (Lord on High) before whom a person should be careful in thought and action.

In 1818 Jeong was released and returned to Majae. He never held office again. He continued revising his works, wrote a self-composed epitaph summarising his life and writings in 1822, and met with scholars who came to visit him. He called his home Yeoyudang, from a passage in the Daodejing describing caution, as if crossing a frozen stream in winter and as if fearing one’s neighbours.

He died in 1836, on the sixtieth anniversary of his wedding, and was buried on the hill behind his house in Majae. His works circulated in manuscript during his lifetime and after, but most were not printed until the twentieth century.

Today his house, tomb and a museum stand at the Dasan historic site in Namyangju, and Dasan Chodang in Gangjin is visited by many people each year. In Korea his name is used for schools, streets and awards, and Mongmin simseo is often recommended to public officials.

Although he is best known today for his statecraft, the largest part of Jeong’s writings consists of commentaries on the Confucian classics: the Analects, Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Great Learning, the Book of Documents, the Book of Changes, the Book of Poetry and the ritual texts. He compared the interpretations of Han, Song, Ming and Qing scholars as well as Japanese Confucians such as Itō Jinsai and Ogyū Sorai, whose writings had reached Korea from Japan, and tried to recover what he saw as the original meaning of the ancient sages.

In doing so he broke with the Zhu Xi orthodoxy that dominated Joseon learning. He criticised the metaphysical reading of li and qi and insisted that virtues such as benevolence (ren) are not innate substances but names for relationships achieved through action. He also joined the Qing-era debate on the authenticity of the “old text” chapters of the Book of Documents, arguing, like Chinese evidential scholars, that they were later forgeries.

Scholars disagree about the sources of these ideas. Some stress the influence of Catholic works such as Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, especially on Jeong’s concept of Sangje and of free moral choice. Others emphasise continuity with earlier Confucian thought, the Namin tradition of Yi Ik and the wider East Asian movement of evidential learning. Mark Setton’s study Chong Yagyong: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism (1997) is a standard English-language treatment of this debate.

Our knowledge of Jeong’s life comes mainly from his own writings: his self-composed epitaphs, letters, poems and prefaces, together with official records such as the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty and the records of the persecution of 1801. His self-portrait is a valuable but interested source, written by a man concerned with his reputation and with clearing his family’s name.

Because most of his works remained in manuscript, their publication was a modern event. Mongmin simseo was printed in 1901. The collected works, Yeoyudang jeonseo, were edited by his descendant Kim Seong-jin with the participation of Jeong In-bo and An Jae-hong, and published in 154 volumes in 76 books by Sinjoseonsa between 1934 and 1938. This coincided with the centenary of his death in 1936 and with the “Korean studies movement” (Joseonhak undong) under Japanese colonial rule, when scholars searched Korea’s past for sources of self-reliant modern thought. Modern critical editions continue to correct the texts and identify works written by his students.

The category of Silhak itself was largely constructed in the twentieth century. Historians in both South and North Korea long presented Jeong as a proto-modern thinker whose ideas showed that Korea was developing toward modernity on its own, a view connected with the theory of “internal development” that countered colonial claims of Korean stagnation. More recent scholars have questioned this framework, stressing that Jeong was a Confucian reformer working within the monarchy and that Silhak was not a unified school. Debates also continue over his relationship to Catholicism and to Western science. These discussions do not diminish his achievement but place it more firmly in its own time.