Gwanghaegun

Gwanghaegun (“Prince Gwanghae”), whose personal name was Yi Hon, was the fifteenth ruler of the Korean kingdom of Joseon, from 1608 to 1623. Most Joseon kings are known by a temple name ending in -jo or -jong, given after death. Gwanghaegun was overthrown and never restored, so history calls him by the title he had held as a prince. Only one other Joseon king, Yeonsangun, shares this fate.

His life falls into two halves. As crown prince from 1592 to 1608 he was a young wartime leader: when Japan invaded and the king fled north, he ran part of the government from the mountains. Yet his position was never secure, because the Ming emperor of China, Joseon’s overlord, refused to approve him as heir. As king from 1608 he rebuilt a country ruined by war and faced a new danger in Manchuria, where the Jurchen leader Nurhaci founded the Later Jin state in 1616.

He is one of the most argued-about rulers in Korean history. The officials who deposed him in 1623 also compiled the official record of his reign, and for three centuries he was remembered as a tyrant who killed his brothers. In the twentieth century many historians praised him instead as a realist who tried to limit Joseon’s losses and to manage relations with both Ming and the Later Jin. Since the 1990s that picture has itself been questioned.

King Seonjo’s queen, Queen Uiin, had no son. Gwanghae and his elder brother Imhae were sons of a royal concubine, Lady Gongbin Kim. Officials had urged the king to name an heir from among such princes, but Seonjo kept putting the decision off. Then, in the spring of 1592, Japanese armies landed at Busan, and on 7 June news came that Joseon’s army had been crushed at Chungju. That night Seonjo raised the idea of leaving the capital.

The ministers insisted that an heir be named first. The record says they deferred several times, saying the choice belonged to the king alone, until the official Sin Jap declared that they could not withdraw until a decision was made that very night. Late at night Seonjo, “with a slight smile”, named Gwanghae, saying the prince was intelligent and fond of learning. He was installed as crown prince the next day, 8 June 1592. He was sixteen, or eighteen by the Korean count. Before dawn on 9 June the king and the prince left Seoul in the dark and the rain.

Why not the eldest son? Seonjo himself said that night that he had meant to install an heir that spring, and a court historian added that many petitions had already been made, so the war seems to have hurried a decision that was already forming. Later accounts, from the Westerner-compiled revised annals to modern encyclopedias, describe Imhae as violent and neglectful of study, but such character sketches were written with hindsight. What is clear is that Gwanghae was neither the eldest son nor the son of a queen, and that this would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The Japanese advance was so fast that by July 1592 Seonjo, at Yeongbyeon in Pyeongan Province, was preparing to cross the Yalu River into Ming territory if necessary. Someone had to stay behind to hold the kingdom together. On the night of 21 July he ordered that the crown prince should temporarily run the state and decide appointments, rewards and punishments on his own. The next day the court split in two: the king headed towards Uiju on the border, while the prince, with the Chief State Councillor Choe Heung-won and about ten senior officials, went the other way. This small second government is called the bunjo, the “divided court”.

The diary of Jeong Tak, an official who travelled with the prince, records the journey day by day. The first goal was Ganggye, deep in the mountains of the upper Yalu. When news came that a large Japanese force was moving into Hamgyeong Province, the party turned east over the passes of Maengsan, Yangdeok and Goksan; on one pass, Jeong wrote, “for every ten steps we fell nine times”. On the night of 17 August they reached Icheon in Gangwon Province, where, for the first time, reports arrived from the governors of the three southern provinces. The prince gathered officers and soldiers to declare his resolve to recover the country and sent messages to encourage the volunteer “righteous armies”.

The divided court then stayed for over two months at Seongcheon. In November 1592 Seonjo wrote from Uiju that the remaining affairs should be handled by the divided court, since “all hope of recovery rests here”. Earlier that autumn the prince had told a royal secretary sent to him that he did not know how to conduct himself, having been given a task beyond him. In winter the court moved to a mountain fortress at Yonggang, where the prince fell ill. In February 1593 Joseon and Ming forces retook Pyongyang, and on 20 February the prince met his father at Jeongju, seven months after they had parted. One modern encyclopedia says the divided court also went into Hamgyeong Province, but Jeong Tak’s diary records it only in Pyeongan, Hwanghae and Gangwon.

While Ming and Japan negotiated and most Ming troops withdrew, the Ming side wanted the crown prince to take charge of the front line in the south. In January 1594 he left Seoul again with a field headquarters called the mugunsa. He went to Gongju and then Jeonju, where he ordered that the families of men killed at Jinju and Geumsan be summoned and given exemption certificates and rice and beans. The same daily reports admit that the entertaining and drinking of his escorting officials became a burden on local people, and that he ordered it strictly forbidden. He then stayed for about half a year at Hongju in Chungcheong Province before returning in the autumn. A Ming imperial edict of 1595 formally entrusted him with the military affairs of Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces.

Meanwhile Seonjo repeatedly announced that he would abdicate or let the prince govern as regent. Han Myeong-gi counts fifteen offers to step down during the war, though the number depends on what is counted. In September 1593, for example, he listed his illnesses, including what he called a “mad illness” and failing eyes, and asked: “Since ancient times, where has there been a king suffering from a mad illness?” Each time the prince and the ministers prostrated themselves and begged him to withdraw the order. The reasons he gave changed — illness, anger at the Ming commander Song Yingchang, the strains of war — and whether he was sincere or testing the loyalty of his son and ministers cannot be known from the records.

As the war ended, the records show a cooler relationship. In January 1598 (the 12th lunar month of 1597) the official Yi I-cheom asked that Prince Imhae stop accompanying the king when he received Ming generals. An entry of 1600 says the king treated the crown prince so sternly that he rarely received him, so the prince came to the outer gate each time to pay respects and went away. Both entries come from the Seonjo sillok, compiled under Gwanghae himself, which may stress the king’s coldness.

Joseon’s kings and crown princes were formally invested by the Ming emperor, a ceremony called chaekbong (冊封). Without it a crown prince was fully the heir inside Korea but not in the eyes of the overlord. Joseon sent envoys asking for Gwanghae’s investiture from 1594. A Ming Ministry of Rites memorial of 1604, copied into the Korean annals, reviews five requests — in 1594, 1595, 1596, 1603 and 1604 — and the refusal or postponement of each of the first four; the fifth was answered that Joseon’s proposal for its heir “absolutely cannot be followed”. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture likewise speaks of five refusals.

The Ming documents copied into the Korean annals give several reasons. First, the order of birth: the Ministry of Rites wrote in 1595 that the order of elder and younger “may not be disturbed by a hair”, and in 1604 that placing the younger brother above the elder was called “contrary” (逆), warning that Joseon’s danger might lie “not in Japan but within its own house”. Second, doubt about Joseon’s claims: Ming officials said they could not know whether Imhae was really disabled by illness, and one noted that Seonjo’s first petition had only praised the second son, while the claim that the eldest was ill appeared only later. Third, merit: a Ming official in 1595 said the second son had “no conspicuous merit” yet, and the Ministry wrote that since receiving the emperor’s edict he had not achieved even a small success. Fourth, timing and security: during the war Ming wanted further achievements first, and after 1598 it still pointed to the danger of renewed Japanese attack and Joseon’s incomplete recovery, telling Joseon to wait two or three years and ask again. The Ministry also warned against favouritism and against cruelty between brothers.

There was a background in Beijing too. The Wanli Emperor had long resisted pressure from his officials to make his eldest son, Zhu Changluo, heir, because he favoured the son of a beloved consort; only in 1601 did he give way. Joseon’s ministers suspected in 1595 that their request had clashed with “what the Chinese court avoids speaking of”, and in 1602 Joseon’s own Ministry of Rites thought the refusals might be because China’s own heir had not yet been installed. This is a plausible contemporary reading, but refusals continued after 1601, and the Ming documents argue from the general principle of the eldest son, so the emperor’s own dispute cannot explain everything. Ming meanwhile gave him military duties without the title, as in the 1595 edict, and Ming officials did not all agree: Joseon’s envoy reported in 1595 that the minister of rites was inclined to approve, while officials of the ministry’s bureau raised objections.

The irony came at the end. When an official urged the dying Seonjo in March 1608 to hand power to the prince, the king rebuked him and wrote that “the crown prince of a feudal lord can only be called crown prince after receiving the Son of Heaven’s mandate”, arguing that handing the throne to an uninvested heir could bring Ming censure. Ming changed its position only after Gwanghae was already king. In 1608 it sent officials from Liaodong, who went to see Imhae in person; in 1609 an imperial edict invested Gwanghae as king, stating that his elder brother had been “disabled by illness” and that the whole country had asked for him, and the proclamation spoke of the principle of “establishing the worthy”. So the short answer is that no single cause explains the refusal: a rule-bound Ming bureaucracy defended the eldest-son principle, at a time when its own emperor’s succession quarrel made that principle sensitive; it doubted Joseon’s account of Imhae and of Gwanghae’s merit; and it preferred to wait until the country was secure. Recognition as crown prince never came; recognition as king came only when the succession was already a fact.

Queen Uiin died in 1600. In 1602 Seonjo married a young new queen, Queen Inmok, daughter of Kim Je-nam. She bore a daughter, Princess Jeongmyeong, in 1603 and in 1606 a son, Grand Prince Yeongchang — the only one of Seonjo’s sons born to a queen. The king was then in his fifties; the crown prince was over thirty. The court was split between two branches of the Northerner faction: the Lesser Northerners around the Chief State Councillor Yu Yeong-gyeong, and the Greater Northerners around Jeong In-hong and Yi I-cheom, who backed Gwanghae.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says that after Yeongchang’s birth Seonjo came to think of changing the heir and that Yu Yeong-gyeong’s faction went along with this, and the Injo sillok, compiled after the 1623 coup, makes the same assertion. The annals, however, record no words of Seonjo himself saying so. What they do record points the other way at least once: after collapsing in November 1607, Seonjo ordered that the throne be passed to the crown prince or that the prince act as regent, and it was Yu Yeong-gyeong and the other sitting ministers who refused, saying that they would rather die than obey. The Revised Annals, compiled later by the Westerners, add that senior former ministers were kept out of the discussion.

In March 1608 Jeong In-hong sent a memorial attacking Yu, and Seonjo answered with the rebuke about the emperor’s mandate quoted above. Eight days after that rebuke, on 16 March 1608, Seonjo died. The Gwanghaegun ilgi says he was suddenly taken ill after eating glutinous rice; a rumour that the food was poisoned appears only in a historian’s comment in the Injo sillok, written after the 1623 coup, and is not evidence of murder. The next day, on the written order of Queen Inmok, Gwanghae took the throne. The late king’s testament told him that the hopes of the subjects were gathered on him and asked him to love his brothers as when the king was alive. At the ceremony he repeatedly declined to mount the throne, saying his grief was too great, but in the end gave way to the officials’ pleas, took the throne and received their congratulations.

Becoming king did not end the question of legitimacy. Ming documents of early 1609 still addressed him only as “acting administrator of the affairs of the kingdom of Joseon”. In the summer of 1608 Ming sent two officials from Liaodong to investigate the succession; on 31 July 1608 they went to Seogang, outside Seoul, to see Imhae in person and left for home the same day. The historian Han Myeong-gi writes that the Korean court gave them large sums of silver to get through this crisis.

Imhae had already been charged with plotting and sent into exile, first to Jindo and then to Gyodong Island. In 1609 he died there. The Gwanghaegun ilgi says that the commander of his guards tried to make him drink poison and, when he refused, strangled him — details that, the same entry admits, only became known after the 1623 coup from a maid who had served him. Yu Yeong-gyeong, accused of having tried to put Yeongchang on the throne, was ordered to take his own life.

On 2 July 1609 the Ming eunuch Liu Yong arrived in Seoul with the imperial edict that finally invested Gwanghae as king and his wife, Lady Yu, as queen. According to Han Myeong-gi, Liu Yong extracted tens of thousands of taels of silver, and in 1610 another eunuch came to invest Gwanghae’s own son as crown prince — the recognition Gwanghae himself had sought for sixteen years.

Early in his reign Gwanghae made Yi Won-ik Chief State Councillor and gave posts to several factions. On Yi’s proposal, on 18 June 1608 he set up the Seonhyecheong (“Office for Bestowing Benefits”) for Gyeonggi Province. Instead of delivering tribute goods in kind — a system that let middlemen charge many times the real price — households paid rice according to their land: 16 mal per gyeol a year, of which a small part stayed with the county. The historian Yi Jeong-cheol stresses that this “Seonhye law” was a trial form and should not be equated with the later Daedong law, which kept much more for local needs; the reform was extended province by province between 1623 and 1708, with regional variants, and never reached Pyeongan Province or Jeju. Gye Seung-beom adds that Gwanghae himself was lukewarm about the policy, but he was the first king to approve it.

In 1611 a land survey began to recover taxable land hidden since the war. State books destroyed in the war were reprinted or newly compiled, and a new archive for the annals was set up on Mount Jeoksang. The most famous book of the reign is Heo Jun’s medical encyclopedia Dongui bogam. Seonjo had ordered it in 1596; Heo Jun presented it to Gwanghae in 1610 and the royal clinic printed it in 1613. It became the classic of Korean medicine, was reprinted in China and Japan, and is now on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Gwanghae also rebuilt the palaces burned in the war, Changdeokgung and Changgyeonggung; the sources give slightly different years (the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture 1610 and 1616, Our History Net 1608 and 1615). He then went on to build new ones: Gyeongdeokgung (later called Gyeonghuigung), whose main halls were finished in 1619 and the whole palace in 1620, and Ingyeonggung, never completed. The cost, met with heavy extra levies, made him unpopular. Critics such as Oh Hang-nyeong argue that the palace projects, which consumed the very tribute goods the tax reform tried to reduce, show that his reconstruction has been overrated.

Gwanghae’s reign was marked by a series of treason trials. The largest began in 1613, the gyechuk year. A gang of seven sons of concubines, men barred from office because of their birth, had robbed and killed a merchant at the Saejae pass. Under interrogation one of them, Bak Eung-seo, confessed to a plot to put Yeongchang on the throne. Queen Inmok’s father Kim Je-nam was put to death, the young Yeongchang was reduced to commoner status and confined on Ganghwa Island, and many ministers were dismissed. He died there in 1614. The Gwanghaegun ilgi, under 19 March 1614 (the 10th day of the 2nd lunar month), says the Ganghwa magistrate Jeong Hang killed him by withholding food and overheating his room; a later Injo sillok account names instead the guard commander Yi Jeong-pyo, who it says put lye in his food on Gwanghae’s secret orders. The accounts differ on both the perpetrator and the method.

In 1617 the Greater Northerners began to demand that Queen Inmok be deposed. Senior figures who objected, including Yi Hang-bok and Gi Ja-heon, were exiled. Early in 1618 the ministers drew up rules degrading her: she lost her titles and was called simply “the Western Palace”, after the palace in which she was confined, the Gyeongun Palace (today’s Deoksugung). Inmok and her daughter lived there under guard until 1623. To Confucian eyes, a son’s mistreatment of his father’s queen and the killing of a younger brother — “deposing the mother and killing the brother” — were among the worst crimes a king could commit.

Who was responsible? Older accounts, including several articles of the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, put most of the blame on the Greater Northerner leader Yi I-cheom and treat the 1613 plot as a fabrication, as the Westerners declared after 1623. Gye Seung-beom, in the encyclopedia’s current article on Gwanghaegun, argues instead that empirical research shows Gwanghae was not simply led by any faction, and that the king himself, insecure about rivals, drove the trials. Either way, the purges became the chief justification for the coup that ended his reign.

In 1616 Nurhaci, leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens, proclaimed a new state, Jin (known as the Later Jin), at Hetu Ala; in 1618 he attacked Ming Liaodong. Ming raised a great expedition and demanded Korean troops. For Joseon’s officials the answer seemed obvious: Ming had saved the kingdom in the Imjin War, a debt called “the grace of restoring the country”. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says that Gwanghae alone opposed sending troops but gave way under pressure. In his own words a year later, he said his aim had not been to refuse but to warn Ming in advance that Korean soldiers were untrained and would be of little use. He chose as commander a civil official, Gang Hong-rip, who spoke Chinese well.

On 5 April 1619 about 13,000 Korean troops under Gang Hong-rip and Kim Gyeong-seo crossed the Yalu at Changseong and joined the southern column of the Ming general Liu Ting. Ming’s main armies were destroyed near Sarhu, and on 17 April Liu Ting’s force was ambushed at Bucha (Fuca), near the Simha (Shenhe) river. Liu Ting died, and the Korean left and right divisions were overrun; Kim Eung-ha, commander of the left division, was remembered for fighting to the last. Gang’s central division, surrounded and starving, negotiated with the Jurchens and surrendered the next morning. The Border Defence Council later spoke of 8,000 to 9,000 dead; Gang and Kim Gyeong-seo were held at Nurhaci’s base.

At home the ministers demanded that Gang’s family be arrested. Gwanghae put them off, saying Joseon had no military means to resist the Jurchens, and wrote that the best way to preserve the state was to serve the great country “with ever greater sincerity” while handling the enemy at the height of his power with care. He kept a channel to Nurhaci through the captive Gang while remaining a Ming vassal. When a Ming censor came in 1622 to demand more troops, he did not comply; his officials, devoted to Ming, protested so persistently that government was nearly paralysed, according to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.

Did Gwanghae secretly order Gang to surrender? A note by the compilers of the Gwanghaegun ilgi says the king had secretly told Gang to keep in contact with the Jurchens, so that Gang surrendered “at the right moment”, and the 1623 edict deposing Gwanghae accused him of secretly instructing his commander to “watch how things moved and act accordingly”. The encyclopedia’s article on Gang Hong-rip accepts that he acted on a secret order to “decide which way to turn according to the situation”. What the annals actually preserve as a royal instruction, dated 18 March 1619 (the 3rd day of the 2nd lunar month), is different: Gang was told not simply to follow the Chinese generals but to concentrate on not being defeated — it says nothing about surrender. Han Myeong-gi reads the king’s guidance in this cautious sense and notes that the Korean and Manchu accounts disagree on who first proposed the surrender. The claim of a secret order to surrender rests on statements made after Gwanghae’s fall. (Nurhaci and the Later Jin are covered in a separate article.)

In the coup dated to the 13th day of the 3rd lunar month of 1623 (12 April), Westerner officials led by Yi Gwi and Kim Ryu, with Choe Myeong-gil, Kim Ja-jeom and the troops of Yi Seo, rose in support of Prince Neungyang, a grandson of Seonjo and nephew of Gwanghae. Moving by night, they broke in through the Changui Gate and entered Changdeokgung, where fire spread through the halls. Gwanghae escaped, hid in the house of the physician An Guk-sin, and was captured. The rebels went to Queen Dowager Inmok in her place of confinement, and Prince Neungyang became king there; he is known as Injo.

The next day Inmok issued an edict explaining the deposition. It accused Gwanghae of killing her father and her son, imprisoning her, killing his brothers and nephews, demolishing thousands of houses to build two palaces over ten years, and selling offices. It then turned to foreign policy: Joseon owed Ming its restoration in the Imjin War, but Gwanghae had “shown sincerity to the barbarians”, secretly told his commander to act according to circumstances so that the whole army surrendered, and failed to send troops despite repeated imperial edicts. These two sets of charges — crimes against family and betrayal of Ming — framed how he was judged for the next three centuries.

Gwanghae was exiled to Ganghwa Island; his wife and his son, the deposed crown prince, died in exile within months. He was moved during the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636, to Taean and Gyodong among other places, and finally to Jeju Island, where he died on 7 August 1641. King Injo suspended court for three days. His tomb, with that of his wife, lies at Namyangju near Seoul, far humbler than the royal tombs of other kings.

Almost everything we know about Gwanghae comes from the Veritable Records (sillok), and each relevant volume was compiled by one side of a factional struggle. The Seonjo sillok was compiled under Gwanghae himself, from 1609 to 1616, first under Yi Hang-bok but later led by Northerners such as Yi I-cheom and Gi Ja-heon. The encyclopedia article by Oh Hang-nyeong judges that it often failed to stay impartial, praising the Northerners and disparaging the Westerners and Southerners. After 1623 the Westerners prepared a Revised Annals of Seonjo (Seonjo sujeong sillok), completed in 1657, which groups each month’s events under a single date.

The record of Gwanghae’s own reign is called an ilgi (“daily record”) rather than a sillok because he was deposed. Compilation was decided in 1624, after Yi Gwal’s rebellion had scattered many of the government records, so the compilers gathered family-held drafts of former historians, court gazettes, private diaries, memorial drafts and unofficial histories. It was finished in the 12th lunar month of 1633 (around the turn of 1634), but only the first few volumes were ever printed. Uniquely among the annals, both the working draft (the Taebaeksan copy, 64 volumes, full of deletions and additions) and the fair copy (the Jeongjoksan copy) survive. The encyclopedia warns that because Westerners who had taken power in the coup led the work, their views must be taken into account.

Historians therefore read these records in layers: a royal order or a copied envoy’s report differs from a minister’s accusation, and both differ from a historian’s comment added years later. The note about Gang Hong-rip’s secret instruction and the poison rumour about Seonjo’s death belong to that last layer. Independent first-hand sources, such as Jeong Tak’s diary of the divided court and the Ming documents copied into the annals, help to check them.

Under the Joseon dynasty Gwanghae could only be a “deposed ruler” and a “benighted ruler”: Injo’s descendants held the throne, and any rehabilitation would have questioned the coup that put them there. The first positive reassessment came from Japanese scholars in the 1930s. Inaba Iwakichi’s Kōkaikun jidai no Mansen kankei (1933) praised Gwanghae’s course between Ming and the Later Jin and blamed the purges on the Greater Northerners. Gye Seung-beom calls this a political reading by colonial-era scholars after the Manchurian Incident of 1931, who wished to treat Manchuria and Korea as one region separate from China proper. After liberation Yi Byeong-do adopted the view in 1959, and the image of Gwanghae’s “neutral diplomacy” entered textbooks.

Han Myeong-gi’s Gwanghaegun: a monarch who pursued an outstanding foreign policy (2000) developed the positive view on a much wider base of sources: in his reading Gwanghae understood the danger of the Ming expedition, tried to limit Korean losses and avoided a war with the Jurchens that Korea could not win. Han also criticised earlier work for ignoring Gwanghae’s limitations.

Critics answer that the label “neutrality” misreads the period. Oh Hang-nyeong, in Gwanghaegun, that dangerous mirror and in later essays, argues that domestic and foreign policy cannot be separated: the palace projects, the stalling of the tax reform and the purges drained the money and loyalty a real foreign policy needed, leaving only opportunism — “watching the situation”. Gye Seung-beom, author of a study of Joseon’s overseas troop dispatches and of the 2021 book The Queen Mother’s Treason, questions whether the policy was wise “neutrality” at all, argues that Gwanghae was not a puppet of the Greater Northerners, and warns that some of his achievements have been inflated.

The main chronology is well established, but some details — how Yeongchang died, what Gang Hong-rip was told, who proposed the surrender — remain disputed, as do motive, responsibility and the labels attached to him. The encyclopedia’s current article ends with the reminder that judgements of Gwanghae have changed with the times and should be approached with an open mind.