Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty (Joseon wangjo sillok) are the official histories of the kings of Joseon, the dynasty that ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910. Each king has his own sillok, or “veritable record”, which describes the events of his reign day by day. Taken together, the records for 25 kings, from the founder Taejo to Cheoljong, cover 472 years.

The records are enormous. The usual count is 1,893 gwon (fascicles, the traditional unit of a Chinese-style book) bound in 888 volumes, containing roughly 49 million characters. They were written in Classical Chinese, the language used for government and scholarship throughout East Asia. They are often described as the longest continuous official record of a single dynasty in the world.

The sillok are much more than a list of kings’ deeds. They record debates at court, memorials from officials, appointments and punishments, laws, diplomacy with China, Japan and the Jurchens, famines and floods, earthquakes and comets. For anyone who wants to understand Korean history between the late fourteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, they are the fundamental source.

The records began with court historians called sagwan. Eight junior officials of the Office of Royal Decrees (Yemungwan) served as full-time historians, and many other officials held historian titles alongside their regular jobs. At least one historian was expected to be present whenever the king met his ministers, heard reports or held lectures. Joseon kings were not supposed to conduct official business without a historian in the room.

The historians’ notes were called sacho, “history drafts”. Besides the official copies, historians also wrote private drafts (gajang sacho) that they kept at home, sometimes adding their own comments, and handed them in only when the next history was compiled. Only historians were allowed to see these drafts. Leaking or altering them was a serious crime.

Most importantly, the king was not allowed to read the drafts or the finished record of his own reign. The idea was that if rulers could not see what was written about them, they could not punish historians for honest writing. The story of King Taejong’s fall from his horse in 1404, when the king ordered that the historian should not be told and the historian recorded the order too, is often retold to show this principle in action.

A king’s sillok was compiled only after his death, during the reign of his successor. The court set up a temporary office, the Sillokcheong (Office for Annals Compilation), usually headed by one of the three State Councillors, with leading scholars as editors. The office divided the reign among several teams, each responsible for particular years.

The teams gathered every available source: the historians’ drafts, the administrative record (sijeonggi) kept by the Office of Annals (Chunchugwan), the daily diary of the Royal Secretariat (Seungjeongwon ilgi), records of royal lectures and reports from government offices. They arranged the material in order of year, month and day and wrote a first draft (chocho).

A central bureau then revised the first draft into a middle draft (jungcho), correcting mistakes, filling gaps and cutting unnecessary material. Finally the chief editors polished it into the final draft (jeongcho). After the finished record was printed or copied and stored away, the drafts and source notes were washed in water so that the ink came off, a procedure called secho. This protected the secrecy of the drafts and allowed the valuable paper to be reused.

The first sillok, for King Taejo, was completed in 1413. At first two copies of each record were kept, one at the Office of Annals in the capital, Hanseong (Seoul), and one in the provincial town of Chungju. In 1445, under King Sejong, the court decided this was too risky and set up additional archives (sago) at Jeonju and Seongju, so that four copies existed. From the reign of Sejong onward the records were printed with movable type rather than copied by hand, making multiple copies easier to produce.

The Japanese invasions of 1592–1598 proved the wisdom of this policy and also its limits. The archives in Seoul, Chungju and Seongju were destroyed. Only the Jeonju copy survived, because local scholars, including An Ui and Son Hong-rok, carried the books to safety in the Naejangsan mountains before Japanese troops arrived. The court later moved them further from danger.

After the war, the government reprinted the records of the first thirteen reigns between 1603 and 1606. Together with the surviving Jeonju set and a proof copy, this produced five sets. One stayed in the capital; the other four were placed in remote mountain or island archives: Mount Mani on Ganghwa Island, Mount Taebaek, Mount Myohyang and Mount Odae. Buddhist temples near these archives helped guard them.

The capital copy burned during Yi Gwal’s rebellion in 1624 and was never replaced. The Myohyangsan set was moved to Mount Jeoksang in 1633 as relations with the rising Later Jin (Qing) state worsened, and the Manisan set, damaged in the Qing invasion of 1636, was later moved to Jeongjoksan on Ganghwa. From then on four sets were kept and each new sillok was added to all of them.

Because the sillok combine so many sources, they cover almost every area of state activity: politics, law, taxation, the military, foreign relations, rituals, education and the examination system, as well as natural events. Entries on droughts, floods, epidemics and famine relief show how the state responded to disasters. Records of eclipses, comets, meteors and unusual weather have been used by modern scientists studying the history of the sky and climate.

The records also preserve many historians’ comments, introduced by a phrase meaning “The historian remarks…”. In these comments historians judged officials’ characters and criticised policies, giving the sillok a moral and political voice as well as a factual one.

Some rulers do not have a sillok in name. Yeonsangun and Gwanghaegun, the two kings who were deposed, have “diaries” (ilgi) instead, reflecting their lower status in the eyes of the officials who removed them. The Gwanghaegun ilgi was never printed and survives in handwritten drafts, which show editors’ corrections on the page and allow scholars to watch the editing process.

For East Asian history more broadly, the sillok are an important source on Ming and Qing China, Japan, the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Jurchen peoples, since Joseon recorded envoys, letters and intelligence about its neighbours in detail.

Each entry begins with a date. Years are counted by the king’s reign rather than by a continuous era, months follow the lunar calendar, and days are named with the sixty-day cycle of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches. By the Joseon convention, a new king’s first full year usually began on the New Year after his accession, out of respect for the predecessor; the year of accession itself was counted as the “accession year”. Converting these dates into the Western calendar requires care, and modern online editions supply conversions.

Under each date come one or more short items. A typical entry might record that the king held a royal lecture, that an official submitted a memorial, what it argued and how the king replied, or that a province reported a drought. Long memorials are often quoted in full, which is why the records are so large.

Famous moments of Korean history can be found this way. For example, the record of King Sejong notes in the twelfth month of his twenty-fifth year (around the turn of 1443–1444 in the Western calendar) that the king had personally created twenty-eight letters, the script now known as Hangul. Reading such passages in their context, surrounded by everyday business, gives a vivid sense of how the court actually worked.

The practice of compiling veritable records came from China, where each reign’s shilu was compiled from the Tang dynasty onward and later served as the basis for official dynastic histories. Goryeo had also compiled sillok, but those records were lost. Joseon took up the tradition with special seriousness.

Joseon was founded by officials and scholars committed to Neo-Confucianism. In this tradition, history was a mirror for rulers: by recording good and bad government truthfully, historians would praise virtue, expose wrongdoing and guide future kings. The saying that history is written “for ten thousand generations” captures the sense that the sillok were meant for posterity rather than for the reigning king.

This ideal gave historians real power but also put them at risk. In 1498, during the compilation of King Seongjong’s record, a historian’s draft that contained an essay by his teacher Kim Jong-jik was reported to King Yeonsangun, who read it as an attack on the legitimacy of the royal line. The result was the Muo literati purge, in which scholars were executed or exiled and Kim Jong-jik’s corpse was mutilated. The episode shows both how dangerous honest history could be and why secrecy mattered.

After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the colonial authorities took control of the records. The Jeongjoksan and Taebaeksan sets were moved to Seoul and in 1930 transferred to Keijō Imperial University. The Jeoksangsan set went to the library of the former royal household. The Odaesan set was sent to Tokyo Imperial University, where most of it was destroyed by fire in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923; a small number of volumes came back to Seoul in 1932.

After liberation in 1945, the Jeongjoksan and Taebaeksan sets stayed with Seoul National University, the successor of the colonial university, and its Kyujanggak archive. The Taebaeksan set was later moved to the National Archives of Korea’s Busan branch. The Jeoksangsan set was taken north during the Korean War and is reported to be held in Pyongyang. In 2006 the University of Tokyo returned 47 Odaesan volumes that had survived there.

The sillok were first reproduced in photographic facsimile in the colonial period, then in South Korea by the National Institute of Korean History in the 1950s. North Korea published a full translation into modern Korean in the late twentieth century. In South Korea a modern Korean translation of 413 volumes was completed between 1968 and 1993 by the Sejong Memorial Society and the Korean Classics Research Institute (Minjok Munhwa Chujinhoe). A CD-ROM edition appeared in 1995, and since 2006 the full text, translation and page images have been freely available online. In 2012 the Institute announced a long-term plan for an English translation.

The records, excluding the last two reigns discussed below, were designated a National Treasure of South Korea in 1973 and inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 1997. UNESCO’s description highlights the length of the record, the variety of subjects and the care taken to protect the historians’ independence.

The sillok are the basis for countless historical dramas, films, novels and webcomics set in the Joseon period. Writers mine them for plots, dialogue and characters, and online access has made “checking the sillok” a popular pastime among viewers who want to know how far a drama departs from the record.

For Koreans, the sillok have become a symbol of a culture of record-keeping, often mentioned together with the Seungjeongwon ilgi, the Uigwe and other Joseon archives. Historians caution, however, that the value of the records lies not in national pride but in their usefulness as evidence, which requires critical reading.

The ideal of impartial history did not make the sillok neutral. From the late sixteenth century Joseon politics was dominated by rival factions, and the faction in power usually controlled the compilation office. When a rival faction later came to power, it sometimes produced a revised record. The best-known examples are the Revised Veritable Records of King Seonjo (Seonjo sujeong sillok, completed in 1657), a revised record for King Hyeonjong and revised or supplementary records for Kings Gyeongjong and Sukjong. Notably, the originals were not destroyed: both versions were kept, allowing modern historians to compare them and see where interpretations diverged.

The records also have structural limits. They are written from the perspective of the court and the central government. Local society, commoners, women, slaves and religious minorities appear mainly when they became a concern of the state. Scholars also note that entries from the later dynasty become shorter and more formulaic, and that domestic politics was more affected by factional editing than foreign relations.

The two records for Gojong (r. 1864–1907) and Sunjong (r. 1907–1910) are treated separately. They were compiled between 1927 and 1935 by an office of the former royal household under Japanese colonial supervision, did not follow the traditional procedures based on historians’ drafts, and reflect a colonial viewpoint. For this reason most historians exclude them from the Veritable Records proper, and they are not part of the National Treasure designation or the UNESCO inscription, although they remain useful as sources when read critically.

Modern scholarship therefore reads the sillok alongside other sources: the far more detailed Seungjeongwon ilgi, the king’s daily record Ilseongnok, private diaries and collected writings, local gazetteers and foreign records from China and Japan. Digitisation has transformed this work, making it possible to search the entire corpus, trace terms over centuries and apply quantitative methods.

Historians debate how much real independence the historians enjoyed. Kings could not read the sillok, but they could shape the court’s agenda, appoint compilers and punish officials for other reasons. The purges of 1498 and later show that the protective system could break down. Some scholars stress the remarkable persistence of the ideal; others emphasise the ways in which the records served the interests of the officials who wrote them, since the scholar-official class was both author and subject.

Another discussion concerns the physical history of the sets: the relationships between the Jeonju original, the 1603–1606 reprints and the proof copies, the survival and whereabouts of volumes dispersed during the colonial period and the Korean War, and the status of the Jeoksangsan set in North Korea, for which there is little independent information. The return of Odaesan volumes from Japan in 2006 renewed debate about where the records should be kept, and whether they should stay together in Seoul or return to the regions where the old archives stood.

Translation is also a scholarly issue. Existing modern Korean translations were produced over decades under time and budget pressure, and critics have pointed to errors and inconsistencies. Re-translation projects and the long-term English translation plan raise questions about terminology for Joseon institutions and about how to make the records accessible to international researchers without flattening their Classical Chinese nuances.