A History of Korea (37 page)

ng’s increasing influence accompanied his accumulation of political offices, and he even went on a diplomatic mission to China to soothe the concerns of the Ming court. Ch
ng’s rivals managed to send him to a brief exile in 1391, but to his rescue came Yi Pangw
n, who killed many of these rivals, including the most prominent loyalists to the fading Kory
monarchy. In 1392, freed from his imprisonment with the help of Pangw
n, Ch
ng Toj
n joined dozens of other top scholar-officials in officially pleading for Yi S
nggye, the man who had effectively ruled the country since 1388, to take the final step and establish a new dynastic order. For all of these efforts on Yi’s behalf, Ch
ng Toj
n was awarded the designation of Dynastic Foundation Merit Subject, First Rank.

Ch
ng’s role in this story invites comparison with other lieutenants of military leaders who established new political orders in Korea, such as Kim Ch’unch’u, the mastermind behind General Kim Yusin’s campaigns to unify the three kingdoms (
Chapter 2
), and later Kim Jong Pil, the dutiful assistant to General Park Chung Hee in the 1960s (
Chapter 23
). Unlike these two, however, Ch
ng Toj
n would not survive the turmoil of the takeover process, and so he came to resemble more the many scholar-officials in the Chos
n era who would become embroiled in royal disputes and pay for this involvement with their lives. Like his successors, Ch
ng was driven by a fierce insistence on his own interpretation of Confucian ideology, and by the official’s obligation to remonstrate the monarch when the latter strayed from the proper path. As part of the earliest cohort of Confucian scholar-officials in the Chos
n, however, he helped lay down the original blueprint of the dynastic order, and thereby exerted a far greater influence than his peers would later. Ch
ng was by no means the only important figure in this regard, and to some historians his contributions were overshadowed by those of other “founding [Confucian] fathers” of this era. But clearly Ch
ng stood as the most versatile and influential in establishing the fundamental contours of early Chos
n government and society.