A History of Korea (56 page)

Ch
ng would never recover his political or intellectual influence, even after his exile of over fifteen years ended while in his late fifties (he would live into his seventies). But the second half of his life that he spent in exile and recovery proved extremely fruitful for him intellectually: it allowed him to reorganize his thoughts, synthesize the various strains of reformist policies that had circulated in the late eighteenth century, and witness directly the plight of the people in the countryside. As a result, he could provide an exhaustive diagnosis for Korea’s systemic ills. His proposed solutions in many ways reflected the influence of the northern learning school, especially given his embrace of new technologies—and particularly in agriculture—though with a more reserved enthusiasm for copying the Qing model. In contrast to his friend Pak Chega, Ch
ng directed more of his attention to fixing statecraft, with an emphasis of fundamental points inherent to Neo-Confucian doctrine but left neglected over the years amidst the wrangling over abstractions. Ch
ng’s premise, then, was that a good society began with good governance more than with material or technological advances. This perspective was reflected in his most famous work,
Core Teachings for Shepherding the People
, which harkened back
to the focus in the Confucian classics on proper education, guidance, and care for the people as the basis of proper government and society. On one level, this work was a handbook on how to be an effective county magistrate, based on Ch
ng’s own experiences as both a magistrate and exiled observer. On another level, the reform measures advocated in this work extended to lessons on administration that applied on a far wider scale. Ch
ng argued, for example, that real-life administrative problems were handled poorly due to the government’s reliance on a stilted examination system to recruit officials, which rewarded rote learning and empty philosophy.

That Ch
ng Yagyong, like Pak Chega and Pak Chiw
n, faded into the political and intellectual wilderness in the early nineteenth century heightens the contrast with their prominence in the late eighteenth century, and in turn the sense of what might have been. Their fates, then, constituted a regrettable end to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the Chos
n golden age: a whimper instead of a bang. The bang would have to await the tumult of the ensuing era.

12

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Popular Culture in the Late Chos
n Era

CHRONOLOGY

early 17th c.	Publication of the Tale of Hong Kiltong
1844	Publication of the Hosan Unofficial History by Cho H iryong
1850s	Standardization of p’ansori librettos by Sin Chaehyo
1858	Publication of the History of Sunflowers
1862	Publication of Observations from the Countryside by Yu Chaeg n

PUBLICATION OF
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE
, 1862

“Many upstanding people have lived in our country, which stretches for hundreds of miles in all directions. How can it be, then, that we know about only a few of these people whose stories deserve to be passed down through our words and literature?” So asks the scholar and renowned painter Cho H
iryong in the preface to the book,
Observations from the Countryside
, on behalf of the book’s author, Yu Chaeg
n. Yu’s work meant to address Cho’s rhetorical question by presenting the biographical portraits of almost 300 notable people whose lower social status had prevented their upstanding actions and lives from having become more widely known. Their backgrounds ranged from the well-educated but subordinated groups of people holding technical positions in the government—or
chungin
, like Yu himself—to local military officers, clerks, doctors, artists, peasants, and merchants, as well as slaves, monks, and other “mean” people. People of all such backgrounds lived as models of filiality, morality, self-cultivation, and sacrifice, Yu wanted to show.