Still, my father insisted on sending me to the seowon, the Confucian school for yangban, in the village when I was seven so that I would begin the study of the Chinese classics. While my younger brothers and sisters worked in the fields and grew brown in the sun, I stayed pale from living indoors, my nose pressed against old, moldering paper marked with fading Chinese characters. But I did well. At thirteen, my father sent me farther, to the school in the provisional town, and at nineteen, I traveled to the capital and sat for the Hanseongsi, the first part of the state examination. Out of over ten thousand of us throughout the land who took this exam, only 330 passed. Happily, I was amongst this number. After the third exam, the Jeonsi, thirty of us received civil posts. They said our names inthe order in which we passed: I was third. We top three entered the Royal Office of the Secretariat. My father’s bet had paid off; my salary would keep us from starving when the crops failed as they seemed to do every few years. We might even be able to get ourselves ahead—buy more land, differentiate our crops, marry off the older girls so that they were safe from the yearly tributes to Ming China.
The Royal Office of the Secretariat required the most learned and literate of men. For it was the royal secretaries’ job to write down the king’s every word, public or private, excepting his most intimate quarters, of course. We also had to read all the memorials that came in for the king, all those scrolls with complaints, supplications, and tattling—who stole whose pig, who slandered whose name, and so on and so forth—and decide which needed the king’s attention, which could be summarized for him in a short report, and which was to be cast aside. We also wrote the king’s responses to the most important memorials, after conferring with him, of course. In 1746, we also began keeping a diary for Crown Prince Sado when he officially became prince-regent. He was fourteen at the time.
I was hired to assist one of the two royal secretaries who would pass down to future generations the words and actions of the Prince. It was my job to carry the writing box, to arrange the paper and ink when it was time, to make sure the brushes were kept clean. My master was a lax fellow and did not expect much of me, so for a long time I felt happy and content in the palace. I ate well, was clothed in the blue silk of my rank, and partook of the many feasts and festivals that required royal attendance. The Prince spent most of his time with the royal tutors, and it was the responsibility of the other royal secretariat, Lord Jang, who was more versed in the Chinese classics, to keep the Prince’s diary when he was studying.
Lord Lim and I were in charge of public and private meetings, and that was all, because Prince Sado was just a child. Later, we would be required to be with him at all times, and ifLord Lim weren’t already dead, this surely would have killed him. For my life changed as Prince Sado grew older, and not for the better.
To understand the Prince, one must know his beginnings. He was born a solemn child, slight of build, long-necked, with a sad expression in his eyes. Perhaps this was because he was always lonely, having been taken from his mother when he was only a hundred days old and moved to the prince-regent’s palace. Privately, we all thought this separation too early but the King was fifty-six years old and had already been ruling for twenty-five years. He gave Prince Sado his own palace in order to establish him straightaway as the future prince-regent.
During his early years, the Prince’s mother, Lady Sonhui, came often, sometimes daily, and was even sometimes accompanied by the King, but it was not the same as living under the same roof with one’s own parents, and the Crown Prince learned early that everyone he loved would go away. Until the Prince married at the age of ten, there were no children around him. He sometimes visited with his sisters, the Princesses Hwasun, Hwapyong, and Hwahyop, but not very often. And when they did, they sat in a room like grown-ups—conversing while eating sweets and drinking tea.
Most of the time Prince Sado was surrounded by silly court ladies and lazy eunuchs who let him do whatever he pleased.
According to those who knew of the Prince’s early years, he was an extremely bright child who delighted and astonished his parents by walking at four months and speaking at six. At seven months, he could point to the four cardinal directions. At three years he could recite half of Confucius’s Analects. But at five, he suffered an ailment of unknown origin. It struck suddenly, taking all strength from him, and for many months, the palace feared they might lose him. But he recovered, though he was pale and listless for many months, and some say he was much changed by his illness.
In terms of temperament, the Prince was a thoughtful child, slow to make decisions, listening carefully to others without letting his own opinion be known. In this way he was quite different from his father, King Yongjo, who was extremely decisive and opinionated. Where the one acted quickly, the other hesitated, unsure which path to take. One could see from the beginning how unfortunate it was that Prince Sado and King Yongjo had such different personalities. The King simply could not understand why it took the Prince so long to answer a question from the royal tutors, and he made his frustrations plain, shouting at the Prince to answer more quickly. He mistakenly took
