The Rising Tide (1)
What Yi Hwan admired most about Jeongjo was the kind of power that could bend reality itself.
By tradition, royal tombs had to be placed within eighty ri of the capital, and the king himself was forbidden from traveling more than eighty ri beyond its walls.
And yet Hyeollyungwon, the tomb Jeongjo built for Crown Prince Sado, stood eighty-eight ri from the capital.
The officials looking for faults had opposed the royal procession, waving law and precedent in the air. Going back again and again to that butcher’s son would only frighten the ministers who had cooperated in Sado’s execution and stir up political unrest.
According to legend, Jeongjo’s reply was this:
“From Seoul to Suwon, it is now eighty ri.”
The ministers trembled at a power that could govern even space itself. The scripture passage about ancient kings measuring distance by their own bodies turned out, after all, to mean that the system of measurement belonged to the sovereign’s whim.
Crown Prince Heonjong Yi Hwan wanted to decide the way the world itself was measured, too.
A king does not argue. A king does not prove. He simply rules, and what he decrees is made to stand.
First, Yi Hwan had to become king. The Opium War, the westward advance of the West, and all the rest could be dealt with after that.
* * *
The line that “Chongwiyeong follows the example of Jangyongyeong” carried a political meaning even Yi Hwan found satisfying.
Using Jeongjo’s precedent to shut down objections—after all, if you called Jeongjo wrong, then you were being impious toward Jeongjo himself—while displaying his own filial devotion was the sort of move a man who had studied the art of kingship ought to make without even thinking.
But Yi Hwan went one step further.
By providing Jangyongyeong as a clear blueprint, he had also decided the size of Chongwiyeong’s budget.
As long as the operational records of Jangyongyeong still existed, there was no way to get away with building nothing but an empty shell of an army. They would have to restore Jeongjo’s Jangyongyeong.
The ministers felt as if they could have set fire to Gyujanggak itself, where the original records were kept.
The king seemed to have forgotten one crucial fact: unlike Jeongjo, when he built Hwaseong New Town and Jangyongyeong, there was no enormous new source of revenue waiting in the wings—nothing comparable to the ginseng boom he had sparked.
But Yi Hwan had already pushed Chongwiyeong through in actual history.
And now his counterblow was even weaker than it had been then. The king had a justification that far outstripped vague complaints like “the palace guards have grown lax.”
The chief ministers of the State Council, all sighing heavily, turned to one side.
Not to the State Council’s de facto leader, the Chief State Councilor Gwon Don-in. No one who stood in the council and mattered at all could be so naïve as not to know where true power lay.
The Minister of Public Works, Kim Jwa-geun, opened the eyes he had been keeping closed.
But instead of speaking at once, he glanced sideways first.
There sat Hong Jae-ryong, the current peak of the nation’s active generals and commander of the Training Corps, and Lee Yu-su, already chosen as the future commander of the new Chongwiyeong, both looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Hong Jae-ryong was the father of the queen consort from the Hong clan of Andong, the secondary queen the court had taken in after the old queen died, and thus the current father-in-law of the king. Lee Yu-su, meanwhile, came from a distinguished military lineage with little connection to the old aristocratic clans; he was a pure soldier through and through.
Both were weapons Yi Hwan had arranged as best he could to stand against the Andong Kim clan. The king’s transparent hope was clear enough: if he could just seize the army, everything else could be settled with sword and spear.
Childish thinking…
Kim Jwa-geun felt a sigh rise in his chest.
The king seemed to have chosen the Andong Kim clan as his enemy, but he had missed the target from the start.
Even if he borrowed another clan’s power to drive them out, that clan would merely take the same place in turn. As for Lee Yu-su, that was one thing, but Hong Jae-ryong was also from one of the great historic lineages, the Namyang Hong clan, and no less formidable than the Andong Kims.
If the king truly dreamed of an absolute monarchy all by himself, then he would have to exterminate or castrate the whole lot of the great aristocratic houses. Say he did that, then what?
Did he mean to drag farmers and merchants into the council hall of an empty kingdom and scream at them instead?
A king could rule a country only because there was an aristocratic class to serve as bridge and limb.
Without nobles, there was no king. Kim Jwa-geun grew weary at the thought that a teenage tantrum ought to have its limits.
And yet even this sort of youthful arrogance was part of his burden as the leader of the true masters of the land, the very people who really ran Joseon.
At last Kim Jwa-geun spoke in his heavy, measured voice.
“This harsh royal command has all arisen from the negligence of those below, from disguise and the failings of the civil officials. Therefore, all the high ministers must properly fear it and obey. But if the people suffer harm, then it is our duty to speak up and remonstrate with all our strength.”
The other chief ministers raised their heads at once.
First of all, they would cooperate with the creation of Chongwiyeong. Fine—if the king wanted Jangyongyeong copied and pasted, then they could do that. After all, that was the specialty of bureaucrats.
The real point of counterattack was the army’s operating expenses.
The budget the state directly allotted to Joseon’s military was only a tiny fraction of what it needed. Most of it was covered by the fields the army owned, the right to collect taxes on salt and fish, market protection fees, book and vegetable sales, and the plunder they took by raiding weaker government offices.
That was why Kim Jwa-geun had spoken of “harm to the people.”
Whatever the name—Chongwiyeong, Jangyongyeong, or some Iron Brigade nonsense—they were still Joseon soldiers.
To achieve quick results, they would loot and extort from every corner. Then the censorial officials would rise in protest, and Kim Jwa-geun would pressure the king through his sister, the Queen Dowager. The king would have no choice but to shrink back.
Since time immemorial, monarchs who favored military force had usually met ugly ends. The king had no legitimacy for sustaining such an army.
Unless some war broke out, of course.
The State Council adjourned soon after that.
All the chief ministers except Hong Jae-ryong and Lee Yu-su wore cold, mocking smiles. The king’s little game would end after a few sweet months at most.
Kim Jwa-geun, the last one left behind, lit his long bamboo pipe inside the empty State Council building.
A pipe fit for a man of his rank was so long that no one could light it by himself—but there was no need to worry.
Some kind of automatic ignition device, far more practical than waterproof matches or a Zippo lighter, flared to life, lit the pipe, and disappeared.
The tobacco burning in the pipe was sangdeung grass, a premium leaf comparable to the Seongcheon sweetgrass Taesu had managed to get his hands on.
It was the sort of thing China itself couldn’t get enough of.
Kim Jwa-geun thought about Yi Won-beom amid that luxurious smoke.
He had never met him, but he seemed clearly better than the king he had now.
So they say the Ganghwa governor reports that he just sits at home reading books, but I ought to learn more about him.
But Kim Jwa-geun was already too big a figure to move personally.
And rather than sending some half-baked fool, it was better to receive covert reports from the Ganghwa governor directly.
After much consideration, Kim Jwa-geun did not discover the answer until he returned home.
He said to his adopted son, Kim Byeong-gi, who had come to pay his respects.
“How old are you this year?”
“I am twenty-nine, Father.”
Yi Won-beom was sixteen.
To a sixteen-year-old, that might have sounded ridiculous, but to Kim Jwa-geun, who was fifty, the two were practically of the same generation.
“Are you studying diligently? Next year, Her Majesty the Queen Dowager will turn forty-two. There will surely be a special court examination for the occasion, so you should make proper preparations.”
In truth, it was a nonsense thing to say.
Only half-broke families bet their entire future on getting into a top university; the truly rich and powerful didn’t need exams at all.
So Kim Jwa-geun wasn’t really asking after academic merit. He was saying that he would set up an exam next year and expecting to see loyalty in return for having brought Kim Byeong-gi into the house as the heir to supreme power.
Kim Byeong-gi, the last of the Andong Kim clan’s great retainers, was not the sort of man who would fail to understand that.
“How could success in the world be more important than filial devotion? In my own inadequate way, I have been striving all along. I have no intention of ever bringing shame upon the family name.”
The answer made it clear that the true object of loyalty was not the country, but one’s father and one’s clan—and only after that came worldly success, if there was any left over.
Kim Jwa-geun was satisfied.
“Until next year, quietly put your studies in order at Jeondeungsa. Ganghwado is a land rich with royal relics and worthy energies, and you may draw strength from it.”
Still prostrate, Kim Byeong-gi was bewildered. He wondered whether his father had gone mad.
What he needed right now was obviously not some foolish preparation for a passing exam. It was the cultivation of the many connections needed to keep the family’s wealth and glory alive forever.
Given the flow of the conversation, Kim Byeong-gi had naturally expected that, from now on, his network would be handed down to him in Seoul. That was an essential step for someone like him, who would soon be walking the elite civil-service path.
But Ganghwado? Jeondeungsa might be a temple steeped in history, but what did that have to do with political power?
As he thought it over, Kim Byeong-gi’s expression changed.
Among the words his father had spoken was the phrase “royal relics.”
Go there and, on one hand, watch Yi Won-beom. On the other, make his acquaintance. At the proper time, I’ll hand him the throne.
It was as if the words his father had left unsaid could be heard in his voice.
So this, too, must be a lesson in kingship for a future ruler. Kim Byeong-gi lowered his head.
“I will obey your command.”
* * *
Cha Un-hong’s assessment of Taesu’s abilities was not entirely wrong.
English, for example.
Kim Dae-geon was better than Taesu, naturally, but that was because he was a genius. Taesu’s own English, honed in the trenches of real life instead of on the college entrance exam battlefield, was still good enough to use.
This wasn’t the twenty-first century yet, when English speakers would act scandalized and ask, What, this earthling doesn’t know English? So there was no serious problem with communication.
The regrettable thing was that the “Westerners” he had to deal with first were not English speakers at all.
French Navy Rear Admiral Jean-Baptiste Cécille had originally come to Joseon around September of that year by the solar calendar.
The purpose revealed in his letters was clear enough.
To exact blood payment for the “French priests” martyred during the Gihae Persecution in 1839.
There was also the claim that, since Kim Dae-geon had been under arrest at the time and was also a priest, the mission was meant to rescue him. In fact, Cécille had carried out a rescue operation for priests in Vietnam the previous year, in 1845, so the story sounded plausible.
But in Cécille’s official documents regarding Joseon in 1846, there was not a single mention of Kim Dae-geon, who was imprisoned at the time.
It was likely that Cécille simply did not know of Kim Dae-geon’s predicament, but even if he had known, it was doubtful the outcome would have changed.
France may have been the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, but that did not mean it had the right to avenge every priest’s death. Kim Dae-geon was not a subject of the French crown.
However, Kim Dae-geon was also a member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. If he survived and could carry the organization’s name, then even the navy could not ignore him entirely.
This was different from the original history, where the French priests were dead and the Joseon priest was destined to die, leaving the military free to devise revenge on its own without worry.
As it stood, Cécille was in a very awkward position facing a Kim Dae-geon who had survived all the way to Shanghai.
Kim Dae-geon could speak the language of nearly every country that possessed warships and cannons.
So there was no problem with him pouring out a passionate speech in French before Cécille.
“If you had seen the report on the martyrs that I sent first, you would not have been able to remain silent. How could the grace bestowed by the Emperor of France on his subjects grow thin simply because the distance is great?”
Kim Dae-geon slammed a copy of the Report on the Martyrs down in front of Cécille again.
The three priests at the center of that report—Imbert, Chastan, and Aube—were Frenchmen for whom Cécille himself bore responsibility.
“If France does nothing about Joseon, then the momentum of future missions in the Far East will be lost forever. Suspicion will arise even among those in Vietnam, where we are only now beginning to lay foundations.”
If the French navy stayed silent even after the testimony of a living survivor like Kim Dae-geon, then the foundations of Vietnam—currently France’s main objective—would begin to shake.
And if that base were lost, Cécille’s larger scheme to open Ryukyu and Japan could easily go awry as well.
Cécille rubbed his eyes. They were itching.
Because of the war the British bastards had started—the First Opium War—cholera and malaria had swept through southern China and still plagued the region periodically.
In that sense, refusing Kim Dae-geon entry the year before had not been only a political judgment. As a captain, Cécille could at least preserve some dignity despite conjunctivitis, but his men were beyond caring about appearances and were busy suffering from diarrhea.
After pressing at his eyelids for a while, Cécille finally decided, like a proper Frenchman, to respect the priest.
Because in the new historical timeline, Cécille had gained one enormous advantage in advancing into Joseon.
In the original history, the French fleet got lost both this year and the next.
The very Cécille who had tried to enter Ganghwado and pressure Hanyang wound up missing the Han River entirely, sailing to the coast of Chungcheong Province, handing over a single letter, and leaving again.
The following year, Captain Lapierre, who came to the waters off Buan, met an even more miserable fate.
Unlike the peaceful Cécille, Lapierre came in loudly demanding trade rights and even calling for the use of force.
Then he smashed into a reef off the Gogunsan Islands and ran aground.
With food running out, Lapierre had no choice but to sing beggar’s songs while waiting for rescue. Trusting the British charts, of all things, and stepping into these dangerous Joseon waters had been the fatal mistake—though, to be fair, a British ship did eventually come and save them.
But now there was a guide named Kim Dae-geon.
Of course, even before this, Kim Dae-geon had diligently made maps of Joseon and sent them to the French. That was what France had spent money to teach him theology for.
But a map and a living guide were not the same thing; even in the modern era, it was guides who made their living that way.
And this guide had one more piece of information that could not be ignored.
“Among the people I met in Joseon, there was one who had clearly been in deep contact with Europeans. He was probably a soldier, or someone involved in special operations. He seemed to be highly trained.”
Admiral Cécille’s hair stood on end.
Kim Dae-geon may not have known about it, but Cécille did.
The year before, the British warship HMS Samarang had made a brief stop at Jeju Island in Joseon.
Suspiciously enough, the British had not sold opium there or fired a single cannon.
Impossible. They had clearly made some kind of local contact then, by one route or another.
And according to Kim Dae-geon, that “operative” had been encountered on Ganghwado, a critical chokepoint on the road to Joseon’s capital. At that point there was no longer room for doubt.
The British had already been the first European nation to contact Joseon more than twenty years earlier, aboard the Lord Amherst. In the worst case, they might have had a pipeline there ever since.
Captain Cécille grew anxious. He could not afford to fall behind the British.
As it was, he had already toured Okinawa and Nagasaki this year in hopes of opening Ryukyu and Japan, but the results had been painfully poor.
For profoundly French reasons, Captain Cécille decided to head for Joseon.
The twisted tide was converging on Ganghwado.
Author’s Note
1. In Louis-Philippe’s era, France called itself a kingdom[Royaume], but in the documents sent to Joseon, Louis-Philippe was referred to as an emperor. At the time, this implied a monarch who served no higher sovereign.