Man vs Wild (3)
The eye of a typhoon knows nothing of the typhoon itself.
Taesu, standing at the heart of the storm that had broken over the southwest coast, had no idea that the HMS Royalist was nearing Gangjin, no idea of the court’s orders, no idea that the governor of Jeolla Province had been abducted.
That was the court’s business. Just as the court knew almost nothing of Taesu’s movements, Taesu had no way of knowing what the court was doing.
All he could infer was that the HMS Samarang had run aground at Gokpo, so the military garrison at Gangjin—being within the same regional command—had probably gone on alert as well.
In truth, even without any official order from the capital, most of the people in Gangjin already knew about the Samarang.
That was thanks to the Gokpo fishermen who had come with Taesu.
“Park Axe was on the ship, saw what those foreign bastards looked like, and in righteous fury he smashed that oyster shell to bits! You know oysters are good for a man’s stamina, right? Park Axe stepped across the water and leapt onto the foreign ship, then brought his axe down once and snapped that thick mast clean in two!”
“He ate summer oysters?”
“This man doesn’t know a thing. Rock oysters are in season in summer!”
Rumor always outran fact, and after the uproar over the foreign ships these past few days, prices had already climbed quite a bit.
By the time they had sold off all the seafood that couldn’t be stored for long and the Gangjin Songbang could finally be called a proper reopening, Taesu went down to the harbor with Cha Un-hong.
“Normally it wouldn’t matter much if we didn’t have weapons, but if we need them now, someone’s bound to try and buy them from somewhere. If we send them in through the military posts then they’ll probably take them without asking questions.”
“A good idea. There’s no chance of shipping them all the way from Japan on short notice, so that’s our only option. As long as Hobaesu’s ship reaches Gangjin safely, we can use that to get our foot in the door.”
Because they had to observe the basic etiquette of a back-channel deal, even ordinary merchandise like that was necessary.
“Come to think of it, you said the Song merchants also take delivery here.”
“You mean the Yangtae from Jeju—the brim of a hat? Yes. I was just about to look into that myself.”
Strictly speaking, the Song merchants had never been granted some exclusive royal charter over horsehair goods.
But then again, wild Joseon people were not the sort who survived because the state handed them things.
With money and muscle in equal measure, the Song merchants had blocked the land-connected ports of Gangjin, Haenam, and other places and monopolized the Yangtae trade.
If some fool outside their circle—someone like Heosaeng, for instance—came along and bought them up without understanding the market, they would first throw him into the sea and then chase him all the way to the inland logistics hubs of Anseong or Cheonan, stripping everything bare before the goods ever reached Seoul.
Taesu was only just beginning to understand the merchant world of Joseon, and curiosity got the better of him.
“Did the Seoul market merchants just sit there and take it? They’re supposed to be the ones making the most hats and supplying the country, aren’t they?”
“Ah, of course they filed a petition. Every year, toward the end of the year, the king hears from the official merchants and listens to their complaints during the Sunmak audience. It was petitioned forcefully in the reign of the former king, Sunjo.”
The Gongsin—the official merchants—were, in a sense, like the diner or stationery shop in front of a government building.
That is, civil servants constantly suffered under the burden of running tabs that they treated as if it weren’t their own money—though unlike in the modern world, if you collected the debt the wrong way, you got hit. On the other hand, without them, the entire machinery of government would seize up.
That was why the Bibyonsa, Joseon’s highest deliberative body, even had a so-called Minister in Charge of the Market, the Gongsidangsang. The king himself was expected to come out every year and hear the merchants’ voices.
By now the official merchants had become an interest group fused to the Joseon state. It wasn’t a matter of bribery or corruption alone; due to the limits of state capacity, Joseon simply could not afford to abandon them.
“And what happened?”
Cha Un-hong answered cheerfully, as if she herself were no Song merchant.
“Wasn’t that obvious? His Majesty ordered the Song merchants’ greedy profiteering to be strictly forbidden.”
It was the stern command of King Sunjo, the “iron monarch” who had endured the seven-year famine that even the ancient sage-king Tang had weathered by cutting his hair and nails in penance—meaning, in effect, that he’d done absolutely nothing about it—and who had then gone on to suppress one of Joseon’s greatest uprisings, the Hong Gyeong-nae Rebellion.
No modern person would doubt that such a decree against monopoly would be obeyed to the letter.
But Taesu, now standing in Joseon and still seeing the Yangtae trade controlled by the Gangjin Song merchants, had every reason to doubt.
Cha Un-hong confirmed his suspicion for him.
She took the Tongyeong gat in both hands. Then she flapped it open and shut like a fan.
Taesu caught on and leaned his upper body toward her. Cha Un-hong pulled the hat down low, covering both of them at once.
It was a clearly mocking imitation of secrecy.
“And then they petition again, and again His Majesty orders it forbidden, and then they petition again, and again he issues another order… you understand me, don’t you?”
The oxygen-starved people of Joseon had simply let steel rust away.
Seeing Taesu’s face up close, Cha Un-hong let out a small laugh. She lifted the hat away and spoke seriously.
“That doesn’t mean the market merchants were some pitiful lot bullied by the Song merchants, either. In the end, what they were asking for was absurd—they wanted the Yangtae price set by themselves instead of by the Song merchants. They were relying on their closeness to the court and making a plea for favors.”
Either the state should have stayed out of it entirely, or, if it was going to interfere, it should have listened to both sides and thought through the best solution.
But the Joseon government behaved as though it were just another merchant helping his fellow merchants.
The problem was that they held the power of the state.
Of course, that didn’t make the Song merchants’ “business methods” any more moral. Just as Taesu, who had taken lives with an axe over a court-ordered forfeiture, wasn’t exactly in a position to claim the moral high ground himself.
Still, he felt a sour kind of kinship there.
Once the state had stood on the same level as the people and engaged in “commercial competition” like that, it had no special right to claim it was more noble than the common folk.
After all, the state existed to prevent such beastly free-for-all predation, not to throw itself into the fray as one of the beasts.
Taesu said carelessly, not bothering to sound cautious in the least, “If that’s the kind of king we’re dealing with, then I suppose it doesn’t matter much if we sit him wherever we want.”
For someone born in a democratic republic, Taesu’s refusal to speak openly of revolution was, in a way, the ultimate contempt.
The ones who cared most about status were, paradoxically, the republicans. If the origin of the word for “love” really was “to think,” as some claimed, then one inevitably loved one’s greatest enemy the most.
Taesu, having seen republicans unable to resist that nostalgia and recreate class distinctions inside republics all over again, did not care to step into that twisted affection.
If you truly ignored rank and status, then you could hand over a king’s seat the way you’d tell a friend to become the owner of a business account.
And a king was a pretty useful business account at that. There was no need to take enormous risks to eliminate him, and no reason it would be worth the trouble.
“The king will probably stir up something before the year is out. And if I read Ha-eung… or Heungseon-gun, and the others correctly, the king may not have long to live. Then, when the time is right, we can step in.”
“Your carefree audacity is enough to give me chills. If you keep talking like that, one of these days some blade will take your head off, so save those words for when it’s just the two of us, whispered by the pillow.”
So what, you’re criticizing me for only ever wandering around as a peddler?
While Taesu was thinking about the need to buy a house in Gangjin along with setting up the Songbang there, Cha Un-hong raised a hand.
“Anyway, even if I’m a Song merchant, Yangtae isn’t something I can just buy on a whim. Everyone has their own backer in Gaeseong. Let’s see if we can find a place where someone made a mistake or didn’t pay on time and the deal fell apart. If that doesn’t work, we may have to go all the way to Jeju.”
But their search was cut short before long.
They had found a man who made Yangtae entirely unimportant.
He fit the subject they’d been discussing just fine, but in terms of timing and place, he was wildly out of nowhere.
“What brings you here?”
“...That’s my line. What brings you here, my lord?”
It was Prince Heungseon, Yi Ha-eung, whom they had not seen since the Dobansu election.
* * *
Though he had left in humiliation after being disgraced in the Dobansu election, Yi Ha-eung had not given up on ambition.
By his own assessment, the reason he had failed to control the bobusang was that his actual social standing had simply been too low. Looking at history as it really unfolded, that wasn’t entirely wrong.
So Yi Ha-eung first shifted his focus away from force and back toward politics.
He diligently sought out political figures who had been pushed aside by the powerful court families or who held a grudge against them.
It was an age of the Gyeonghwa aristocracy; where else would you find a weighty political figure far from the capital? Yet there were some.
Exile.
Yi Ha-eung gave a perfectly acceptable Joseon reason for his presence.
“I’ve come because my maternal cousin by marriage, the venerable Chusa, is staying in Daejeong-hyeon in Jeolla Province, and I thought I’d bring him some side dishes.”
Taesu was a little surprised. Not at Yi Ha-eung’s courtesy, but at the name itself.
“Chusa? Kim Jeong-hui? The calligrapher?”
You’d better not go around saying a nobleman’s name like that.
Fortunately, Yi Ha-eung had never expected much in the way of manners from Taesu in the first place, so he let it slide.
“So you know him, then. Well, it’s no wonder, given how renowned he is for scholarship. If not for the viciousness of the Andong Kim clan, he’d have been a minister already.”
It is often said that Yun Sang-do impeached the Andong Kim clan and that Kim Jeong-hui, being entangled with Yun Sang-do, was sent into exile as a result—but in this brief account, almost nothing is accurate.
Yun Sang-do had in fact been a man active on the Andong Kim side during Sunjo’s reign. And the people he impeached were not members of the Andong Kim clan at all, but rather men closer to Kim Jeong-hui.
To be more exact, it was a scheme the Andong Kims devised to purge the “Hyo-myung Crown Prince’s inner circle,” which included Kim Jeong-hui.
The Andong Kims knew perfectly well that Sunjo had tried to overcome sedo politics through Crown Prince Hyo-myung.
So the moment the crown prince died, they sent a warning to Sunjo by having Yun Sang-do’s memorial annihilate the prince’s loyalists wholesale.
But when Sunjo instead charged Yun Sang-do’s radical memorial with impiety—essentially labeling it a “thought crime”—even the Andong Kims hesitated. Rusted steel still dies when it is pierced.
As the head of the Andong Kim clan at the time, Kim Hong-geun led the affair with a stroke of creative rethinking.
Ah! If we say that Yun Sang-do’s impious memorial was ordered by the Hyo-myung Crown Prince’s allies, then that will do!
Why would the crown prince’s allies draft a memorial impeaching the crown prince’s allies?
What’s more, Yun Sang-do’s side had even impeached Kim Jeong-hui’s father, Kim No-gyeong, and now they were claiming that Kim Jeong-hui had handed a text to such men? It was baseless slander with no logic behind it whatsoever.
But logic always comes after power. There are no exceptions.
Ten years later, when the current monarch Yi Hwan, that is, Heonjong, began ruling in his own right, the Andong Kims dredged up the old case again, warning that he must not even think thoughts like Crown Prince Hyo-myung’s.
This time, unlike in Sunjo’s day, it was laughable for the king to go on about impiety. The person clearly above the king was the queen dowager, and she was an Andong Kim.
The Andong Kims casually tore Yun Sang-do, who had once acted as their front man, limb from limb and offered him up as a sacrifice to black magic. The ministers who had barely survived as exiled convicts and were still loyal to Crown Prince Hyo-myung’s faction were wiped out entirely.
Kim Jeong-hui, too, had only escaped being beaten to death because the king sent him away into exile as a kind of emergency refuge. At the time, even the king’s own order to send him off quickly was being rejected by the Uigeumbu, which insisted that they should rough him up more with torture before letting him go.
Black and white mixed together; friend and foe could no longer be distinguished. All power simply rested in the hands of the court families.
That was the Kim Jeong-hui case.
Unlike Kim Jwa-geun’s view, the idea that the likely future monarch, Yi Hwan, would use the military to kill off his subjects wholesale was not such a stupid or reckless notion.
The subjects were just as reckless themselves. It was an age ruled by nothing more than the line, “What exactly do you think you can do about it?”
Yi Ha-eung explained this political climate to Taesu.
“However severe the tyranny of the powerful families may be, there are still men of principle like this.”
In any case, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. If you keep dropping a line like that here and there, they won’t be tempted by the powerful families’ seduction.
It was a little worrying that the child attending him seemed to understand better than Park Axe did, but that was how it was.
Even so, Taesu did not share Yi Ha-eung’s indignation. Instead, he looked at him suspiciously.
“You came all the way to Gangjin just for that?”
Yi Ha-eung was startled by the utterly shameless morals of a modern man.
“Just for that? He’s said to have lost his appetite from hardship and exile. At that age, a man can go to the Yellow Springs at any time if things go badly. He was my teacher when I was young—how could I possibly ignore him?”
“Why doesn’t he just deal with that at home? Does a disciple really need to come all the way here and check on him?”
“He says the food sent from his family home all went bad. I suppose that makes sense, given how far away he is.”
At that moment, Cha Un-hong, who had been watching for an opening, produced a dish that would have fainted even a British zoologist.
“If you want side dishes that don’t spoil, how about this? It’s made with crab and abalone. I packed it tightly in jars and boiled it, so it hasn’t gone bad until now. A Western method, you see.”
Yi Ha-eung flinched. He knew history.
Crab had killed King Gyeongjong, and abalone had nearly killed King Yeongjo.
The reason Yeongjo survived was that he had an unusual mastery of dark medicine. And Yi Han-eung, the Commander of the Three Provinces’ Naval Forces who had once nearly avenged Gyeongjong, had become, like his ancestor Yi Sun-sin, a commander personally interrogated by the king.
Yi Ha-eung tried to judge it using the same method as Yeongjo.
But unlike Yeongjo, who had gone numb in the nose for a full day, Yi Ha-eung’s face lit up.
“Can this truly be abalone and crab that have sat in this infernal heat for several days? So you’ve been in Songdo as well, have you? You don’t seem like a mere servant at all.”
“Do you know the Song merchant Cha Un-hong? I came from that household. This time, Park Haengsu here was entrusted with Cha Un-hong’s property and came out to do business, so I followed along.”
“I see. But since I’ve got you here, let me ask one more thing. Seeing as you’ve come all this way, you must have a ship, no?”
“We don’t have one here at the moment, but one will arrive soon.”
“Is that so! Then could you give me a ride? Song merchants go back and forth between Jeju and Gangjin all the time, don’t they?”
Taesu said to the mountain spirit:
I’ve felt this since the first time we met, but Ha-eung really does have a thick face.
[How could a fallen royal house possibly survive while watching the powerful families’ faces all day, if not by discarding all sense of shame?]
But Taesu was a merchant. Ignoring the elbow Cha Un-hong jabbed into his side, he said, “You’re short on fare? Then I doubt you can even pay for those side dishes.”
Yi Ha-eung looked troubled.
“That’s not what I mean. Whether I have the fare or not, the ships to Jeju have all been canceled for now.”
“Why?”
“Hm? Why are you asking me? Isn’t that why you came here too?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because they said a foreign ship was coming to Gangjin. The garrison has been sweeping up every little coastal boat it can find, whether it’s a single-masted vessel or a two-masted one.”
Taesu and Cha Un-hong looked at each other. The image of the HMS Royalist boldly charging in reverse came to mind.
“I thought you’d come here to stop the foreign ship, like you did in Ganghwa. People had been talking about Park Axe, after all. I didn’t know you were really here.”
Before Taesu could make a slip of the tongue, Cha Un-hong quickly stepped in.
“We had no idea another foreign ship was coming. We came on business and need to meet the military posts quickly, but if that’s how things are, then we’ve been put in a difficult spot.”
After a moment’s thought, Yi Ha-eung clapped his hands.
“Then I believe I may have something that can replace both the side-dish money and the ferry fare. I’m actually staying at the house of a military family here, a clan that has lived in Gangjin for generations and knows how to talk with the garrison. Once the servant I sent to the military post comes back, come with me and let’s pay our respects together.”
Author’s Note
1. The relationship between the official merchants and the court was not one-sided. The official merchants did wield influence over the court, but they also could not simply stop doing business as they pleased. That said, as Cha Un-hong pointed out, the records from Sunjo’s reign contain some striking requests that seem to feign grievance while clearly aiming to obtain advance payments or have taxes imposed on rival merchant groups.
2. There is no record that Yi Ha-eung personally visited Kim Jeong-hui, but given Kim Jeong-hui’s fame, many scholars of the time did go to see him in exile. It is also true that he suffered from food shortages.
* * *