What Would Shakespeare Have Made Of Yongjo And Sado?

Bruce Cuming's book devotes more pages to King Yongjo, the monarch with the longest reign in the Joseon Dynasty than to King Sejong. Perhaps he wanted to highlight this particular individual to illustrate the Korean perception of "the ideal Confucian prince" but I suspect he also couldn't resist the high drama of his tragic relationship with his son and heir, Prince Sado who, unfortunately, embodied all the worst of the Korean royal system.

It has all the elements of tragedy - the sharp contrast and conflict  between a serious-minded and stern king who strove to be the best ruler possible at odds with a  spoilt son whose neurosis soon turned into schizophrenia; the son's wastrel ways degenerating into the habits of a serial killer; the mother who failed to make her husband acknowledge the son's mental illness - King Yongjo simply saw Sado as an unfilial son and so the desperate mother even once suggested  that the king sentence the son to death for all his crimes against court physicians, eunuchs, kisaengs and even Buddhist nuns. The poor woman was so burdened with guilt for even contemplating the possibility of encouraging the death of her own flesh and blood that she soon succumbed to illness and died.

As Cumings put it," To execute the son for his crimes would tarnish the royal family, and simply to kill him would be a crime." Apparently Yongjo had told Sajo: " If I die, our three -hundred -year dynastic line would end. If you die, the dynasty can be preserved. It would be better if you died." Sado failed to strangle himself in front of his father and "by early evening the king was tired of pleading: ' Aren't you ever going to kill yourself?' " So the solution seemed to be to persuade/ compel Sado to enter a large rice chest and to leave him there to die under a hot July sun thirteen days later.

These and other intriguing details such as Sado's attempts to delay his daily meetings with his father by changing his clothes continually and his inclination to sleep in a coffin-like box ( a sinister foreshadowing of his grim end), were noted by Sado's wife, who was betrothed to him at the tender age of ten and subsequently recorded by Lady Hong in her "Memoirs of a Korean Queen" ( translated and edited by Choe-wall Yang-hi, London, KPI, 1985).

Apparently this fascinating episode has been made into at least two mini-dramas. One of them is the rather clumsily-titled: Eight Days The Mystery Of Jeongjo's Assassination. Has anyone seen it?

Source:
Korea's Place in the Sun- A Modern History by Bruce Cumings ( W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1997).