we watch films at night, often streaming them from youtube, netflix or the Kdrama streaming sites.
We watch a lot of the historical dramas: Kings and queens and lovely ladies...and in the background, murderous feuds between different factions, including the murders/executions of some of them.
But often the K dramas present a more sympathetic portrait of the characters, and then you read wikipedia, and you can contrast the dramatized "history" with the reality. (or the reality of Wikipedia, which has it's own biases of course).
For example, we just finished the miniseries Dong Yi, LINK2 about a lowly water girl in the palace who became the king's favorite concubine. The plot's background includes the background of slavery and and powerful factions who assassinate their rivals and framed the non violent equivalent of the underground railroad for the murders... (peasant revolts are alas common in Korean history, as they are in Chinese and British and European history).
Most of the story of Dong Yi is fictional of course: Ladies don't usually get their point of view into the history books.
But I thought it was interesting that Lady Jang, another favorite concubine of the king who later became the queen, was portrayed not as the murderous manipulative bitch as she is portrayed in the history books, but as a girl who loved the king but was pushed into her position by greedy manipulative family members belonging to this faction.
Lots of similarities of Lady Jang with Ann Boleyn, whose family also manipulated their daughters to get ahead: get rid of the queen to become the main queen, and then get executed by the king for your treasonous shenanigans.
The king in the drama of Dong Yi has only two sons (one does wonder why there are so few kids who survive ... High childhood mortality and high miscarriage rate are sometimes mentioned).
Lady Jang's son is a bit retarded or sick and had no kids, so Dong Yi's son ends up king, and a fairly good one, despite his violent purges of the various factions who accused him of poisoning he older half brother and of having a slave for a mother, i.e. lower class tainted blood.
And you thought Game of Thrones was bad. The difference is that GoT has nasty people in it: in the K dramas they try to portray them with a bit of nuance.
DongYi's son, King Yeongjo, was essentially a good king...who alas killed a lot of his enemies to stay in power, but he did reform the government and fought corruption.
But there is one terrible blot on his memory: King Yeongjo also arranged a nasty death of his son, and later gave him the name Prince Sado, (thinking of with great sorrow) to show his grief in having to do this. And the king then put a hold of silence on anyone who dared talk about what had been done.
Years later, Prince Sado's son became king, and he insisted the more benign version of his father's death be the official story: that the king did it because Prince Sado backed up the faction of the poor, not because when Sado lost his temper he went around killing eunuchs and beating up court ladies (and even beat to death his favorite consort in a rage of temper) and the king rightly worried he might end up on his son's hit list.
from Wikipedia:
One of Jeongjo's first statements upon becoming king, however, was to declare, "I am the son of Prince Sado."[31] Jeongjo always showed great filial devotion to his father, Crown Prince Sado, and he changed the posthumous name of his father's to a longer one, which is the origin of the latter's alternative title, Crown Prince Jangheon.
This is the background of the hottest drama on K streaming sites i.e the Red Sleeve, about his son...
But of course one reason it is popular is that it is...romantic:
yet even in this fluffy romance, there is a scene where the now senile King J. shouts at his grandson (who he thinks is his son) that he deserves to die for killing over 100 people.
Despite the attempt of Prince Sado's son to revere his memory by destroying the alternative (real) story, out of love for his father, it was his mother who put the record straight years later, after the death of her son and grandson, who now could not be harmed if the secret came out.
So unlike the earlier drama, we have the woman's point of view of what was going on.
Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong (often called Lady Hong in the English versions) includes four memoirs.
Her early memoirs were of her life in a family of scholars, and also to defend her family members who were killed or exiled for what we now would see as minor problems but back then could be treason and lead to a revolution, and hey, it's easier to kill your enemies than risk a bloody civil war.
But in her last memoir, written in 1805 after the death of her son and grandson , she wrote the real story of her husband, and went into details, and did it in such a way to defend both her husband and his father.
the memoirs can be read in detail, with commentary, here PDF LINK
but a version easier to read is the fictionalized version by famed British novelist Margaret Drabble, which can be borrowed from internet archives. The Red Queen.
The interesting thing about Lady Hong in Drabble's take is that she explains a lot of her husband's troubles using the ideas of modern Freudian psychology: His father neglected him and nagged him for his imperfections, etc. and the nannies/ eunuchs/ court ladies who were supposed to care for him did a bad job: no love, no discipline, etc.... Nobody loved the poor boy, alas so no wonder he went nuts.
But on reading the actual memoirs, in her 1805 memoir, LadyHong actually does use a modernesque psychological explanations for her husband's behavior, blaming it on mental illness...
She blamed the lack of parental love, the father's nagging, and the overly strict Confucian rules that made his life seem like a prison with no way to escape, so that is why the Prince descended into episodes of rage and madness where he destroyed his clothing, threw things at her, and beat to death the servants.
Being an obedient Confucian trained wife, she defends him despite these things: she insists that he was not evil, but mentally ill, echoing the lament of MacBeth:
“MACBETH: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?
In other words, she laments that he was sick, not evil.
Even today, a lot of folks would find that nuance a bit ridiculous, so it is not surprising that his less sophisticated father, trained as a fundamentalist Confucian scholar, did not understand. So although she acknowledges that the king had to stop his son's murderous behavior, laments that there was no other way to do it, short of his execution.
Prince Sado had good and bad times, suggesting that he was probably bipolar with psychotic episodes. His aggression, promiscuity and agitation could be signs of mania, and his numerous attempts at suicide are the depressive signs of bipolar disease, a problem that even in our day is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed.
he also had obsessive compulsive tendencies that centered around his clothing, sometimes tearing up his clothing and having problems choosing what to wear.
I also wonder if he might have borderline personality disorder.
So was it bipolar disease behind his murderous rages and destruction of personal property and aggression against the staff?
Impulse control disorder, has numerous causes besides Bipolar disease, and the list is long, including psychiatric, toxic, and neurological disease..
Maybe he had low grade toxic heay metal poisoning such as lead contamination of beverages or food or from the ceramic or metal containers, or even lead contamination in the medicines he was given (including medicines used on his chronic skin rashes). Other organic reason for impulse control disorder would be post traumatic or post measles encephalitis brain damage which can cause explosive rage episodes.
But the tragedy is that he became a mass murderer, which of course as prince he could get away with because eunuchs and court ladies were lower class and he was the prince.... (until he killed his concubine, and then it was his mother, not his wife, who told the king what was going on).
It was only the murder of his concubine and attempts to harm higher court officials that made the king act.
And the reason for his horrific death (starved to death in a rice storage box) is that if he was officially executed, the Confucian law said the criminal's family also should be killed, and the king did not wish to execute his beloved daughter in law and her son (who was of course next in line for the throne).
So the king essentially "suicided" him by starvation which the prince "agreed" to by not being forced but by voluntarily entering the box, where he lived for 8 days before dying...
The king then arranged for Prince Sado's son to become the adopted son of his (late) uncle so that he could inherit the throne without this ancestral taint.
a sad story on many levels.
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