The Annals of King T'aejo: Founder of Korea's Choson Dynasty

"This is the man who founded the Choson kingdom in Korea at the end of the 14th century. It is really interesting, not just because it’s a great picture of a time and a place that is quite foreign to most of us, but also because of what he tried to do. So his project—besides setting himself up as king and taking the country away from the people who had ruled before him—was to construct the state based on a particular understanding of neo- Confucianism . It’s a very ideologically driven project that he’s at the head of. And the reason he’s doing this is that he believes that, in order to allow people to live good, honest, productive and righteous lives, you have to have certain standards of human behaviour that the state helps to produce or reproduce in terms of responsibilities, work and family—all of that. This is a fascinating look into that process, but also into his mind, what he and those around him talked about. These are the official records of his rule, compiled by state historians after he died. But they are based on documents and verbatim transcripts from T’aejo’s time in power. It was a collective project, similar to what used to happen in Imperial China, one wrote the history of the ancestors, the predecessors, so subsequent generations could learn from it. That’s how this one came into being as well. The T’aejo Annals were particularly difficult to put together because he was the founder of a dynasty and had overthrown a kingdom that had been in place for hundreds of years. It took five years to compile them, and many different versions before the historians agreed on what to include. Even so, they present a remarkably detailed picture of T’aejo and his world. Yes. Confucianism existed in Korea before and it was pretty well established. But he made it the state ideology. That’s what made him a seminal figure in Korean history and, in many ways, in East Asian history, because there hadn’t been an experiment like that before. The Ming Emperor in China, who came to power roughly at the same time, was also preoccupied with neo-Confucianism. This is one of the things that these two countries have in common, but it was so much more profound in Korea, so much more intense as a social and intellectual project."