Who Was Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan)? The Joseon Scholar Who Wrote His Masterpieces in Exile

Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836), better known by his pen name Dasan, was a Korean scholar, official and engineer of the Joseon dynasty, and one of the most prolific thinkers in Korean history. He was a favourite of the reforming King Jeongjo, helped design the walls of Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, and then, after his patron's death, spent eighteen years in exile in the far south of Korea. It was there, in a small thatched house, that he wrote most of the works that made him famous, including a classic handbook on how a local official should serve the people. His life is a story about talent, politics, religion and the strange productivity of misfortune.

A quick guide to Joseon

Dasan lived in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Joseon, the dynasty that ruled Korea from 1392 to the end of the 1800s. Joseon was governed by scholar-officials trained in Neo-Confucianism and selected through civil service examinations. Court politics were dominated by rival factions, and belonging to the wrong faction at the wrong moment could end a career, or a life.

In the late 1700s, new ideas were also arriving through China, including European science and Catholic Christianity, which Koreans encountered as part of "Western learning". Dasan's family stood right at the point where these currents met.

A gifted young man in Seoul

Jeong was born in 1762 in what is now Namyangju, just east of Seoul, and died in the same place in 1836. His pen name Dasan means "tea mountain", and his house name Yeoyudang was the last pen name he used.

He passed the first-level state examination in 1783, which allowed him to enter the Sungkyunkwan, the national Confucian academy, and in 1789 he took top place in the higher civil service examination. King Jeongjo had already been impressed by his answers to royal questions in 1784, and the two developed an unusually close relationship. Politically, Jeong belonged to the Southerners faction, which was often on the losing side at court.

The engineer of Hwaseong

Jeongjo had an ambitious project: a new fortified city at Suwon, south of Seoul. From 1792 Jeong worked on the design of its walls, drawing on European, Chinese and Japanese sources. Korean accounts credit him with devising a geojunggi, a lifting device using pulleys, to help raise heavy building materials. He is also said to have designed a pontoon bridge of boats and rafts across the Han River while serving King Jeongjo.

Hwaseong Fortress still stands in Suwon today, and when you walk its walls, you are walking through the practical side of a Confucian scholar's mind.

A family caught up in Catholicism

Jeong's connections to Catholicism would decide the rest of his life. In 1784 he was introduced to Western learning and Catholic ideas by the scholar Yi Byeok, and his brother-in-law Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing that same year. His older brother Jeong Yak-jong became the leader of Korea's first Catholic community.

Catholicism was dangerous in Joseon because it seemed to challenge Confucian ancestral rites. When a Catholic named Yun Ji-chung was executed in 1791 over the issue of those rites, some sympathisers turned away from the faith. Whether Dasan himself was ever baptized is unclear; the English Wikipedia article notes there is no proof that he was.

1801: the fall

Everything changed when King Jeongjo died suddenly in the summer of 1800. The regent who took power, Queen Dowager Jeongsun, moved against the Catholics. In the spring of 1801 Jeong Yak-jong was executed, along with Yi Seung-hun. Korean sources record that Dasan was interrogated, declared that he had renounced the faith, and had his punishment reduced to exile.

He was first sent to Janggi, near modern Pohang, for a few months. Then a further scandal, the so-called Silk Letter incident, in which a Catholic wrote a letter requesting foreign military intervention, brought harsher persecution. Dasan was moved to Gangjin in the southwest, arriving on 28 December 1801. His other brother, Jeong Yak-jeon, left behind Jasan eobo, a pioneering record of fish and marine life.

Eighteen years in Gangjin

Dasan stayed in Gangjin until 1818. At first he lived in a room at a tavern, then at a hermitage near a Buddhist temple, and from the spring of 1808 in a thatched house known as Dasan Chodang. A monk named Hyejang from the nearby Baengnyeonsa temple became his close companion, and the two shared a love of tea; one of Dasan's early poems to him asks for tea leaves.

Instead of giving up, he read, taught local students and wrote at an astonishing pace. Totals of around 500 volumes are often quoted, though the English Wikipedia article cautions that one "work" could fill many volumes and estimates about 14,000 pages in all.

The "one blueprint and two books"

Koreans often summarise his most important writings as il-pyo i-seo, "one blueprint and two books".

• Gyeongse yupyo ("Design for Good Government") lays out a reform of the whole state: offices, counties, land, taxation, labour service and the examinations.
• Mongmin simseo ("Admonitions on Governing the People") explains how a local magistrate should think and act.
• Heumheum sinseo ("New Treatise on the Clearing of Wrongs") deals with criminal justice, drawing on real cases Dasan handled as a magistrate.

Behind all three is a simple conviction: government exists to reduce the suffering of ordinary people, and that depends on honest, fair officials. On land, he proposed a "village land system" in which villagers would farm together and divide the harvest according to the labour each contributed.

Was he a "Silhak" thinker?

Textbooks usually place Dasan at the peak of Silhak, or "practical learning", a movement of Joseon scholars who wanted Confucian learning to solve real problems. The label is useful but not perfect. The English Wikipedia article argues that his concerns are better understood as a fresh exploration of Confucian themes, aimed at returning to the original teachings of Confucius and focusing on ritual, music and law rather than abstract theory.

Return and legacy

In 1818 Dasan was finally allowed to go home. Attempts to bring him back into government were blocked by factional politics, and he spent his last years at his family house, where he died in 1836, on his sixtieth wedding anniversary. In 2012, the 250th anniversary of his birth, UNESCO included him among its commemorated anniversaries of eminent personalities.

Learn with Jeong Yak-yong

Five English phrases to talk about his life and ideas:

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to fall out of favour	to lose the support of people in power	After Jeongjo died, Dasan fell out of favour.
to be sent into exile	to be forced to live far from home as punishment	He was sent into exile in Gangjin.
a blessing in disguise	something bad that leads to something good	Exile became a blessing in disguise for his writing.
to put ideas into practice	to use ideas in real life	He wanted to put Confucian ideas into practice.
to serve the people	to work for the good of citizens	A good magistrate serves the people.

Some Korean words from the story: 유배 (yu-bae, exile), 학자 (hak-ja, scholar), 차 (cha, tea).

Try this: Think of a difficult period in your life. Write three sentences about it using "a blessing in disguise" and "put into practice".