Medieval Korea: from the Goryeo to Joseon periods

25:44And he's replaced by a king who's quite young. Do you want to guess how young? I'm going to say nine years old. I mean, pretty close. He's 10, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. How do you feel about 10-year-olds being in power? Would the world be better or worse if we just handed all control to a 10-year-old? I feel like, let's try it. Because what's happening now with these old fogies I don't think is working. So it's like, why not? Yeah, we've had the gerontocracy. Let's give the kids a chance. I feel like, you know that phrase, it's like, oh, you don't learn hate, right? So a child would probably be a little bit nicer.

26:21But let's see about this 10-year-old king, what he's about to do. John, who is this 10-year-old boy? Does he have power or was he just a puppet? Well, sadly, he was just a puppet. Well, and again, it's this tumultuous time. This ambitious leader had just been killed. And a 10-year-old boy was a lot more palatable to a lot of the nobility. So what's his name, this 10-year-old? King Wu. Okay. And so he's just a puppet. So who's pulling the puppet strings? Who's the real Bengali here? So you have this, again, this is a lot of political intrigue going on. Real power is held by a man named Yi Inim, leader of another clan.

27:00So essentially, you can just see a lot of political intrigue ongoing as the Mongol Empire declines. And Korea is trying to decide what to do as this massive continental empire falls apart. Okay, so what happens next then? If the Mongol Empire is collapsing, the Yuan Dynasty is coming to an end, does Korea get its independence back? Do we still have this sort of, these puppet kings or do we get an assertion of someone who's going to reclaim power? Yes, a man does step in at this time, a general, a man named Lee Sung-gye, whose father, also a military man, had served the Mongols actually. So Lee Sung-gae was a general who, with the support of other generals, overthrew the now adult King Woo in 1388.

27:52He'd aged out. He'd aged out, yeah. And replaced him with the king's nine-year-old son. I see a pattern here, yes. One year later, Lee Sung-gae would just replace this kid with a distant relative named Kong-yuk. Okay. Has there ever been a baby? Yeah. We've had babies in Scottish history. We've had babies in English history. But Henry VI was a baby in English history. Becoming king. That I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Nine years old is the youngest we'll go so far. At least for a quarter period. Okay. Good. All right. Is he a king or is he not a king? Not yet. Okay. But in 1392, he removed King Kongyang.

28:36Yeah. And he made himself king. Right, okay. When you say removed, is that sort of a polite term for killing? Exiled and probably quietly murdered. Okay. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online. It's the difference between giving away those cookies you just made for free and running your cookie empire. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between having a movie-reviewing hobby and a movie-reviewing career. Squarespace. Because no matter what you're into, a website makes it real.

29:16Use offer code DIFFERENCE for 50 % off select plans. Terms and conditions apply. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Janaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

29:54So our new king, John, what's he called? Yeah, so he's known in records as King Taezo. That's his monarchical name. He renames this new state, this new dynasty, Joseon. So this is the end of the Goryeo dynasty. This is the end of the Goryeo dynasty now. Okay. The old descendants of Wangeon are now hunted down, killed. Right. King Taezo would move the capital from Kaesong to Hanyang, also called Hanseong, which is basically present-day Seoul, present-day Seoul, the capital of South Korea. So it was in the northern peninsula and it moves to the southern peninsula. Yes, exactly. Okay, so Seoul is still the capital because of this decision.

30:40Exactly. Okay, that's fascinating. Right. What period are we in here? I mean, the 1300s? So this is like around the 1390s. Okay, great. So this is the beginning of the Chozon dynasty and we've got a brand new capital city in the south of the peninsula. Right. And what do we get in terms of society? Do we still have these kind of elite warlords running around doing their own thing? The elites are called the Yangban, right? Is that correct? That's right. Tell us about them. Are they powerful still? One could say that the Twilson period is sort of a culmination of the reforms that we talked about earlier, starting with Kim Bo-Shik.

31:14So the victory of these sort of more Confucian-minded, more Sinitic reformers, or Koreans who were more fond of aspects of Chinese civilization and wanted to turn Korea into this sort of Confucian utopia. They established, again, a country very much based upon this sort of Chinese model or the king at the center of government and advised by members of the Korean aristocracy known as the Yangban. So the Yangban dominate not just politics, but much of the economy and society throughout the Joseon dynasty. There's a lot of debate to what extent did the aristocracy change between the Kodil and Julesman periods.

31:57We're not going to go into that today. But yeah, essentially you see a revamping of the country into this very centralized order with a seven-member state council that reviewed matters, gave advice to the king, instructed bureaucrats and supervised officials. And the government was reworked into six government ministries, personnel, taxation, rights and rituals, military affairs, punishments, and public works. Wow. This ministry of punishments, that feels quite scary. Yeah. Which of those six would you want to run, Erica? You've got personnel, taxation, rights and religion, military affairs, punishments, and public works.

32:37Which minister would you be? I think I'd pick taxation. It'd be nice to be on the other side of that for once. go on people's door and be like, hey, cough it up. Yeah, pay out. I mean, how does taxation work? Is everyone taxed peasants all the way up to the elites? In theory, you're supposed to. There's a land tax and so forth, but elites found various ways to get out of the land tax. Wow, so like modern. A tale as old as time, right? There was also everyone was supposed to serve in the military, but the elites got out of that. Sure. And even non-elites would pay a special tax to get out of military service, which became a major source of revenue, actually, for the government.

33:19Sure, right. So Erica will be in charge of taxation. That's good. I guess I'm in charge of punishments. So, you know, I'll be lenient for now. But can you talk to us about the society, the wider structure of society? You mentioned earlier enslavement and an enslaved class. What's the demography of Korea at this point? How many people or what level of the society is enslaved or is peasant class? Right. So, of course, these percentages, you know, they vary greatly depending upon region and time period. We see, and it depends on the documentation we have. We could look at some census registers from the mid-17th century.

33:57You have areas of Korea where 30 % of the population are listed as slave. Wow. Okay. But that doesn't mean the whole population was, right? But yeah, it could be as high as 30 % in certain regions and certain areas. So slavery is a very curious aspect of Korean history. It's the only East Asian country where you see a continuous slave system not only emerge, but also continue from the medieval into the early modern period all the way to the end of the 19th century. You have slavery in Japanese and Chinese history as well, but not as sustained in the same sort of institutional continuity. This is an inherited status.

34:39You could be enslaved as punishment for crimes. For most slaves in the chosen period, they inherited that status from their parents. So either their mom or their dad was a slave, so they were a slave. Right. I suppose we perhaps know more about the transatlantic slave trade. That's a thing perhaps we studied at school or we've heard more about. Is this exactly the same in terms of the legal conditions but also is there a racial element to it? Are there people who are of a class that is considered to be enslaved or is it more just politics and economics? More the latter. There's no ethnic element to Korean slavery.

35:16It's Koreans enslaving Koreans. Right. But the legal conditions regarding slavery were not consistent throughout the dynasty. In the latter half of the Chosin dynasty, you see a lot of cases of slaves like suing Yangban. They could take Yangban to court over offenses and so forth. So they could take the elites to court. Which is interesting, right? So they've got legal representation, which we wouldn't have had over in, for example, the transatlantic slave trade in America. Exactly, exactly. So it's a very different context. So Korea was a society that valued kinship networks. And also Confucian philosophy really emphasizes, really prioritizes relationship between parent and child, between people of the same families.

36:02So you can imagine the tensions that emerged in a society like Korea where you had aristocrats and slaves living together on same estates. And they could be related to each other in some senses, right? A really instructive story is a very instructive sort of bittersweet account. In the mid-16th century, there was a scholar named Yui Chun. He's an official in the royal court, a very high-level official. And he had four daughters with an enslaved woman. So he had been traveling around the country with his administrative duties. And during these duties, he had lived with, I guess you could say, a concubine, a slave concubine.

36:45But he didn't own her. She was owned by someone else. And with this slave concubine, he had four daughters. It seems like he kept in touch with those daughters because when each of them got old enough, to be of marriageable age, he spent a considerable amount of money and political capital to free each of them. He traded a horse to free the first two daughters, paid money and also bribed some officials to free the third and fourth. All this took him several years. And this made it possible for the daughters to marry another free person. You were a lot more attractive marriageable candidate if you were free rather than a slave.

37:28Because then their children would be born free. Was that quite rare, like, to become free at that time? No. There were many ways slaves could gain their freedom. They could buy their freedom, especially in the latter half of the chosen dynasty. You see this happen more often. They could donate, like, a bunch of grain to a government granary and get even, like, some military title as well along with their freedom. You could also run away. Right. Okay. You could, yeah. Slaves technically had to wear these ID tags, actually, called hoppeh that they hung around their necks. So that was one way of trying to keep track of them.

38:06But you see many cases of runaway slaves throughout the Cholzin dynasty and slave catchers hired to try to find them. Yeah. It's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? The idea of a father having to liberate his daughters one by one because they were owned by someone else is really, it's tragic, it's sad, but it's also kind of, it's different to how we understand the histories of enslavement, perhaps. But we should move on. We're a comedy show, and this is sad. Let's talk about sort of happier things. Erica, what do you imagine life was like for women in this society? We're in the Chosen dynasty now.

38:38Well, I mean, what history has shown me is life for women is always pretty shit, no matter what. But I don't know. I'm going to guess that it was okay based off of the question. You may not be. I mean, I'll turn to John, because I think probably there's a variation, right? Presumably there is plenty of women would be enslaved, but there'd be elite women too. That's right. I know you said you wanted to go on to happier things, but life for women in the chosen dynasty was, of course, in many ways, if you consider what a patriarchal agrarian bureaucracy would look like, life for women was not great.

39:19Of course, all this changes over time, But the expectations for women, especially elite women, was to be virtuous and remain chaste before marriage. If their husband died, widows, especially elite yangban widows, were expected to be chaste and not remarry. They were expected to, you know, the stereotypes you see in the documents are, you know, possess delicate features, have domestic skills like weaving and cooking, be obedient and so forth. That's what we see at least according to the writings of male yangban. Okay. And divorce law? Is there any law that allows divorce for women? Very limited.

39:58Technically, again, this really depends upon the era, but we have some documents that say that a woman could technically get a divorce if a husband was away from home for a long time or abused her physically. But again, this is all very difficult, even if it was legally sanctioned. Socially, it would not have been. Okay. So there are only two reasons a woman is allowed to leave her husband but there were seven reasons a man could leave his wife right which you know that feels uh sort of on the nose um do you want to guess what some of those reasons would be i bet it says like oh she sneezed weird like get rid of her john can you talk us through the the official reasons a man can divorce his wife well so some of the things we see in some documents again we don't know how how much these were followed up upon was disobeying one's parents, or so disobeying his parents, so disobeying your in-laws.

40:51Okay. That was a big no-no. Failing to produce a male heir. Adultery. Okay, so if a woman had two daughters, she could be divorced for that. From my understanding is that they would not have divorced. If it was a yangman male, in particular, a man of means, he would have just taken a concubine. Right. Adultery. jealousy toward other women in the household like the concubine that got tanked to have the male heir serious disease stealing and talking too much wow women be talking ain't that always the way it goes and I feel like also like jealousy towards another woman if you were cheating on her with a concubine that feels like a legitimate emotion yeah 100 % Yeah, okay.

41:42I mean, you know, luckily talking too much is no longer a divorceable thing because obviously I'm a podcast. It's all I do is talk too much. So luckily my wife has not left me yet. But let's turn maybe to happier things. I'm not sure. Let's turn to art and culture. So you enjoyed K-pop when you were younger growing up. I like Korean movies. What sort of culture is being produced, do you think, at this time in the Chosun dynasty? They haven't got movies yet and they haven't really got K-pop. I would guess a lot of like artwork. probably. What kind of art are you imagining? Are you thinking paintings?

42:14I'm thinking paintings. Paintings, okay. What about storytelling? Oh, I didn't consider that that would be an art form. I think that's an art form. Yeah, I mean, I do stand up. I should consider it an art form. Yeah. Is there storytelling, you know, is there comedy in the 15th, 16th centuries? Certainly. A lot of satire of young band elites, very popular amongst commoners and slaves, as you can imagine. Sure. And poetry, of course, was very important. Carved ceramic wares, so definitely right about that. Celadon wares in particular. A very famous Korean art form. So this is what vases, bowls, that kind of traditional, what we'd imagine is ceramics that are ceremonial or are they functional?

42:58Both. Okay. But also architecture and how that's also something that is quite interesting about the Chosen dynasty as most buildings are made from wood. It's connected to the timber industry and the very distinctive forestry policies of the Joseon dynasty. So you're an environmental historian. That's your bag. So, you know, go off. I don't want to take too much time. How much more? Another podcast for this one. Koreans tend to use pine, actually, for most shipbuilding and construction. So this led the government to actually focus a lot of energy on protecting pine forests throughout the Korean peninsula.

43:35So essentially, it's one of the longest continuous forestry systems in global history where the government is basically creating a system of protected forests along the Korean coast, protecting them all the way from the 14th to the 19th centuries to create a sustainable timber supply for shipbuilding, construction, and so forth. And so how do they defend those forests? What are the punishments if someone were to go and chop down a lovely pine tree? That's where the Ministry of Punishments comes in, right? Well, technically people could be imprisoned. They could even be exiled for these things.

44:12But a lot of people would just pay bribes to the warden and so forth, try to get away with it. But yeah, these were, in theory, strictly regulated forests. And these Korean homes that are timber built, are they single story? Is it similar to Japanese architecture or is it different? Ooh, that's beyond my pay grade. Okay, so I'm not an architectural historian. But I can't say about the Japanese case, but in the Korean case, yeah, one-story buildings generally. Yeah, lovely. Okay, because Koreans are famous for having the underfloor heating, right? That's right. Yeah, which is an amazing technology.

44:51Is that from this period or is that from a later period? That system of underfloor heating, ondol, that becomes more prevalent from the 18th and 19th centuries onward. depends upon one's interpretation of what's going on in these documents. But it's a very wasteful way of heating your home as well, especially in a pre-modern society. So how was it done? You just get a lot of wood into this, I guess you would call it. Are you allowed the wood? Ministry of punishment. Yeah, that's the other part, right? People are just going into these forests, gathering as much wood and branches as possible. And you basically burn it up in a, I don't know the right term for it, But you burn it up under the, basically under the house, under the building, and little flues bring the heat from that big fire into your home.

45:40Yeah. It's every room, right? Every room. Yeah. Which is why it's such an amazing technology. This is medieval underfloor heating. It's lovely. That's right. I've seen. It's very smart. Erica, have you ever heard of Hangul, the script of Hangul, how Korean is written? I mean, I feel like I've seen it out in the world. It's very specific. It's very distinctive, isn't it? Yeah. I know I can tell when I see Korean because I always see like the circles like that. Yeah, that's it. It's so immediately distinctively different to what we might see as Chinese characters. The traditional story is that there's a great king who comes along and goes, all right, lads, I've got an idea.

46:16I've invented a script. This king is Sejong. Sejong the Great. Sejong the Great, yeah. Is this a myth? Is he real? I mean, he's a real king, but is he the pioneer of this new script? Yeah, you know, he is considered this great sage king, kind of like Alfred in a sense. And that is a narrative that people are often told in Korea. Certainly Koreans encountered alphabetic phonetic scripts during the Mongol era. Yeah. Things like Pogspa, which is a Tibetan script used by the Mongols to transcribe their own documents. But Koreans definitely encountered these sort of scripts and perhaps got the initial inspiration for turning the Korean language into a phonetic alphabet.

47:06But certainly we have to give credit to Sejong and his scholars for creating, which is a very unique and distinctive phonetic alphabet, the only phonetic alphabet native to East Asia. And a system of 14 consonants and 10 vowels that perfectly encapsulates the Korean language. And before, Koreans were transcribing documents, Korean sounds with Chinese characters, Chinese characters that roughly approximated Korean sounds. That's very difficult. And so the Hangul alphabet greatly simplified the ways Koreans could read. It standardized readings of Chinese characters. And Sae Jong-yong supposedly wanted to raise a level of popular education.

47:55So Hangul is a phonetic alphabet. does that mean it's the equivalent to the Western alphabet where things are spelled out with letters? Right, and with vowels and consonants that can be interchanged and exchanged to create sounds. Rather than, say, in Japanese, where you have specific, a syllabary, it's not separate vowels and consonants, but rather makes, say, sound like ka or ga together with one character. Right, okay. Whereas Korean, it's like in Latin. Yeah, we have 26 letters in the Latin alphabet and in the Korean equivalent, it's 24. That's 14 consonants, 10 vowels. That should be right.

48:37My math is right there. And the Koreans also, they got there way earlier than Gutenberg with the printing press. In Europe, we're like, Gutenberg invented it. Korea was like two, three centuries ahead. They had movable type, they had metal typeface, they were printing. they didn't have the same industrial print, but they were printing. So they were... Oh, wow. It's amazing, isn't it? There's all these things that we think of as European inventions. Yeah, but you guys be doing that. I know. So this is a very cultured king, Sejong the Great. So can we say this is a kind of Korean golden age? We're into the 1400s now.

49:13Is this where Korea reaches its peak culturally post-Mongol? Sejong certainly thought so. True historian's answer. It's hard to say. One could say this is sort of a post-Mongol's Hejong Renaissance. What's more important is that Korea is achieving now into the 16th centuries a level of political and social stability that's very different from the turmoil that we talked about earlier of the Koryo period. Right. So we haven't got warlords. We haven't got invaders. There's no Red Turban rebels. There's no Mongols running around. We've got a powerful king and his bureaucracy and his elite yang ban and everything is sort of fine.

49:52until it's not, because by the end of our story, Erica, it all goes a little wrong. Do you know what happens in the 1590s? Sounds like something bad about what happened. Yeah, I did hype it up a bit. Yeah, a boogeyman of sorts is about to come down. It's not quite a boogeyman. It's a different invasion. It's not the Mongols invading this time. It's a different culture invading. This time it's Japan, right? In the 1590s, in England, that's the reign of the late Tudors, the Elizabethans. In the 1590s, the Japanese invade the Korean mainland. You know, this is the early Edo period of Japan. What happens to the Korean Choson dynasty?

50:28It survives. Okay, yeah. Because they keep going to the 19th century, right? It does, but the wars are absolutely devastating. I mean, these are, you know, samurai armies armed with European gunpowder weapons and they tear through the Korean peninsula in a rapid invasion. The Chinese help out the Koreans. They intervene. And with Chinese help, the Koreans are eventually able to beat back the Japanese. But a huge cost, devastating the Korean Peninsula. Between 10 to 15 % of the Korean population may have been killed or displaced. It's always hard to tell with modern sources. But it was an absolutely devastating war.

51:13So this is kind of scorched earth tactics. This is brutal. They're burning the field. They're burning the towns. Exactly. It's really horrific. Would that have been the first time they would have encountered guns? Yeah. Good question. Oh, that's a good question. Not the first time they would have encountered. The Mongols had gunpowder, right? Right. Not the first time they would have encountered gunpowder weapons, but certainly the sort of European-style small firearms, the arquebuses and so forth, that was a surprise to the Koreans, how effective Japanese tactics were with these weapons. Yeah, because how would Korea normally fight?

51:48How would wars normally be fought? Would you have soldiers with swords, soldiers on horseback, archers? Is that the standard Korean army? Or is there firearm technology in Korea at this point? Oh, definitely Koreans were using firearms as well. But certainly once they saw how effective the Japanese were with them, they used similar tactics. You know, sort of men in a row in this kind of early modern European style. Yeah. Firing volleys. Okay. So the Koreans adapted. Yes. And they defeated the Japanese or was there a peace treaty? How does this end our episode? It ends when the Japanese warlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, when he dies.

52:24Okay. Yeah. Helpful. The man who started the invasion dies. Yeah. That helps end the war. Great. That's a nice way to end our episode, really. It was all going so terribly wrong and then he dies and it stops. That's amazing. So that's the end of our medieval career period. But the Chilson continued to the 19th century. That's right. Okay. So it's been quite a wild ride, Erica. We've covered seven centuries together. Was there anything there surprised you? I feel like all of it. All of it. Because I had no clue about Korean history, so all of it was surprising to me because I just had no idea. Yeah.

53:03I didn't know that the print was first there. That's new to me. Yeah. Yeah. The Chinese and Koreans were printing way before the Europeans. Yeah. Yeah. The myth about how Korean people came to be about a bear. Never heard that in my life. That was surprising to me. It's a good story, that one. Yeah, I liked it. It's quite sweet. The magic of garlic and wormwood, right? Feels like it could be a children's animation. It's lovely. The Nuance Window!

53:36Well, it is time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Erica and I sit quietly in our dark cave, eating our garlic for two minutes, while John tells us something we need to know about medieval Korea. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Dr. Lee. I'll just sort of summarize or tie together some of the points we talked about on the geopolitical side and the domestic side. On the geopolitical side, quickly, the Mongol era was a key turning point in Korean history. It more firmly esconces Korea in this sort of Sinitic cultural and geopolitical order. So ironically, it is the Mongols, these steppe nomads, who would strengthen these ties between Korea and China, bringing Korea into this wider Eurasian sphere.

54:21So it's important to note also that, in a sense, the Chuzin dynasty would benefit from these cultural and diplomatic ties to late imperial Chinese dynasties. The Yangban elite identified themselves as part of this broader Sinitic order, sort of like how some medieval European elites may have felt ties to a classical sort of Greek or Roman civilization. Ties to China, as you've seen, also ensured security. Korea remained at peace with this much larger neighbor. And it got also decisive assistance during the Japanese invasions. Two things I want to mention on the domestic side. regarding gender and women in Korean history, I highly recommend a couple books that elaborate upon some of my points, some of my very sparse points.

55:08It's very complicated. Women may seem oppressed during the Chosin period, but they left so many records themselves and letters to their daughters, letters amongst themselves, their own diaries, that looking at what women actually wrote during the Jozon period gives an excellent window into their own lives and how they navigated these sort of seemingly oppressive patriarchal forces. So books by, say, Ji Soo Kim, Jung Won Kim, Ksenya, Chesanova, these are all like scholars writing in English who've written excellent books on women during the Jozon dynasty. And again, just want to say the longevity of slavery itself is quite strange in Korean history.

55:48And the Jozon dynasty itself is very strange. How this highly stratified agrarian bureaucracy marked by seemingly oppressive institutions last so long. The simplest explanation I can give is that the Chosin dynasty was able to build this stable, centralized order, quite different from the tumult of the Koryo period. And as oppressive as the dynasty may seem, Koreans for multiple generations tied that Chosin order to notions of stability and security and prestige and governance. That would all change in the 19th century, but that's another story. Amazing. Thank you so much, John. Fascinating. Really interesting to hear that women's lives are so well reported in the historical record.

56:31Yeah, I wouldn't expect, but I guess it was their own writing, you said? Yeah, so there's one scholar, Chizu Kim, looked at women's petitions, petitions that women wrote to the court, to the Ministry of Punishments, and to magistrates and so forth. when they had some sort of grievance, if they were robbed or assaulted and so forth. And some of these could even be read by the king. They can reach the court. And that Yangban women would often write letters to each other in Hangul or in classical Chinese. They write to their daughters. And so we have all these documents still available. It's wonderful, isn't it?

57:08It's a lovely resource that we don't usually get that much of in medieval Europe. We do have women's letters and so on, but they're often elite. They're often the rich, rich, rich. But that's wonderful. So what do you know now?

57:25Okay, well, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now. This is our quickfire quiz for Erica to see how much she has learned. Now, Erica, we've covered seven centuries and neither of us knew much about Korean history beforehand. So I will be pretty lenient with my marking, I promise. How are you with quizzes usually? I don't know. It's been a while since I've done one. Actually, that's not true. I did one for a bachelorette party, but it was about the person who I know very well. Sure. Yeah, okay. So we'll see. Okay, I've got 10 questions for you, Erica. Here we go. Question one. What is the cave-related origin myth of the Korean people?

58:01The name of it or what? Well, just tell me the story. Well, there was a god and a tiger and a bear begged him, saying, please make me human. He said, under one condition, if you eat all this garlic for, I think it was 20 days? 100 days. 100 days, all right. I'm more easy on them. 100 days. Then I'll make you human. And the tiger, weak. Weak sauce for that tiger. So you couldn't cut it. But the bear did, and the bear became human. And then they had a baby after that. That's a wonderful story. Well done. Excellent. We should get you to narrate the children's story. Question two. Can you name the ruling dynasty that founded in 918 by Hwang Kwan?

58:50I think I made a note for this one. Yeah. It does give its name to the Korean people. Oh, Koryo? Yeah, absolutely. The Koryo. That's it. Very good. Question three. What was unusual about the conception of legendary hero warrior Kim Yuxin? How long was he in the womb for? 20 months. It was 20 months. Very good. Question four. The Miochong Rebellion was led in the early 12th century by what type of magical guy? A geomancer. Yeah, he was. He was a geomancer slash Buddhist monk. But it didn't really help him out, did it? Because he still died. Question five. Which nomadic warrior tribe invaded Korea in the 13th century?

59:29The Khans? The monk. Yeah, the Mongols. Yeah, very good. The Khans, that's it. Very good. Question six. In 1388, Yi Song-gye led a coup against King Gong-yang and the Koryo. founding a new ruling dynasty which ran until the 19th century. What was it called? Oh, I don't know. Is that the nine-year-old one? Yeah, it's a long-running dynasty. It begins with Cho. Cho, cho, cho. I don't know. The Joseon dynasty. Okay, we didn't get that one. Okay, question seven. The Joseon dynasty also moved Korea's capital to which city where it still is? Seoul. It is, and originally it was Hanyang, I think. Question eight.

1:00:08up to what percentage of the Korean population were enslaved during some points of the Joseon dynasty? 30%. It was 30 % in, I think you said 16th century, John. It really depends. It could be 30 % in parts of the 16th century. Absolutely. Fascinating. Well done. Question nine. Can you name one reason a woman would be allowed to divorce her husband during the early Joseon dynasty? Man, I remember all the one about the guys being able to. Give me one of those then. Women talking too much. Very good, yeah, absolutely. And for the women, of course, physical abuse or if he was away for too long. And this for nine out of ten.

1:00:46Which great king in the 1400s sponsored the invention of the Hungol writing script? Do you remember his name? Did I write it down? It begins with S. C. John. Yes, C. John the Great. Well done. Nine out of ten, Erica. I'll take that. That's pretty good. I'll take that. Pretty good. Well done, John. Excellent teacher. And listener, if you want more East Asian history, We've got episodes on Edo Japan, on Tang Dynasty China, and for more Marauding Mongols, we did an episode on Genghis Khan, of course. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else.

1:01:22And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the fantastic Dr. John Lee from University of Durham. Thank you, John. Thank you. Yeah. It was lovely having you in and in Comedy Corner we had the excellent Erika Eler Thank you Erika Thanks so much It was lovely having you and see you lovely listener Join me next time as we uncover another legendary origin of another very real civilization but for now I'm off to go and join my daughter in watching K-pop Demon Hunters for the 3 ,000th time Bye

1:01:58You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4 This episode was written and produced by Dr. Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow me and series producer Dr Emma Negus. The research was by Aurelien Perrin. The studio and edit producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett.

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1:03:00In a world where swords were sharp and hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is, two fearless historians, me, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr. Eleanor Janaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.