Hong Gyeong-nae Rebellion
A failed examination candidate raised a rebellion in north-western Korea in 1811 that held out for four months. The grievance was regional. P'yŏngan province had been discriminated against by the Chosŏn state for centuries: its men were barred in practice from the highest offices however well they did in the examinations, its commercial wealth from the China trade was resented, and central officials treated postings there as a punishment. Hong Gyeong-nae had passed a preliminary examination and gone no further, and spent a decade recruiting — merchants who financed it, mine labourers, a geomancer, local landowners and disaffected clerks. The rising began in December 1811 and took eight county seats in ten days, largely by having its supporters inside them open the gates. It then stalled. The rebels failed to take P'yŏngyang or Anju, government forces arrived, and the remnant withdrew into the walled town of Chŏngju with several thousand people. The siege lasted from January to April 1812 and ended when the besiegers tunnelled under the wall and fired 1,800 kilograms of gunpowder. Hong was killed in the assault, and some 2,000 survivors were executed — every male over ten. The rising is treated in Korean historiography as the beginning of the nineteenth-century crisis of the dynasty, which produced the Chinju risings of 1862 and the Donghak revolution of 1894. Regional feeling about the north-west outlasted the Chosŏn state entirely. Hong himself became a folk figure in the north-west, with stories circulating for decades that he had escaped and would return. The Chosŏn state lasted another century and never solved the problem the rising had named, which was that a system claiming to select on merit was in practice selecting on birth and geography.
- Year: 1811 CE
- Category: Political
