The Red Queen (16 page)

It was getting late, and from where we sat we could hear the shrill, angry voice of His Majesty at the shrine, and the rapping of his sword. Sado knew he had to go out to meet his fate. He hesitated, but eventually, with some urgings of support from me and from his attendants, he gathered himself together, with one last effort, and stood up, and left the room. I was never to see him alive again. I cannot recall his last words to me, or mine to him. I saw him go to his death, and I did not reach out my hand to stop him.

I will not now attempt to describe my emotions. After a while, I asked one of the attendants to go to the wall and look over it to see if he could see what was happening. He returned to report that the prince had already removed the dragon robe, and was now prostrate upon the ground. I knew that this was the last scene of the last act of the tragic drama of his life. I was too restless and despairing to stay at Tŏksŏng House, waiting passively on the unrolling of events, so I made my stumbling way to the Grand Heir’s residence, where we hugged one another desperately, mother and son, and wept. It was hot, and my feet were white with dust, and my face was streaked with tears. We had no notion of what to do next. I have never felt so utterly helpless. My son was distraught. He knew all too well what was happening. The angry voice of his grandfather resounded through the still afternoon air. Maybe I should have stayed away from my son, for my presence was no comfort to him, and I could offer him no protection. But I clung to him, selfishly. At such moments, one cannot endure solitude.

At about four o’clock, I was informed that a eunuch had come to request a rice chest from the kitchens. I could not understand what this request meant, and I was too agitated to let him have what he wanted. Had I known what its purpose would have been, I hope I would have refused it. But the truth is that I did not know what was happening. I was beside myself.

After a while, the Grand Heir, desperately anxious, suddenly stood up, and pulled himself to his full height. His face was full of determination and self-command. Remember, he was not yet ten years of age. He went bravely out through the gate to the shrine, where, I am told, he threw himself to the ground, behind Sado’s prostrate body, and begged his grandfather to spare his father’s life. Should I have tried to restrain him? Did I have some hope that his intercession might succeed? He was only a child. Whose heart would not have been moved by his tears? Poor child, he feared his father, but he loved him, too, and he was to love him even better after death. King Yŏngjo told him, sternly, in a terrible voice, to get up, and to leave the courtyard. Chŏngjo refused, or was unable to move, and he had to be pulled up and carried away by force. And so he was obliged to leave his dishevelled father lying on the ground in the dirt at his grandfather’s feet. He was not brought back to join me, but was taken to the waiting room at his father’s residence. To wait for the end. This is all I knew at the time of what happened. I knew that his pleas had been rejected, and that I was alone. I was surrounded by servants, but I was alone.

I knew it was my duty to die. I reached for a knife, but it was taken from me. I knew that it was also my duty to live. Whatever I did would be a crime, a betrayal.

Eventually I, too, unable to bear the passivity of helpless waiting, went out, towards the shrine, but I could see nothing over the wall, and I was not permitted to pass through the gate. My knees were trembling and my breath came fast and shallow. I could hear Prince Sado pleading for his life, and the sound of the terrible rapping of His Majesty’s sword, and the wailing of Prince Sado’s tutors. The midsummer heat was terrible. The air smelt of death. I could hardly hear the words that Sado was saying, but I could hear the low, defeated tone of his desperation and his humiliation, and I remembered the many times that he had told me that he knew that his father would not permit him to live. He was now, yet again, confessing his faults, and promising eternal obedience. He would study harder, he promised. Like a child, he promised to be good. Was it yet possible that there could be forgiveness? Could the father stretch out his hand, at this last moment, and could the son be restored to favour?

I could see nothing. I could not see over the wall.

I could not see that there was now a rice chest in the courtyard. It did not come from my kitchens. Later, nobody claimed it, nobody accepted responsibility for having provided it, but it was there. It had been brought by the king’s command. Somebody had brought it to his presence. I will describe this rice chest.

A rice chest is a large, square wooden box, a domestic object of a nature familiar to all in our country. It is used for the storage of rice or grain. It stands on short legs, and can be locked by a metal clasp. (Some rice chests are objects of considerable value, and are handed down as family heirlooms, as I believe linen chests may be in your country.) The rice chest in question here was a large one, which measured four feet by four feet by four feet. I am told that the first chest to be provided proved unsuitable (presumably it was too small?) and that a second had to be obtained.

Writing down those two harmless words, ‘rice chest’, is still painful for me, after all these years. During my life, we never used those words. We referred to the rice chest, when we spoke or wrote of it, as ‘that thing’.

My own father was later accused of providing the rice chest, but he did not do so. I do not know who provided it. Those who accused my father were malicious detractors.

This is what happened. As the long hot day wore on, Sado’s pleas exhausted themselves, and his feeble but repeated attempts to kill himself were repeatedly foiled. King Yŏngjo then ordered his son to climb into the rice chest. And, in the end, he did so. I did not witness this.

We do not know in whose brain the novel idea of the unparalleled cruelty of the death in the rice chest was hatched. Some have complimented King Yŏngjo himself upon it, some Lady SŏnhŬi, and some, as I have said, have implicated my father. Others have pointed the finger at various ministers. I do not know whose idea it was. It was not known. It is not known.

Sado was young and strong. So why did he climb voluntarily into his own wooden tomb? He sealed his fate. He consented, however reluctantly, to his death.

I have tried to give you, from my observations, an accurate, factual description of what happened on that fateful day. It seems that there are two other known contemporary documentary accounts of that day’s events and its immediate consequences. My account, of course, is the most trustworthy.

The second account, the most official and the most carefully edited, is in the
Sillok
for the reign of King Yŏngjo. The
Sillok
is the name we give to the official record or gazette of each king’s reign. Written in Chinese, these annals were compiled retrospectively, after each monarch’s death, but from contemporary sources. They were printed and preserved under rigorous management. The version in the
Sillok
for King Yŏngjo’s reign was, in effect, written by a committee – a committee of historians and diarists and editors. The
Sillok
, in all its 2,000 and more volumes, is now preserved as a National Treasure, under carefully controlled conditions. I am told that the
Sillok
for Yŏngjo’s reign consists of 137 volumes in eighty-three books, and, although it is full of minute detail, it is reticent about the illness and death of Prince Sado, which are described briefly and somewhat obliquely.

The third account was written by a diarist who was, unlike myself, an eyewitness to what happened in the courtyard by the shrine. He was a recorder in the Royal Secretariat. In my lifetime, I did not know of his account, and I have not yet had an opportunity to study it in full. But I believe there are no major discrepancies between these three accounts.

This third text, unknown to me in my lifetime but thought to be authentic, is said to describe in full, first-hand and distressing detail many of the events of which at the time I knew only by eavesdropping and by hearsay. It was preserved in the Yi royal family private collection, and has only recently come to light. All I can say here is that it is said to confirm my worst fears about the sufferings of the prince, about his futile efforts to strangle himself, about his tutors’ determined efforts to thwart his suicide attempts, about his father’s persistent fury, and about the confusion that ensued after the prince had been persuaded to climb into the rice chest.

There are many stories about what happened later that night – some say that nails were driven through the chest, and some say that it was padded with straw to stifle the prince’s cries. But we all know that eventually the chest was sealed tightly, strapped with ropes, covered with grass, and carried from the lower to the upper palace where it was placed in front of the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence. At midnight, the king issued an edict deposing Prince Sado and demoting him to the status of commoner, but the royal secretaries refused to transcribe and issue it, saying that it was unlawful. The king had to write it out himself, in his own shaking hand.

This may be the moment at which I should try to explain to you, to posterity, the reason – if one may call it a reason – why Prince Sado had to die in the rice chest, and not in some less painful or more dignified manner. Prince Sado had to die like this because it was very important to the state and to the royal succession that he should not die in the manner of a common criminal. It would have been acceptable for him to commit suicide, but this he was not willing or not able to do. He appears to have tried, after a fashion, to kill himself, but was easily prevented. It is not easy to fall on one’s sword. (Stronger men than he have quailed at such a moment. Even that brave warrior Mark Antony bungled it, and had to ask for help.) So Sado had to die in a manner in which no blood was shed, in a royal manner, in a manner in which his body was not disfigured or dismembered. (The consideration that he cannot have looked very pleasant after days of slow, cramped starvation in a rice chest does not seem to have carried much weight with those who devised his death.)

Death by poison would have been acceptable. It had been the custom to present a cup of poison to those members of the upper classes who unfortunately found themselves obliged to remove themselves for the better good of the state. Some, like Socrates, took it willingly, but occasionally coercion followed the presentation, and the poison was forced down the victim’s throat. This had happened in the case of Lady Chang, the rival of the virtuous, childless and abandoned Lady Inhyŏn, the queen whose melancholy story had so mysteriously touched Lady Pingae. (Lady Chang, you may recall, was the lowborn mother of the crown prince who later became King Sukchong. King Sukchong was King Yŏngjo’s grandfather, and the poisoned Lady Chang was thus after a manner King Yŏngjo’s step-great-grandmother.)

The unfortunate manner of Lady Chang’s death had cast a lingering cloud over the succession. It was a bad precedent. Perhaps that was why the rice chest seemed to offer a better option than poison. It was certainly cruelly ingenious. The device of the rice chest technically absolved the perpetrators of any guilt. As Sado was seen to enter the chest unaided, he was deemed to have voluntarily chosen death. I leave it to you to judge whether or not this device was to his father’s credit.

I note that some unsubstantiated versions of this day’s events claim that Sado was indeed offered a dish of hemlock and refused to drink it. I do not know whether this was true or not. If it was, I did not witness it.

I return, now, to my own actions on that long and dreadful day. I was informed of my son’s failed intercession, and of the king’s implacable determination to force the death of Sado. I have said that at this point I knew little of the story of the rice chest, but eventually news was brought to me of Prince Sado’s incarceration. You can imagine how unreal, how fantastical, how horrible this denouement seemed to me. At last, recovering myself a little for my son’s sake, I sat below the gate in the late afternoon shade and wrote a letter to His Majesty, humbly requesting permission to return with my son to my father’s home. With difficulty, I managed to find a eunuch and asked him to deliver it to the king. Not long afterwards, First Brother came to me with a royal decree granting that I should be allowed to depart the palace. A palanquin was to be brought for me, and a sedan chair for the Grand Heir. I was unable to walk, but I was carried on someone’s back through the Ch’ŏnghwi Gate, where the palanquin was already waiting for me. A lady-in-waiting rode with me. And so I went home to my father’s house, no longer the royal wife of the crown prince, but the wife of a condemned criminal, and a commoner. Despite the slow accumulation of my fears and my sorrows, I had not thought that it would come to this.

I was laid in a room in the inner quarter of my father’s house. Soon we were joined by my nine-year-old daughter-in-law, the Grand Heir Consort, who shared our disgrace: her family had sent a palanquin for her, and she came with my oldest daughter Ch’ŏngyŏn. So we were reunited in our humiliation. The shock suffered that day by the Grand Heir Chŏngjo was indescribable, and the horrors of it were not over yet. I do not think Chŏngjo ever recovered. Certainly he never forgot.

It took Prince Sado eight days to die in the rice chest. He was eight days dying. During this period, I remained at my father’s house, which was now crowded with many who had fled from the palace, including all the ladies-in-waiting from the Grand Heir’s establishment. It was a scene of chaos and displacement and uncertainty. We had to rent the house next door, and to cut a passageway through the fence in order to accommodate everybody. I say ‘we’, but it was Father and First Brother, I believe, who were obliged to take these practical steps for our family’s physical survival. I was, for these first days, beside myself. I was sealed up in the black box of my own grief and horror, and I was of no use or help to anyone. I had always suffered – as I think many of us do – from a mild form of claustrophobia, and the thought of my husband’s entombment was appalling to me. I had hated those underground fake coffins he had made for himself, and now he was sealed in a real coffin. My imagination could not abandon him. I died along with him.