Epilogue

Summary

LADY HYEGYEONG’s BIRTHDAY celebrations ended with another birthday banquet in Hanseong on the eighteenth day of the sixth month. Through a series of great royal events, Jeongjo created the momentum to unite the people and spurred on political reform as a greater goal. In the following year (1796), the king revisited Hyeollyungwon Tomb in the first month and completed the construction of Hwaseong Fortress in the tenth month. From 1797, Jeongjo made a rule of visiting Hyeollyungwon Tomb twice a year, in the first and the eighth months. The construction of irrigation facilities in Hwaseong continued thereafter; Jeongjo invested his own private money in building Mannyeonje Dam before the entrance of Hyeollyungwon Tomb and completed the construction of Chungmanje Dam and Seodun Farm. In this way, Hwaseong developed into a self-sufficient city with a more stable financial base.

Despite his energy and vigour, however, Jeongjo died of a chronic skin disease at the age of forty-nine on the twenty-eighth day of the sixth month of 1800. There is much speculation about the death of Jeongjo. It is true that his political reforms, which were somewhat authoritarian, made his opponents feel very uncomfortable. Members of the Byeokpa branch of the Noron faction, who sought political power led by bureaucrat, must have had the impression that Jeongjo ruled the nation almost as though it were his private realm. Inevitably, therefore, Jeongjo’s ideal of suppressing the capital’s ruling class and building a nation for the common people failed to be firmly established as a solid alternative political system.

Jeongjo’s political reforms that embraced people of all classes came to an end with his death. Joseon politics in the nineteenth century was led by the group of people Jeongjo had detested – the coalition of royal in-laws and powerful officials of Hanseong. The leaders of this group were highly educated and sophisticated, but they lacked the leadership and generosity necessary to embrace the rural population. This led to the tragic conflict between the capital and the rest of the country, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century.