A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tŏkhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea by Eugene Y. Park (review)

Pak Tŏkhwa (1590–n.d.) was a marginal member of the long-running lineage of the Pak clan of Miryang, a clan that is prominent today in South Korea. We say marginal because he seems to have been lesser in his own family, not listed with the same name pattern as his father’s other sons, and, as burial records show, buried apart from other family members in southern Kyŏnggi Province. Eugene Park discovered him as the ancestor of his own lineage—the Park spelling being a variant of Pak (朴), the third most common surname in South Korea. Koreans with the same surname are distinguished by clan, usually referring to the locale of the clan’s origin story, and within the clans by branches, all with careful attention to exogamy and social-status awareness. The Pak clan of Miryang is a distinguished kinship group, but some of its branches are obscure or even dubious in origin. Pak Tŏkhwa was a Miryang Pak but definitely not an important member of the clan.

The “family of no prominence” reference in the book title points to the position of Pak Tŏkhwa’s descendants among Korea’s “middle people,” or chungin (中人) during the Chosŏn dynasty. The chungin were a specific social caste, the product of concubinage in the Korean yangban nobility. Sons of concubines might live in their father’s household, be educated alongside their “legitimate” half-brothers, inherit property, and in many cases be almost-but-not-quite full heirs to their fathers’ posterity. It often happened that their shortfall—their “illegitimacy”—came in the form of a designation, soŏl (庶孼), indicated in their father’s genealogy by the first character, or short form, sŏ (庶). This is not the case with Pak Tŏkhwa, as Eugene Park shows with illustrations of family records; but Pak Tŏkhwa’s dubious parentage is shown in other ways, and it seems clear he was the son of a concubine. Except for mention in certain editions of the Miryang Pak clan genealogy, it is not until the 1630s that Pak Tŏkwha appears in his own right in the Chiksan area of Ch’ungch’ŏng Province as a military officer during the Manchu invasions of Korea.

Not that this is the start of a rags-to-riches story. Pak Tŏkhwa did not rocket into prominence due to his heroic exploits during the Manchu war. Rather, as slaves were freed and commoners found it possible to make small upward moves around the time of the war, Pak and his descendants found opportunity. Eugene Park’s second chapter traces the sometimes-shaky ascent of lineage members during the seventeenth century to chungin status through commerce, moving to Seoul and intermarrying with chungin families there.

The Chosŏn era offered two main avenues for chungin advancement: careers in support positions for the bureaucracy and as officers in the military. For example, they were Korea’s county clerks, magistrates’ assistants, legal specialists, astronomers, scribes, and translators. They had to pass examinations, called chapkwa (雜科), to get their positions, just as their more noble counterparts in the regular yangban aristocracy took the higher civil-service munkwa (文科) exam. The chungin who opted for military careers took a special military officers’ exam, the mukwa (武科). While these were not hereditary careers, the late Chosŏn period had a number of chungin families who were associated with particular types of specialties, and they amounted to a social stratum all their own. Their lineages were carefully documented in genealogies, and their offspring normally married children of other chungin.

Chungin have gotten special attention as a kind of vanguard of modernizers in the last decades of traditional Korea. Often they are associated with the late eighteenth-century Silhak (實學, “Practical Learning”) school of reform thinkers and the related Catholic community that developed parallel...