From the Mists of Time

Following the course of the paks' emergence from obscurity requires an understanding of currently recognized Korean descent groups and their master narratives. Pak is one of some 280 surnames documented in South Korea, each with its own mantle of history. Pak, moreover, is one of the five most commonly used surnames, which together account for half of all South Koreans. Though no statistics are available, the number of surnames in North Korea, with a population roughly half of the South's, should be about the same, since the most common South Korean surnames seem to be just as common among North Koreans.

With the number of surnames so small, a surname, especially a very common one such as Pak, can function as a historically meaningful identifier only when combined with an ancestral seat designation. Currently in South Korea, more than forty-one hundred ancestral seat–surname combinations are in use, each ostensibly denoting a descent group with a master narrative that honors a common patrilineal male ancestor and stresses descent from royals or aristocrats of the Silla (n.d.–935), the Koryo (918–1392), or the Choson period. We can surmise that roughly the same number of ancestral seat–surname combinations must have been in use in the North as of the 1945 division of Korea by the U.S. and Soviet occupation forces, though the communist state since then has discouraged its citizens from thinking about such a vestige of feudal culture to the extent that most younger North Koreans today reportedly do not know their families' ancestral seats.

Modern Korean genealogies are full of claims that logic and fact easily contradict. If, for example, we were to take the claims of all descent group master narratives at face value, then roughly a quarter of Koreans today would descend patrilineally from just four males who lived in the tenth century. Second, in spite of master narratives that clearly explain the origins and history of every ancestral seat–surname entity (or descent group), no more than a quarter of Koreans can actually find themselves or their patrilineal kinsmen in genealogies. Third, fewer than half of such pedigreed Koreans appear in older-edition genealogies published in the first part of the twentieth century or earlier. And, finally, the Y chromosome DNA mutation analysis that can determine roughly how many generations ago the common patrilineal ancestor of two given individuals lived (the analysis that has shown, for example, that more than 80 percent of the Cohens, Jews of priestly tradition, share an apex figure who lived around the time of the Exodus) discerns no particular genetic marker distinguishing Koreans from their neighbors, not to mention distinguishing descent groups among Koreans.

Although the empirical veracity of the process is in doubt, the cultural imperative is strong and of long standing. As is well acknowledged among social historians, widespread pursuit of status across class boundaries was a postmedieval trend as early as the fifteenth century, depending on region. Rather than a component of some sort of colonial modernity sparked by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, early modern Korean understandings of kinship identity took shape long before any gunboat arrived on the shores of the "Hermit Kingdom." One needs to go farther back in time in a search for the historical origins of institutionalized Korean descent groups, both real and imagined.

Descent and Kinship in Medieval and Early Modern Korea

We can begin the search with the medieval period (ca. 850–ca. 1500), when the notions of a surname and an ancestral seat spread among the elite and a central aristocracy took shape. Unifying the Korean Peninsula in 936, the Koryo dynasty granted surnames to local strongmen who gradually evolved into hereditary functionaries performing day-to-day administrative work for the fledgling central government in Kaesong. Besides surnames, the state also extended other incentives, including eligibility for entering officialdom through the government service examination established in 958. Such official families formed the central aristocracy whose members, even after moving to Kaesong, kept a house in the countryside while identifying themselves by the ancestral locales where their forebears had served as local functionaries. Increasingly, patrilineal principles shaped how the Korean aristocracy understood descent and kinship. Although matrilineal connections continued to influence how Koreans divided inheritance and determined residence, the strengthening notion of an ancestral seat contributed to a more strictly patrilineal conception.

In late medieval Korea (ca. 1270–ca. 1500), the aristocracy became a closed status category. In the thirteenth century, when the local social order experienced instability, displaced functionaries began flocking to Kaesong in search for new opportunities, and the scale of influx was such that in the fourteenth century the central government sought to force them back to their ancestral locales to perform their original duties. The scholar-officials supplanting the Koryo with the new Choson dynasty in 1392 effectively barred local functionaries, hitherto the main supply pool of new families for the aristocracy, from officialdom and increasingly applied neo-Confucian ideals of family structure to define familial status ever more narrowly. Rejecting the custom of polygamy among the Koryo aristocracy, according to which a man legally could have up to four wives, the Choson state and its elite proprietors took measures to identify concubines (ch'op) and illegitimate children as such and legally discriminate against them, whereby they lost prerogatives as bona fide members of the aristocracy, including the right to sit for government service examinations. All this began in the fifteenth century when the Choson elite began to insist on a "monogamy" that allowed a man just one legal wife, though it left him free to maintain concubines. A law first enacted in the early fifteenth century distinguished illegitimate children mothered by a concubine from children of a legal wife. A series of new legislations followed, culminating in 1469 with the State Administrative Code (Kyongguk taejon), which formally banned illegitimate sons from the civil service examinations.

Prior customs did not vanish immediately, however, and the oldest known genealogical record of a descent group, the 1476 Andong Kwon genealogy, is revealing. Recording about nine thousand individuals descended from a twelfth-century aristocrat who, in turn, was a descendant of the eponymous tenth-century ancestor of the Andong Kwon, the genealogy reflects a not-yet-fully-patrilineal notion of kinship. Only about 30 percent of the descendants in the genealogy are patrilineal descendants of the twelfth-century ancestor; the rest are affines, though the presumably nonaristocratic lines that had branched off before him are not shown. As evidenced by the genealogy, the Korean elite at the time was rather homogeneous: 901 out of 1,794 (51 percent) government civil examination (munkwa) passers from 1393 to 1481 appear. The genealogy, additionally, unlike later ones, respects birth order rather than listing all sons before daughters, and though it does not record a daughter's name, it does record the son-in-law's name as that of the daughter's husband (yobu) rather than treating it as the name of the daughter. The genealogy even records a daughter's second marriage—a phenomenon that would become unthinkable in late Choson Korea, when chaste widowhood was idealized. There also are no adopted sons recorded under heirless males, as adoption was not the societal norm it would become in late Choson. And although it is unclear whether a strict legitimate-illegitimate distinction had become the custom in distinguishing the status of children, the genealogy records not a single child as illegitimate.

Published eighty-nine years later, the 1565 Munhwa Yu genealogy recording about forty-two thousand descendants of a tenth-century founding ancestor reflects many of the new social trends of early modern Korea. Characteristics that it shares with the 1476 Andong Kwon genealogy include coverage of all direct descendants of the eponymous tenth-century founding ancestor's first famous descendant but exclusion of the presumably nonaristocratic lines that had branched off during the intervening generations; a high percentage of examination graduates and prominent statesmen; respect for the actual birth order in recording children; indication of daughters' multiple marriages; and lack of the designation "illegitimate" (so) for any children, though again it is unclear whether the parents did not make the distinction to begin with or illegitimate children simply were not recorded. At the same time, the 1565 genealogy shows that the notion of a male heir had assumed greater importance. First of all, the "son-in-law" (so) notation has replaced the "daughter's husband" label for a daughter. Second, some heirless men are shown to have adopted an heir, though the genealogy records only seven cases. Significantly, even such adopted sons appear under their natural fathers—with a mention of the name of the adoptive father. This marks the beginning of the early modern practice of aristocratic Korean men without a legitimate son (chokcha) adopting within their respective descent groups.

For ancestral seat–surname entries, a seventeenth-century genealogy, the Origins of Descent Groups (Ssijok wollyu), tends to leave recorded descent lines unconnected to a putative noble ancestor. Unlike later Korean genealogies that generally sought to demonstrate that all descent lines of any one ancestral seat and surname pair descended from a common founding ancestor, the work demonstrates that the seventeenth-century Korean elite reckoned descent groups as more microscopic patrilineal kinship units, each descended from a documented, traceable ancestor. Also, the work duly notes local functionary origins and even conflicting pedigree information, again in general contrast to modern genealogies. In the cases of an Uisong Kim descent group segment and a Ch'angnyong Cho descent group segment, for example, the author includes two versions of their pre-Choson pedigrees and rightly suggests that the one showing most of the individuals as holding local functionary posts is probably more accurate.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Korea, genealogies compiled by the aristocracy became more expansive and detailed. The driving force behind these changes was an emerging new cultural identity. The Manchu (Qing) conquest of China in the seventeenth century spurred neo-Confucian Korean aristocrats to view their kingdom as "Little China" (So Chunghwa). As preservers of the Way (that is, civilization), the aristocracy's emphasis on correct rituals entailed conceptualizing kinship and descent in more strictly patrilineal terms and making appropriate status distinctions even among children of the same parents. Looking beyond a narrowly defined lineage or a descent group segment, genealogies covered even entire descent groups sharing a common surname, ancestral seat, and descent from a putative ancestor. In constructing such large-scale genealogies, compilers brought together family pedigree records that in the medieval period typically had been kept by individual households. As the printed genealogy started recording all members rather than just the aristocratic ones, it also began recording adoptions of male heirs of the same social status as the heirless father.

As status distinctions mattered, nonelites of means increasingly adopted a surname or, if already in possession of one, claimed a widely known ancestral seat to go with it. Household registers, examination rosters, and other documents of the time record individuals claiming affiliation with a historically long recognized descent group although their names do not appear in the genealogies compiled by the aristocracy. Already well represented at the time were modern Korea's most common ancestral seat–surname combinations, such as the Kimhae Kim and the Miryang Pak.

For a given descent line, determining the beginning point of its reliable genealogy sheds light on the family's social status at the time. Whereas for the early modern aristocracy a single-line succession for generations was a pattern applicable only to genealogies of their ancestors of the earlier medieval period, this was still true in the early modern era for many sub-chungin families in genealogies. As of the early modern period, aristocratic descent groups resource-rich enough, since the medieval period, to boast a large number of members descended from a medieval-era common ancestor, before whom the available record had information only on his direct patrilineal ancestors. In contrast, those of lower social status were able to organize themselves into sizable descent groups as such only in the early modern era or later. Also, descent lines of sub-chungin status, as recorded in genealogies, tend to leave out daughters until the nineteenth century or so. In contrast, during the early modern era, bona fide aristocrat and chungin genealogies scrupulously recorded daughters by their husbands' names—providing information on their ancestral seats and, if applicable, degrees, court ranks, and offices, as well as including even the names of their fathers and sons. After all, indicating the prominence of the son-in-law's family was as important as showing that of the father-in-law.

The Chungin in Medieval and Early Modern Korea

The importance of genealogy as a record of a descent group's social standing raises questions about the nature of chungin as a status category below the aristocracy but above commoners. How did the chungin status group emerge? Did chungin families attain their status by rising from below, or falling from above? What was the extent to which various groups that were neither aristocrat nor commoner viewed one another as a social cohort?

To answer these questions, we must begin with the history of chungin status in the late medieval period, with the definition becoming quite complex. When the term chungin began gaining currency in the early Choson period (1392–ca. 1567), it referred to those whose social standing was of middle level in terms of wealth or other attributes. The History of Koryo (Koryosa), completed in 1451, and other sources on the earlier Koryo dynasty recognize only the aristocracy, commoners, and low-born as ascriptive status categories. Although an intermediate social stratum clearly neither aristocrat nor commoner existed, at the time it evidently did not constitute an ascriptive chungin status category per se.

Another fifteenth-century source, the Veritable Records of King Sejong (Sejong sillok) of 1454, makes it clear that chungin was not yet in place as an unequivocally recognized social status category. The geographical treatise (chiriji) section of the source lists each administrative locale's indigenous surnames, but most of the ancestral seat–surname combinations that would become uniquely chungin family identifiers by the seventeenth century are missing. This suggests that most of early modern Korea's chungin descent groups with distinct ancestral seat–surname combinations had come to regard as their "ancestral seats" the places where they had been residing sometime after the Koryo dynasty's institutionalization of the indigenous surnames system for local functionaries in the tenth century. Certainly more research is necessary on the origins of such chungin families, but the chungin families bearing identifiers unique to them included the dislocated local functionaries of late Koryo who had managed to stay in Kaesong as well as others arriving in Seoul from elsewhere after the 1392 dynastic change.

At the beginning of the early modern era, the term chungin began to refer to technical specialists and others of social status below the aristocracy but above commoners. According to A Brief Study on the History of Chungin (Chungin naeryok chi yakko) by Hyon Un (1860–n.d.), a foreign language interpreter, anyone browsing through chungin genealogies should notice that chungin families had been serving as government technical specialists for no more than ten generations or so—showing that such families had arisen in the sixteenth century when court factionalism began to take on a more hereditary character. Expressing his pride as a member of a prominent chungin lineage, Hyon contended that among the scholar-officials politically marginalized owing to factionalism the well-to-do of moral probity pursuing practical studies became known as "chungin." He acknowledged, however, that the circumstances wherein they acquired the label were not known in detail, and he mentioned that according to some the designation referred to those occupying the position between scholar-officials and common folks.