alternatehistory.com

Well, here's my second chapter. And like John Cleese would say... "And now for something... completely different."


…And while in 1811, the world was convulsing in revolutions, pests, and warfare, in Asia, a revolution was starting to fester.

The overall situation in Korea was quite bad, with poor harvests, famines occurring with frightening regularity, religious persecution towards Christians, and a bureaucratic nightmare to end all bureaucratic nightmares. It was under this oppressive regime that the Korean peninsula became a hotbed of rebellions, intrigue, incompetent kings that were manipulated by their councils or their regents, and Christianity gaining a foothold in Korea due to how the world always seemed to end for them.

Hong Gyeong-nae was a yangban (a type of noble-scholar in Korea) from Pyeongan, the son of a prominent family in the region, who had fallen out of favour with the elites from Hanseong [1]. Mostly because he studied the Korean classics on agriculture, such as “Straight Talk about Agriculture” (which was so good that the Royal Ministry of Agriculture ended up revising it until 1940) and other similar texts, like his rural fellow men. And lastly, he was tired of these lazy bureaucrats and the foolish policies that were done from the capital. He witnessed that these bureaucrats were pilfering the taxes, then they raised these taxes even further, and they went on to going to town on the population, making everyone on the province as equally poor and equally miserable. [2] And not to mention that the taxes were stupidly high, with a part ending up on the slush “funds” of some other bureaucrat. [3]

Then, in 1801, he hatched a plan: He was to take 1000 labourers to Chudo island, with the excuse that he would set up mining operations in the island, and with the funds . Instead of mining, they would begin to train in military tactics, and also planning on what to do if they successfully managed to topple the current regime. Information available in any language that is not Korean is sketchy at best, but with the aid of an automatic translator, I was able to deduce that when he came back to the mainland, Mr. Hong and some of his men went to the home of their local bureaucrat, seized him, dragged him outside, and turned him into a human piñata in January 1811. And everyone rejoiced, as the piñata, instead of giving out candy, it gave out the whole grain tax of multiple years (and also, it spilled its guts and blood).


Then, the situation somehow escalated quickly, as in many towns the same thing happened. And with bureaucrats getting killed en masse and all of a sudden, Hong Gyeong-nae found himself as the main commander of a rebellion that managed to cover the northwest of the Korean peninsula. Taking command of such a large amount of territory in less than ten days was a complete achievement that even I haven't been able to replicate in any of my grand strategy games. And with such a massive army, he managed to take the fortress of Jeongju, sending them the message quoted on the beginning.


By June 1811, the rebellion grew in both the terrain it controlled, to the point that it managed to extend as a sliver of land from the Yellow Sea to the Pacific. Hong’s rebel army defeated the Royal Army with the use of hit-and-run tactics, supply theft, and decapitating their already weak command structure by striking at the officers first and killing anybody stupid enough to continue fighting on, as the rebels actually offered a chance to the remaining soldiers to join the movement.

But it didn’t stop there. With the prospect of actual success against the Hanseong regime, Hong chose to form the basis of a government, instead of continuing on hit and run battles against the Royal Army. He proposed, with the aid of a few Korean Catholics [4] who brought in some Western knowledge, to go through some basic reforms on the government, such as drafting a basic law for the common people, toleration of all religions within the kingdom as long as they opted not to incite a rebellion, a complete revision of the officer examinations, shifting from Neo-Confucian texts to practical books in metalsmithing, agriculture, mercantilism, and sciences, and last, but not least, a much needed restructuring of the bureaucratic system, that would bring officers from the provinces that would actually bring a new point of view instead of the biased prejudice of these capital dwellers.

So, this brought many of the social classes in Korea to support him: defecting soldiers, merchants, artisans, labourers, farmers, and Catholic converts. The latter would become extremely important later on.


It all ended for the Joseon dynasty in early June 1813, after almost two years and a half of war. With the rebels sieging the city, and with no prospect of escaping, King Jeongjo, last king of the Joseon dynasty, and with just 21 years of age, chose to spare the lives of his fellow soldiers and to call for negotiations with the rebels. There was no point on continuing the war, especially as he was willing to go for reforming the political system, which was a quagmire from the beginning.


Hong Gyeong-nae and King Jeongjo were to start their dialogue in June 16, 1813. However, when everything was set to actually come to good terms, Jeongjo was murdered by members of his council (and under the orders of former Queen Dowager Jeongsun, seeing his negotiations as a threat to her power and those of her fellows), in order to put his son, the two-years old Crown prince Hyeomyeong, as the king. Needless to say, Gyeong-nae went off to hunt these traitors, and this time around it was open season for the rebels against these radicals.

In June 21, in lieu of the young crown prince getting murdered by his remaining cadre in order to deny the rebels to get him and instill these ideas into him, and with most of the old bureaucracy and the Queen Dowager Jeongsun dead, they had to think on what to do. Korea, at that time, did not have any kind of democratic tradition, so at this point, the only thing that Kyeong-nae was able to say was “Well, screw it, I’ll do this” (Not in those words, though). He became the King of Korea (Though, he did not took a regnal name).

And, from that point on, the Hong dynasty began to grow, and with the new technocratic bureaucracy, Korea managed to industralize earlier than most of Asia. Catholicism began to grow until the point where the new royal family converted, and most people followed suit, thus opening a whole new world of diplomatic relations with the European colonials in Asia (and especially Spain, of which we'll talk more about later). With technological innovations, prosperity (and other social marvels such as democracy) came to its people, and the country broke off from the grip of perpetual poverty and its cycles of famine. But that's a story for another time.


I extend my thanks to zeppelinair, as without him, this chapter would have never occurred. Even though, it was hard due to the fact that I had to rely on Google translate, and make heads and tails out of the resulting garbled mess that those translations threw at me. By far, the hardest chapter I’ve done, and something inside me tells me it's not quite right. But at the same time, it's something completely different, and definitively a POD that I think that no one really considered before (save for an extremely old usenet discussion with 6 posts that I lost the link to).

The POD here being that Gyeong-nae started his uprising one month later. With a more prepared army and more tactical acumen, his rebellion succeeded, and brought the King to negotiations. But... stuff happened.

[1] Old name for Seoul.

[2] A small, but relevant POD for the future of Asia. You will see why when we get to sometime after the 1860's.

[3] Farmers paid with their harvests. Now, connect the dots.

[4] The presence of Catholic converts proved to be a boon on proving to the Europeans that they were not barbarians.

Next Chapter:
The Comanches and other ethnic groups in the Empire.