In July 1762, King Yeongjo of Joseon Korea sealed his own son, Crown Prince Sado, inside a wooden rice chest in the courtyard of Changgyeonggung Palace in Seoul, and left him there for eight days. It was not an improvised punishment. It was a legal loophole, engineered so a father could destroy his son without the law reaching down to destroy the grandson too.
Yeongjo held the Joseon throne for close to forty years, longer than almost any king in Korean history, and ran one of its most productive reigns. He forced the rival Noron and Soron factions into a policy called Tangpyeong, cut taxes that fell hardest on the poor, and pushed the Korean alphabet at a court that still wrote in Chinese. At home he was a different man: volatile, cutting, and cruel to the son he made crown prince before the boy turned two. Sado grew up terrified of him, and by his teens he was collapsing near his own father, unable to speak or dress himself.
The breaking point came in 1757. Two of the only people who had ever shown Sado tenderness, Queen Inwon and Queen Jeongseong, died within two months of each other, and the killings began almost immediately. He beheaded a eunuch named Kim Han-chae and carried the head through the palace. He beat a woman known as Concubine Gyeong to death in 1761. Nobody kept a ledger of how many died, and the rumors that followed inflated the number for centuries. What survives instead is the memoir of his own wife, Lady Hyegyeong, who lived through every year of it and wrote the fullest account of both his suffering and his violence, a source that is at once his defense and the only real witness against him.
By the summer of 1762, Joseon law left Yeongjo boxed in by two separate legal walls. A king could not let a blade touch a royal body, and a formal conviction for treason would have legally condemned Sado's wife and children along with him. So Yeongjo stripped his son's title first, turning a crown prince into a private citizen the law no longer had to protect, and sealed him inside a chest built to hold grain. His own mother, Consort Yeongbin, was the one who told the king it had to be done, on the condition that his family be spared. The son Sado left behind grew up to become King Jeongjo, one of Korea's greatest rulers, who built Hwaseong Fortress for his father and led a six-thousand-person procession to his tomb in 1795.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - A Killing Planned Around Furniture
0:46 - Changgyeonggung Palace: Where It Happened
1:27 - King Yeongjo: A Reign Built on Suspicion
2:06 - Tangpyeong: Forcing Two Rival Factions to Kneel
4:39 - The Boy Who Went Silent Near His Father
6:41 - Thirty Sets of Clothes and a Body Count
7:48 - June 1757: The First Killings
9:47 - A Hundred Deaths, or More, or Rumor
10:16 - Lady Hyegyeong: The Wife Who Wrote It Down
11:17 - One Book, Two Truths
12:56 - They Said He Was Sick
14:02 - Consort Yeongbin's Impossible Choice
14:56 - The Law That Built a Rice Chest
16:27 - Eight Days in the Courtyard
18:20 - A Name That Means Grief
19:54 - The Son the Box Saved
22:08 - The Procession of 1795
23:15 - What the Rice Chest Really Was
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Sadohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Hyegy%C5%8Fnghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeongjo_of_Joseonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeongjo_of_Joseonhttps://www.historicmysteries.com/history/prince-sado/30050/📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about the execution of Crown Prince Sado of the Joseon dynasty, who died in 1762 after his father, King Yeongjo, sealed him inside a wooden rice chest for eight days at Changgyeonggung Palace in Seoul. It covers Yeongjo's forty-year reign, his Tangpyeong policy balancing the Noron and Soron factions, Sado's childhood as crown prince from 1735, his breakdown after the 1757 deaths of Queen Inwon and Queen Jeongseong, the killing of the eunuch Kim Han-chae, the death of Concubine Gyeong in 1761, the memoirs of his wife Lady Hyegyeong known as Records Written in Silence, the plea of his mother Consort Yeongbin, the Joseon legal code behind the rice chest, and the reign of his son King Jeongjo, who built Hwaseong Fortress and led the 1795 royal procession. Joseon dynasty, 18th century Korea, Korean royal history.
#JoseonDynasty #KoreanHistory #CrownPrinceSado #KingYeongjo #ChanggyeonggungPalace #HistoryDocumentary #DarkHistory