General Nam Yi

Every year, on the first day of the tenth lunar month, drums start beating in one neighborhood of Seoul.

It is Yongmun-dong, in the district of Yongsan. People from the neighborhood carry a palanquin through the streets. Musicians go first, beating drums and gongs until the sound fills a whole row of houses. Flower lanterns hang along the way. The elderly walk behind the palanquin, and children run along both sides. They are carrying a general in procession.

That general died more than 500 years ago. And he died condemned by a court for treason.

His name was Nam Yi.

Nam Yi lived in the time of Joseon, the dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. In that age, a man who hoped to become a general usually had to wait many long years. Nam Yi did not have to wait. He was gifted in the martial arts, and people saw it while he was still very young.

In 1467, a great rebellion broke out in Hamgil Province, on the northern frontier. It was led by Yi Si-ae, and it rose against King Sejo's policy of drawing power into the capital. The court sent troops to put it down. Among the generals leading them were Nam Yi and General Gang Sun. They ended the rebellion.

After that victory, Nam Yi rose very fast. At the age of 28, he was made head of the Ministry of War. That meant he oversaw all the military affairs of the whole country.

Twenty-eight years old. At that age, most people are still learning a trade.

But a man who climbs too fast can also fall easily, above all when the throne changes hands.

King Sejo died. His son Yejong took the throne and became the eighth king of Joseon. At court there was a man named Yu Ja-gwang, who had never liked the rising young general. He found out something important. The new king did not like Nam Yi either.

So he accused Nam Yi of plotting rebellion. And he did not accuse Nam Yi alone. He dragged General Gang Sun in as well.

A trial was held before the king himself. Both generals were found guilty. Nam Yi died that same year, at just 28, the very age at which he had received the highest post of his life.

After the case, the court recorded Yu Ja-gwang as a meritorious subject of the first rank.

By rights, the story should have ended there. A sentence, a name wiped away, and time settling over everything.

But it did not end. There was one thing the sentence could not do. It could not make ordinary people believe it.

On a small island in the middle of the Bukhan River, there is a spot where people in the area believe he lies, and they have believed it for generations. His real grave is somewhere else. In the old days, the spot had no stone tablet, no surrounding wall, no roof. There was only a heap of stones piled one on top of another.

And people warn one another that anyone who takes away even a single stone from it will carry misfortune home.

It sounds like a threat. Yet that threat did real work. For generation after generation, no one touched the stones. The heap belonging to a man condemned for treason stayed there whole, quietly guarded by an entire region, without a single soldier.

The island later came to bear his name. Koreans call it Namiseom, Nami Island. Today visitors from everywhere come in great numbers, cycling under the rows of trees, taking photos, eating ice cream. Most of them do not know that the name printed on their ticket belongs to a young man once called a traitor.

Folk belief went further still. People did not only keep his stones safe. They came to worship him as a protecting god.

In Yongmun-dong there is a shrine dedicated to Nam Yi. Koreans call the yearly procession there Nami Janggun Sadangje. In July 1999, the city of Seoul entered it on its list of intangible cultural heritage, as number 20. In other words, something the people of one neighborhood had done among themselves for generations was at last recognized by the city itself as worth keeping.

So the same man has received two verdicts.

The first came from a trial. It was handed down very fast, and it said he was a traitor. More than 300 years later, the court itself cleared his name.

The second was pronounced by no one. It was gathered from very small things. A stone no one picks up, a shrine no one abandons, a procession no one leaves unfinished, year after year, generation after generation. And the second verdict says the opposite of the first.

So on the first day of the tenth lunar month, when the drums sound in Yongmun-dong and the palanquin starts moving through the streets, the neighborhood is giving an answer.

It is the answer of ordinary people, given quietly over many generations, and still going on today.