Jeong Yak-yong's Letters Home

The road ran south, and each day it pulled a man a little farther away.

Late in 1801, a man left the capital of Joseon Korea to go into exile. It was the time of the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. He was not allowed to choose the day he left, and still less the day he would come back. He was told only where he had to go. It was Gangjin, a small county far down in the south, almost at the end of the peninsula.

The man's name was Jeong Yak-yong, and he was born in 1762. Back in 1792, he had designed a wooden crane that ran on pulleys, called the geojunggi. It helped lift heavy blocks of stone into the walls of Hwaseong in Suwon.

Now he was going the other way, every step taking him farther from all the work he had done.

The reason lay at court. The court of the day had grown suspicious of his family. And at a royal court in those times, once suspicion fell, there was no arguing it away. The order was short. Go very far away, and stay down there until another order comes. That other order took 18 years to arrive.

The road south in those days had none of today's trains or cars. There were only feet, horses and river ferries. Each morning the capital fell a little farther behind him. Familiar voices grew fewer. The accents along the road changed. Then, at some point, even the wind changed its smell. It carried a salty taste, which meant the sea was somewhere very near.

At last the road ran out. He was standing in Gangjin.

And here is the strange part of this story. For most journeys, arriving is the end. For this one, arriving was only the beginning.

Gangjin sits among low hills that look out over a bay. On the slopes of Mount Mandeok grew old tea bushes, so many that people in the area simply called the hill tea mountain. In Korean, tea mountain is Dasan. In later years, people stopped calling him by his real name. They called him by the name of that hill, which he himself had taken as his pen name.

Halfway up the hill stood a small thatched house facing south. It was called Dasan Chodang, which means the thatched house on tea mountain. To the left of the house was a little pond. In the yard was a stone spot for heating water to make tea. On a rock face nearby, two characters were carved: Jeongseok. The carving is still whole today. From a little higher up, Gangjin Bay lies below, shining.

Another man in his place might have spent his days grieving over his fate. He set up a writing desk.

Students from the area came, one after another. The thatched house became a classroom. Books were carried in, borrowed, copied out by hand, and piled up around the place where he sat. And he wrote. He wrote steadily and stubbornly, year after year, until later generations counted about 500 volumes under his name, most of them written in that time. There were books on how to govern so the people would suffer less. Books on laws and on judging cases. Books on medicine, on reading the sky, and on how to build houses.

Yet the thing that makes Koreans today speak of him in a much softer voice is not that pile of books. It is the letters that traveled back north.

At home he had two sons, Jeong Hak-yeon and Jeong Hak-yu. When their father was sent away, the brothers were still young enough to be at their studies. For 18 years, father and sons were separated by almost the whole length of a country. He was not allowed to cross that distance. Most of what traveled between the two ends was paper.

So he raised his sons on paper.

The letters he sent home did not dwell on hardship. They were mostly advice. Which books to read, and how to read them so the words would sink in. How a sentence ought to be written. What learning was for, in the end. And what he came back to most often was the hardest thing of all. The family had fallen on bad times, and outsiders now looked at it differently. Even so, the two boys had to live upright and decent lives, and keep to the ways of educated people.

The scene is easy to see. A father sits in the thatched house on the tea hill and writes down a line of advice for his sons. He folds the page. Then he waits, week after week, while the letter travels the very road he once traveled himself.

One year, something unusual arrived from home. It was not books, and it was not money. It was a silk skirt.

It was the red skirt that his wife, Lady Hong, had brought with her as a new bride. After so many years in storage, the red had slowly faded to the color of an evening sky. She sent it all the way south to her husband.

He did not put the skirt away in a chest. In 1810, he cut the silk into small pieces and joined them into a few small cloth albums. Then he sat down and wrote words of advice on them for his two sons. A father's handwriting, on a mother's wedding skirt. The albums are called Hapicheop.

There were four albums at first. Three survive today. Those three small cloth albums are now kept in the National Folk Museum of Korea in Seoul, as a designated treasure.

He did not throw away the leftover cloth either. On it he painted a few birds perched on a blossoming plum branch, and he added a poem. He sent it to his daughter, wishing her a warm and peaceful life in her husband's family.

In the autumn of 1818, the order to come home finally arrived.

That same year he finished the most famous book of his life. It was called Mokminsimseo, and it was about how an official should care for the people. A man kept out of office for 18 years had sat down and written a whole book on how to hold office with decency.

Then he traveled the old road back, and this time it was the road home.

That road is still there. The difference is that people now go down to Gangjin by car and make the trip in half a day. At the end of it are the tea hill, and the house rebuilt on the old foundations of the thatched one. There is the little pond to the left of the house, and the stone spot for making tea in the yard. Visitors often stand for a long time at the high point, looking down at the bay. Behind them, far away, lies the north, the direction the letters once traveled.

And in a museum in Seoul, a few pieces of silk the color of an evening sky are still telling the rest of the story. They hold the handwriting of a father who could not come home, written for two sons he could not reach. They hold it on the very wedding skirt his wife had sent the whole length of the country.