i'm making a thread of my favorite entries of the sejong annals bc i'm having more fun than i thought

a normal day in the joseon era

kang sangin's story is sooo long it's been months and they still talk about him almost every day. basically he didn't obey the orders of the previous king taejo and so he's been arrested and they tortured him every week despite the king being bored as hell with the whole ordeal

btw these are just the titles of the articles, i'm not translating all the entries bc it already takes too long just to read them myself

after four months of torture sangin decides that if he dies someone else will have to die with him and says the random name of someone he hates probably

about this yi banggan, he tried to rebel against king taejo and the king spared his life and AFTER TWENTY YEARS they're still petitioning for the king to behead him despite the king being like no it's been 20 years who the hell cares

can't find the english translation and too lazy to write my own but the culprit behind kang sangin's betrayal was shim on, the father of king sejong's first queen, so father in law of the king.

this is kind of problematic because you know the law said that if you're a traitor you should die, all your male relatives should die, and the women of the family shall become slaves or lowered to lowborn status. so. uhm. awkward.

??? phoenixes don't even exist but they had a whole page of conversation about whether it would be a good omen or not

shim on is finally arrested and tortured. he sees his brother in law while he's in the cell so he accuses him too. then he denies. then he accuses him again. i'm not making this up.

the king finally decides that shim on should commit suicide but since the king has already married his daughter and he quite likes her he decides the rest of the family will not be punished. the law is always on your side when you're the king.

spoiler: the king refused and espatriated them back to china

okay but apparently one of the princes was kind of wild, running away at night to chase women lol

the whole thing with the prince was super wild, apparently he was very upset because he was in love with a woman, but other court ladies bullied her and led her to commit suicide and that's why he ran away. also when the previous king found out he arrested the prince's wet nurse.

i kinda feel bad for the king bc this prince was super spoiled apparently but had a very bad attitude since he was young so in the end despite loving him a lot the king decides that if he commits another crime he will be punished like everyone else and banishes him to live alone.

so now we're back to the usual business which means the king and his father passive aggressively fighting for days bc the abdicated king should go to pyeongsan but doesn't want to and they keep commanding and counter-commanding the trip to be abolished or go on as planned.

one of the eunuchs started gossiping about one of the generals who apparently said "if his majesty treated prince yeongnyeong (the one who ran away) like the other princes, he wouldn't have ran away." ofc the eunuch was then tortured until he revealed the name of the generals.

the confusion? was this entry really necessary

march 1419 was such an uneventful month that other than this entry there was an entire week when the entries were all like: the royal chariot went to 'insert name of random city' and spent the night there

i'm so bored with this month that i included an entry about slaves trying to rebel and going to an island only to get captured and beaten in my assignment just bc there was nothing else to say