Seungjeongwon Ilgi
承政院日記 · The Diary of the Royal Secretariat
A day-by-day record of what was said and decided in the king's presence. What survives runs to 3,243 volumes — more than two hundred million characters.
It was designated a National Treasure in 1999 and entered UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2001. And there is exactly one copy of it in existence. Unlike the annals, which were duplicated and stored in separate archives, this was never copied.
A record that exists once only needs erasing once. That is where this story begins.
Heard in — Salt Letter · Echoes of the Empty Palace · The Blood Seal
Sacho and the historian
史草 · 史官
The court historian sat in the room with the king and wrote down what he saw and heard. Those drafts were called sacho.
The point was that the king could not read them. A record only becomes a record for later ages if the power of the moment cannot touch it. The annals were compiled from these drafts after a king had died.
What the people in this story risk their lives to protect, and what someone else is trying to destroy, is finally a single sheet of paper.
Heard in — The Blood Seal · A Blade at the Brush Tip · Salt Letter
The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty
朝鮮王朝實錄
Four hundred and seventy-two years of chronicle, from the first king to the twenty-fifth, entered into UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 1997.
Copies were kept in separate mountain archives, which is why they survived invasions and fires. Scattering a record was how you preserved it.
When a song says a woman vanished without a single line in the annals, it does not mean she never existed. It means she was removed.
Heard in — Ghost Fire · The Blood Seal
The purge of 1504
甲子士禍 · Gapja Sahwa
Queen Yun was a consort of King Seongjong and the mother of his successor. She was deposed and, in 1482, ordered to drink poison.
In 1504 her son learned the full account of what had happened, and a mass purge followed. It is known as the Gapja Sahwa.
The king and the woman in this project are not these people. But the shape of it — a woman erased from the record, and a man who changes after losing her — stands in that event's shadow.
Heard in — Echoes of the Empty Palace · Ghost Fire · The Blood Seal
Uigeumbu
義禁府 · The State Tribunal
The office that interrogated and judged serious offenders on the king's direct order. What matters is that it was not an ordinary court — the king's will reached it without passing through anyone.
It is the gate the men in this story walk through for the crime of having written something.
Heard in — A Blade at the Brush Tip · The Last Brush
Saheonbu
司憲府 · The Office of the Inspector-General
It audited officials, impeached them, and spoke up about the king's own conduct. Together with two other offices it formed the Samsa, the three organs of remonstrance.
When a man is punished for speaking in the office built for speaking, the country has already become a different country.
Heard in — The King's Path
The state examinations
科擧 · Gwageo
The examinations that selected officials. Passing made you a man who had risen by ability rather than birth; failing meant growing old as a candidate.
The scholars in this story passed. Which is why they could write — and why writing sent them into exile.
Heard in — The King's Path · A Blade at the Brush Tip
Exile
流配 · 圍籬安置
Exile sent a convicted man to live far from the capital. The harshest form, wiri anchi, built a fence of thorn branches around the house and confined him inside it.
Places that required crossing the sea, like Jeju, were among the heaviest sentences. It was a way of erasing a man without killing him.
Heard in — Road of Exile · A Blade at the Brush Tip · Salt Letter
The haenyeo and the sumbisori
濟州 海女 · The diving women of Jeju
The sumbisori is the whistling sound a diver makes as she surfaces and releases the breath she has been holding.
The bitchang is the iron blade used to pry abalone off rock; the taewak is the float she rests her chest on. The work is done on a single breath, with no tank.
Jeju haenyeo culture was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016 and designated a National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017.
Heard in — Sumbisori · Beneath the Water · The Woman Who Returned to the Water
Ieodo
離於島
A real submerged reef in the sea south of Jeju. It never breaks the surface, so no one has ever seen it from a boat.
The legend came first. For generations the people of Jeju said that those who did not come back from the sea were living on that island. The discovery came afterwards.
So the island you go to and do not return from is not a metaphor. It is a place on a chart.
Heard in — Ieodo · Sumbisori · Beneath the Water
The beacon system
烽燧 · Bongsu
A chain of hilltop beacon stations that carried news by smoke in daylight and fire at night, from the border to the capital.
It had grades. One fire meant all was quiet, two that an enemy had appeared, three that they had neared the border, four that they had crossed it, five that fighting had begun. The number of fires was the sentence.
A night when the beacons climb from one to five is a night when everyone knows before any messenger arrives.
Heard in — The Last Signal Fire · Gather
Mask dance
탈춤 · Talchum
A dance and a play performed in masks. The point of the mask was that no one could tell who was underneath it.
That is what made the lines possible — mocking the nobility, making a fool of a monk. There was no one to punish afterwards.
It is also how the performer in this story carries a scholar's words to the capital hidden inside a song. Paper can be seized. A sound cannot.
Heard in — The Market Street · Shadow on the Road
The royal seal
玉璽 · Oksae
The king's seal. The moment it touched a document, the document stopped being one man's wish and became the decision of the state.
So a scene in which something else is pressed onto the paper instead is not only an image. It is the act of turning what the country does into a private matter.
Heard in — The Blood Seal · Two Steps
The Big Dipper and the chilseongpan
北斗七星 · 七星板
To a sailor the Big Dipper was direction. It was also believed to govern lifespan and death.
The chilseongpan is the board laid at the bottom of a coffin, pierced with seven holes in the pattern of those stars. To 'carry the seven-star board' came to mean going to your death.
The same seven stars a man steers by on his way out to sea are the ones he is laid out beneath.
Heard in — Big Dipper