Posts

Showing posts with the label #Seonbi

Victory before the War

Image
 In 1592, Japanese army suddenly invaded and occupied Joseon dynasty, a peaceful land of ancient Korea. For the next seven years, a terrible war continued, and during that war, many people were killed and their property lost in the land of Joseon. Shortly before the end of the war, the strong Japanese navy led over 300 warships the coastal waters of the southwestern part of the Korean Peninsula, and attacked the Joseon navy with 12 old warships and some of defeated soldiers tired of the long war. Unfortunately, Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who was being temporarily punished for political party fights during the long war, had to hurry to participate the battlefield of crisis by leading the so weak Joseon navy as a classless soldier. Just in September 1597, Admiral Yi Sun-sin resisted by encountering a mighty Japanese warship on the narrow waterway between the land Haenam and the island Jindo in south Jeolla Province with 13 more battleships. The narrow sea road on the battlefield there was a...

The Story of Heo Saeng and a Big Commercial Dream

Image
  In the late 1700s, Park Ji-won, a scholar of the Silhak school wrote the novel ‘The Story of Heo Saeng’. As a servant of King Jeongjo of the Joseon Dynasty, he, like other Silhak scholars, criticized the old feudalistic notion that ignored the prosperity of commerce.    Unfortunately, many feudal scholars, Seonbis + have held the view that commerce in which some goods are bought cheaply and sold at high prices is an immoral act of making money easily without working.   At that time, however, scholars of the Silhak school thought that commerce was productive like agriculture and manufacturing, and it compensates for the excess and shortage of production and consumption areas through exchange, and further increases national wealth with the surplus.   The main character of the novel, Heo Saeng, who was poor, first asked Mr. Byeon, a man of large property in Seoul, to borrow business funds to make money through commerce. Unreasonably, he asked the man of wealth to...