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ljwritesThere's always a sense of completeness and a sense of strangeness when things come back to the beginning, right where they were supposed to end up in the first place. There's fulfillment, sure, but at the same time it's different from what you imagined, and the familiar is no longer familiar.
The Story of Crown Prince Sado
The death of Crown Prince Sado of Choson (1735-1762) was the seed of Shadow of the Dragon King that it only took me eighteen damn chapters to get to. That historical episode was the start of my obsession with the story, and where the story almost-ends. Not only is Shadow close to the end now, but the whole premise of the story is that Zuko came close to dying from the Agni Kai episode, not from his wounds, but from deadly factional strife within the Fire Nation when his defiance at the war council was construed as treason by a suspicious father and a dominant faction of nobility. The story's conceit is that Zuko avoided Sado's fate because... well, you'll find out in the next chapter.
I first thought of Sado in connection to Zuko when I surfed over to the Annals of the Choson Dynasty on a whim. Choson, the country that ruled over the Korean peninsula from the 14th century to the late 19th, took after the Chinese in being rather, um, anal about recording their kings' deeds and palace happenings. The result is 500 years of historical data, recorded firsthand as the events unfolded, now entirely online in both the original forms and translated into modern Korean.
That's a history nerdgasm happening right there.
The death of Crown Prince Sado is one of those historical mysteries that everyone has an opinion about and which will never be resolved. Born Lee Sun to the twenty-first king of Choson,* he was originally a promising young prince, but according to the Annals he increasingly neglected his studies since the age of 10 and his behavior became more and more erratic due to an unspecified illness. It came to the point where he murdered palace staff and regretted it when his fits passed, and his royal father's severe reprimand only made the illness worse. (The "yell at the disease" approach to mental illness has a long pedigree of not working, it seems.) Finally the king stripped Sado of his title as Crown Prince, then ordered him confined. Eight days later, with no official explanation, Sado was dead at the age of 28.
*The historic name for him is Yeongjo, but as with all Korean kings that was never a title anyone called him when he was living. The king is the king IS the king, His Majesty the one and only, and he didn't have any name separate from that, at least none that anyone outside the immediate family was allowed to call. It's like in Great Queen Seondeok, as mentioned in fairladyz2005's post, where the titular queen tells her would-be lover that it is treason to call her by name. Once a king was dead he would be given a posthumous title to distinguish him from all the other dead kings, and Yeongjo is one such posthumous title. So is "Sado," incidentally, since he had a different title when he lived.
Speculation about the death is naturally rampant to this day. Sado's wife wrote a memoir alleging that her husband was locked in a tiny grain closet and not given food or water until he died of dehydration. Others dispute her account and say Sado died of his mysterious disease, which has been called everything from bipolar disorder to syphilis. Still others say Sado was a scapegoat of factional politics, and that the Noron ("the elder argument"), the dominant faction of the day, which hated Sado for his sympathy to the Soron ("the youth argument"), created the rift between father and son which led to the father killing his own son. This third theory is probably the most popular because that particular tragedy of it resonates the most. There are records to support each theory, so I don't expect the controversy to ever settle down.
Without pretending to know the weight of truth in each theory, I found the third theory of Prince Sado's death intriguing in relation to the character of Prince Zuko. The parallels between the account of Sado's disgrace and Zuko's Agni Kai scene were irresistible--the disgraced prince prostrate on the ground, weeping, the father's harshness, the tension and drama of the scene, and the abrupt end in the prince's death. This was the beginning of Dragon King, the vision of a prince brought low by factional strife, and I knew the thought wouldn't let me go until I gave it life by writing it.
Postscript on Jeongjo, the Twenty-Second King of Choson
Jeongjo as a child, as imagined in the 2007 MBC show Lee San
Lee San, Crown Prince Sado's son, was just eleven when he watched his father's death at his royal grandfather's hands. Like his father, the young San was a promising young prince who learned his letters young and showed prodigious feats of memory and learning. At the time of Sado's death San was also was around the age his father started neglecting his studies and becoming erratic in his behavior, and if anything could throw the new crown prince off kilter and into a self-destructive spiral, it was this.*
* Sometimes it's almost like Yeongjo was deliberately fucking with his grandson's head. Get this: Due to his own father's tainted record San was adopted as the son of his uncle--except this uncle had died decades ago at the age of ten. It was strictly a paper adoption, of course, but really? You "adopt" a boy traumatized by his father's death to said father's long-dead brother? Thanks a lot, Grandpa.
Yet in one of life's unexpected turns, San did not go crazy, nor did he neglect his duties. Realizing by his father's example the danger of a political confrontation with the king, he threw himself into his studies. It seems his king-grandfather's rage toward his son never reached his grandson, but allegedly the members of the Noron who led Sado to his death (including the Hong family, where San's mother hailed from) also attacked San, trying to discredit him in the eyes of the king. These efforts did not succeed, though, partly through the able machinations of his retainers including Hong Guk-yeong, a distant cousin from the Hong family, and partly because it seems Yeongjo increasingly regretted what he had done to his son.
San became the twenty-second king of Choson at the age of 25 after the death of his grandfather Yeongjo. Posthumously named Jeongjo, Sado's son remains one of the most successful and humane kings in Choson history. He greatly expanded the scope of commerce by allowing merchants more freedoms, limited harsh penalties dealt by locial officials, was comparatively lenient toward new ideas such as Christianity, and did his best to mitigate the ravages of factional strife by hiring men from all factions and resisting the calls to avenge his father.
Through it all Jeongjo never stopped trying to restore his father's honor, posthumously naming him king and building a large new grave for him. (It's possible that many of the more sympathetic portrayals of Sado are a product of his son Jeongjo's times. It seems clear at any rate that Sado became a rallying point to push back on the overbearing Noron faction, so the factual truth of his life is hard to determine.) One might look at Jeongjo's life and see a man stunningly unscarred by childhood tragedy, but records indicate the pain of loss stayed with him all his life. At one point he even said he lived only because he couldn't die, despite the sorrows upon sorrows piled on him. He was far from immune to the trauma of his youth, but he turned his grief to productive uses instead of allowing it to destroy him.
Zuko's story as I depict it in Shadow is a composite of Sado's and Jeongjo's stories--both the disgraced prince and the resilient boy, and ultimately the strong king who overcame a legacy of violence and trauma to create his own legacy of forgiveness and compassion. Maybe it's naive of me, a political fairy tale, but I've never been averse to creating my own comfort when I need it. Besides, Jeongjo the Twenty-Second King of Choson, Lee San the son of a murdered father and grandson of his father's killer, already showed us that it's possible. He showed it in the most eloquent way possible, through the course of his life as both a man and a king.
The Story of Crown Prince Sado
The death of Crown Prince Sado of Choson (1735-1762) was the seed of Shadow of the Dragon King that it only took me eighteen damn chapters to get to. That historical episode was the start of my obsession with the story, and where the story almost-ends. Not only is Shadow close to the end now, but the whole premise of the story is that Zuko came close to dying from the Agni Kai episode, not from his wounds, but from deadly factional strife within the Fire Nation when his defiance at the war council was construed as treason by a suspicious father and a dominant faction of nobility. The story's conceit is that Zuko avoided Sado's fate because... well, you'll find out in the next chapter.
I first thought of Sado in connection to Zuko when I surfed over to the Annals of the Choson Dynasty on a whim. Choson, the country that ruled over the Korean peninsula from the 14th century to the late 19th, took after the Chinese in being rather, um, anal about recording their kings' deeds and palace happenings. The result is 500 years of historical data, recorded firsthand as the events unfolded, now entirely online in both the original forms and translated into modern Korean.
That's a history nerdgasm happening right there.
The death of Crown Prince Sado is one of those historical mysteries that everyone has an opinion about and which will never be resolved. Born Lee Sun to the twenty-first king of Choson,* he was originally a promising young prince, but according to the Annals he increasingly neglected his studies since the age of 10 and his behavior became more and more erratic due to an unspecified illness. It came to the point where he murdered palace staff and regretted it when his fits passed, and his royal father's severe reprimand only made the illness worse. (The "yell at the disease" approach to mental illness has a long pedigree of not working, it seems.) Finally the king stripped Sado of his title as Crown Prince, then ordered him confined. Eight days later, with no official explanation, Sado was dead at the age of 28.
*The historic name for him is Yeongjo, but as with all Korean kings that was never a title anyone called him when he was living. The king is the king IS the king, His Majesty the one and only, and he didn't have any name separate from that, at least none that anyone outside the immediate family was allowed to call. It's like in Great Queen Seondeok, as mentioned in fairladyz2005's post, where the titular queen tells her would-be lover that it is treason to call her by name. Once a king was dead he would be given a posthumous title to distinguish him from all the other dead kings, and Yeongjo is one such posthumous title. So is "Sado," incidentally, since he had a different title when he lived.
Speculation about the death is naturally rampant to this day. Sado's wife wrote a memoir alleging that her husband was locked in a tiny grain closet and not given food or water until he died of dehydration. Others dispute her account and say Sado died of his mysterious disease, which has been called everything from bipolar disorder to syphilis. Still others say Sado was a scapegoat of factional politics, and that the Noron ("the elder argument"), the dominant faction of the day, which hated Sado for his sympathy to the Soron ("the youth argument"), created the rift between father and son which led to the father killing his own son. This third theory is probably the most popular because that particular tragedy of it resonates the most. There are records to support each theory, so I don't expect the controversy to ever settle down.
Without pretending to know the weight of truth in each theory, I found the third theory of Prince Sado's death intriguing in relation to the character of Prince Zuko. The parallels between the account of Sado's disgrace and Zuko's Agni Kai scene were irresistible--the disgraced prince prostrate on the ground, weeping, the father's harshness, the tension and drama of the scene, and the abrupt end in the prince's death. This was the beginning of Dragon King, the vision of a prince brought low by factional strife, and I knew the thought wouldn't let me go until I gave it life by writing it.
Postscript on Jeongjo, the Twenty-Second King of Choson
Jeongjo as a child, as imagined in the 2007 MBC show Lee San
Lee San, Crown Prince Sado's son, was just eleven when he watched his father's death at his royal grandfather's hands. Like his father, the young San was a promising young prince who learned his letters young and showed prodigious feats of memory and learning. At the time of Sado's death San was also was around the age his father started neglecting his studies and becoming erratic in his behavior, and if anything could throw the new crown prince off kilter and into a self-destructive spiral, it was this.*
* Sometimes it's almost like Yeongjo was deliberately fucking with his grandson's head. Get this: Due to his own father's tainted record San was adopted as the son of his uncle--except this uncle had died decades ago at the age of ten. It was strictly a paper adoption, of course, but really? You "adopt" a boy traumatized by his father's death to said father's long-dead brother? Thanks a lot, Grandpa.
Yet in one of life's unexpected turns, San did not go crazy, nor did he neglect his duties. Realizing by his father's example the danger of a political confrontation with the king, he threw himself into his studies. It seems his king-grandfather's rage toward his son never reached his grandson, but allegedly the members of the Noron who led Sado to his death (including the Hong family, where San's mother hailed from) also attacked San, trying to discredit him in the eyes of the king. These efforts did not succeed, though, partly through the able machinations of his retainers including Hong Guk-yeong, a distant cousin from the Hong family, and partly because it seems Yeongjo increasingly regretted what he had done to his son.
San became the twenty-second king of Choson at the age of 25 after the death of his grandfather Yeongjo. Posthumously named Jeongjo, Sado's son remains one of the most successful and humane kings in Choson history. He greatly expanded the scope of commerce by allowing merchants more freedoms, limited harsh penalties dealt by locial officials, was comparatively lenient toward new ideas such as Christianity, and did his best to mitigate the ravages of factional strife by hiring men from all factions and resisting the calls to avenge his father.
Through it all Jeongjo never stopped trying to restore his father's honor, posthumously naming him king and building a large new grave for him. (It's possible that many of the more sympathetic portrayals of Sado are a product of his son Jeongjo's times. It seems clear at any rate that Sado became a rallying point to push back on the overbearing Noron faction, so the factual truth of his life is hard to determine.) One might look at Jeongjo's life and see a man stunningly unscarred by childhood tragedy, but records indicate the pain of loss stayed with him all his life. At one point he even said he lived only because he couldn't die, despite the sorrows upon sorrows piled on him. He was far from immune to the trauma of his youth, but he turned his grief to productive uses instead of allowing it to destroy him.
Zuko's story as I depict it in Shadow is a composite of Sado's and Jeongjo's stories--both the disgraced prince and the resilient boy, and ultimately the strong king who overcame a legacy of violence and trauma to create his own legacy of forgiveness and compassion. Maybe it's naive of me, a political fairy tale, but I've never been averse to creating my own comfort when I need it. Besides, Jeongjo the Twenty-Second King of Choson, Lee San the son of a murdered father and grandson of his father's killer, already showed us that it's possible. He showed it in the most eloquent way possible, through the course of his life as both a man and a king.
