Jeong Yak-yong

Who is Jeong Yak-yong?

Jeong Yak-yong, widely known by his pen name Dasan, was one of the greatest scholars of Korea's late Joseon dynasty and a leading thinker of the Silhak ('practical learning') movement. A gifted official who earned the trust of the reform-minded King Jeongjo, he contributed to statecraft and technology, including designing a crane-like hoisting device (geojunggi) that aided the construction of Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. Because his family was associated with Catholicism (Seohak, or Western Learning), he became a victim of the Catholic Persecution of 1801, after which he was exiled to Gangjin in the far south for about eighteen years. During this long exile he produced an enormous body of work, writing hundreds of volumes on government, law, economics, ethics, geography, and the Confucian classics. His best-known writings include Mokminsimseo, a guide to just and humane governance for local magistrates; Gyeongse Yupyo, a wide-ranging proposal for reforming state institutions; and Heumheumsinseo, a treatise on the fair administration of criminal justice. He is remembered as a towering intellectual whose reformist ideas remain influential in Korea.

Sources: Jeong Yak-yong, Mokminsimseo (목민심서), 1818 · Jeong Yak-yong, Gyeongse Yupyo (경세유표) · Jeong Yak-yong, Heumheumsinseo (흠흠신서), 1822