The Tale of Kim Jeong-ho’s Imprisonment

A legend handed down over the centuries.

The tale that Kim Jeong-ho climbed Mount Baekdu many times to make his map and offered it to the court, only for the Daewongun to burn the woodblocks and imprison him for revealing state secrets. Spread by a 1934 colonial textbook, it has no basis.

In this tale Kim Jeong-ho walks the whole country and climbs Mount Baekdu again and again to make the Daedong yeojido; when he presents it to the court, the Daewongun accuses him of exposing state secrets, seizes and burns the woodblocks and throws Kim and his daughter into prison, where they die. It spread widely after appearing in the Joseoneo dokbon, a Korean-language reader published by the Japanese Government-General in 1934.

Yet no Joseon record supports it, and the woodblocks said to have been burned still survive. Kim built his map by gathering and refining earlier maps, so he had no need to walk the whole country. Today the tale is seen as invented or embellished to make the Joseon court look benighted.