the Jajewi guards

[ajk]

Was looking for a website to provide a link to, about the jajewi guards. Couldn't find a specific page for them, but here's text from the Gongmin page of a Wikipedia alternative website called New World Encyclopedia:

The details of King Gongmin’s reign and the circumstances surrounding his death are recorded in Goryusa, the history of the Joseon Dynasty, in several Books of King Gongmin. The account of his murder may have been colored by the fact that the Goryusa was intended to legitimize the succeeding dynasty by demonstrating the moral failures of the previous one, but there is no alternative historical record to counter the "Goryusa" account. According to an entry for the first day of the tenth lunar month in the twenty-first year of the reign of King Gongmin—in the forty-third volume of Goryusa, the sixth Book of King Gongmin—in 1372 King Gongmin formed an elite group of young men called the Jajewi (‘Noble Youth Guards’), selected from among the most promising sons of the nobility. Ostensibly, the Jajewi was organized so that Gongmin himself could instruct these young men and groom them as the next generation of loyal government ministers. However, the record goes on to recount that Gongmin had become mentally unbalanced after the death of his first wife, and though he had four consorts, he rarely visited them and was impotent. The members of Jajewi were selected, not for their virtues, but for their youthful beauty and perverted dispositions, to become the King’s intimate companions.

The record goes on to say that the King ordered the men of the Jajewi to have relations with his consorts, in order to produce a male child that he could claim as his own. When three of the consorts, Jung, He, and Sin refused and threatened to commit suicide if they were violated, the King personally took several of the Jajewi men, including Hong Ryun and Han An, to the chamber of Consort Ik and frightened her into complying by threatening her with his sword. After this, the men often went to her chamber at night under the pretext of fulfilling the King’s order.

It is written in the Life of Hong Ryun that two years later, on the night of the murder, the eunuch Choi Man-Seng reported to King Gongmin that Consort Ik was in her fifth month of pregnancy. The King was greatly pleased by this, and asked who was the father. When he learned that it was Hong Ryoun, he told the eunuch that he would now have to kill him and the entire group of Jajewi men in order to keep the secret of her baby's paternity.

That same night, on the twenty-first day of the ninth lunar month in the twenty-third year of the reign of King Gongmin (1374 C.E.), at the royal palace in Songdo, the capital of the Kingdom of Goryo, several men entered the King’s private chamber in the middle of the night and butchered him with swords. Though at least three people shouted, "enemy has entered," the palace guards dared not make a move, and the royal servants refused to come out of their rooms. Immediately after the murder, a court eunuch named Yi Gangdal and the high ministers Gyung Bouheung, Yi Inim, and An Sagi, conducted an inquiry, discovered Choi Man-Seng still wearing clothes stained with Gongmin's blood, and extracted a confession from him. He named five members of the elite Jajewi, including Hong Ryun, as his accomplices. All six were executed, their fathers put in prison, their children hanged, their families’ properties confiscated, and their brothers and uncles flogged and sent into exile. Mercy was shown only to the wives, who were allowed to live on as palace slaves.

www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gongmin_of_Goryeo

The source of this text is cited as a 2006 book called Of Tales and Enigmas by Kang Min Soo. A lot of the events described are as we saw them in Episode 2, or else are fairly close. The stuff about getting a confession from Choi Man Saeng, we won't see that because we saw Choi killed. In any event, this at least gives some background about the jajewi.