KING AN D COUR T 583
secondary sons of legitimate wives (i.e., all but the eldest son). Yu, however,
also recognized that both usages prevailed in Korean practice: "In ancient times
[in China] the name, chOk, only referred to the eldest son of the legitimate wife
[chokchangja), while the other sons were referred to as so. In addition we [Kore-
ans 1 have also referred to the sons of wives [ch 0] as chok but the sons of con-
cubines [ch op] as so [nothoi].":1 In other words, the use of the term so in two
ways in Korea had to be retained as the basis for the assignmcnt of noble titles.^4
Curiously, Song Siyol was eventually forced to take poison because his def-
inition of King Hyojong as the soja of his father, King Injo, in the Chinese or
classical sense of the term meant that all who mourned for him owcd a lesser
degree of mourning than that required for the eldest son of King lnjo, thc deccased
(possibly murdered) Crown Prince Sohyon (Sohyon seja). For one thing, many
Koreans were offended at Song's using soja for a king since Koreans had been
using the term to mean the nothos of a slave concubine. In the second place, the
Southerner faction demanded Song's death because his ruthless logic had
impugned the legitimacy of King Hyojong by defining him as something less
than the legitimate successor of a king. Had Yu lived to 1689, he might have
shared Song's fate, but the purpose of his argument was not to determinc the
mourning period for a member of the royal house, but to establish a method of
ranking royal princes to reduce the expense of supporting them.
Even though Yu adopted Song's position that the term so did not mean the
nothoi or son of a concubine in the manner of colloquial Korean parlance, he
did take cognizance of Korea's traditional discrimination against sons of con-
cubines, because he did drop the sons of royal or princely concubines (or palace
ladies) one degree below the sons of legitimate royal and princely queens and
princesses. His ground for doing so was not bccause thc mother was good or
base (commoner or slave) in status, but because she was a concubine or sec-
ondary wifc (ch 'op), a status lower than the main wife (ch 0). In other words, he
retained the principle of discrimination but tried to remove thc stigma associ-
ated with inherited slavery.
Otherwise, if distinctions were made because of the mothcr's status (i.c .. slave
as opposed to commoncr status), "it would do damage to the Way [that should
be maintained] between father and sons," by which he noted that it would reduce
the respect that sons owed to their fathers and poison the feelings of harmony
between half-brothers. For those reasons he preferred to eliminate all discus-
sion of the family pedigree (munji) of the mother, high or low.' Although he
hoped to eliminate the stigma attached to inherited slavery in the case of royal
or princely concubines, at the same time he also incorporated, and thus legit-
imized, the unique Choson prejudice against concubines and their sons, the nothoi.
Yu made clear that the reason for his division of princes into three categories
was to reduce expenditures when he cited Chu Hsi's reference to the financial
problem created by the support of large numbers of princes. He also mentioned
that in the Han dynasty the emperor granted land to imperial sons and declared
them "kings" or princes (wang), but only one of the sons of the kings, the eldest