General Introduction (Ch’ongsŏ) 33
stone steps. Since King Kongmin had great respect for T’aejo, he treated
[his stepbrother] Yi Hwa, the son of Lady Kim, with special favors. He
made Yi Hwa always attend him in the palace and often held banquets to
entertain his mother, with food as well as music provided by the training
school for entertaining girls (kyobang). Feeling honored to receive such
favors from the king, T’aejo lavished the performers with gifts. He also
always lived with Yi Hwa and another stepbrother, Wŏn’gye, who was older
than him. His brotherly love for them was so great that T’aejo burned the
slave documents related to their mother.
In the sixth month of the twenty-first year (1372) of King Kongmin,
Japanese marauders invaded the Northeast Region. In response, the king
appointed T’aejo the magistrate of Hwaryŏng [Yŏnghŭng] and made him
military commander to repulse the enemy.
Chu Ming, the former military commander of the fortress of Liao, was
old by that time; nevertheless, he followed T’aejo on his trip to his new post.
He arrived in Hwaryŏng, and one day he joined T’aejo in hunting. The
hunting area was steep, rugged, and even slippery due to ice. T’aejo, how-
ever, galloped over the steep hill on horseback to kill four or five bears with
a single arrow each time.
Deeply impressed by what he witnessed, Chu Ming could not help
admiring T’aejo. He said, “I have met numerous people in my life, but none
of them will be able to outperform you.”
Sometime earlier, when T’aejo was hunting on Mt. Chop’o in the Hongwŏn
area, a herd of three roe deer suddenly appeared. Racing on horseback,
T’aejo dropped the first one. As the remaining two ran away, he shot another
arrow, and this time it passed through the bodies of both deer and ended up
stuck in the tree. When Yi Wŏn’gyŏng came back after pulling out the arrow,
T’aejo asked, “Why were you so slow in retrieving the arrow?” Wŏn’gyŏng
replied, “Your arrow was embedded deeply in the tree; it took me a while to
pull it out.” Laughing aloud, T’aejo rejoined, “Even if there had been three
roe deer, my arrow would have been strong enough to penetrate all of them
at once.”
Sometime earlier, T’aejo invited many of his close friends to a banquet
and started shooting arrows at a target. A hundred paces away stood a pear
tree loaded with dozens of pears. The guests asked T’aejo to knock the
pears down, so he shot an arrow and all of them fell to the ground. He
served the pears to his guests, and they congratulated T’aejo, raising their
cups and expressing their admiration for his shooting.