Three Royal Tombs, Paju

The three tombs at Paju are for people who did not live long. Gongneung holds Queen Jangsun, who married the crown prince at fifteen and died at sixteen after giving birth; her husband later reigned briefly as Yejong. Sulleung holds Queen Gonghye, first wife of King Seongjong, who died at eighteen. Both were daughters of Han Myeong-hoe, the minister who had engineered Sejo's seizure of the throne and then married his daughters to two successive heirs to keep his hand on it. Yeongneung, the third, is for Crown Prince Hyojang, King Yeongjo's first son, who died in 1728 aged nine, and for the girl who had been betrothed to him. Sixty years later he was named the adoptive father of King Jeongjo — a genealogical fix so that Jeongjo would not be the son of the disgraced Prince Sado — and raised to king, which is why a child's grave has a king's shrine. The tombs are small, spread over a wooded hill, and rarely busy. They are a good place to see how the standard layout — red gate, shrine, mound — was scaled down for those who died before they could matter.

Original Text

Where it is

Region

Paju, Gyeonggi

Designation

Historic Site · 사적