Olleung Royal Tomb, Yangju

Queen Dangyeong was the wife of Jungjong, the prince installed by the coup of 1506. Her father had been on the wrong side of that coup and was killed in it, and the men who had made her husband king would not have his enemy's daughter as queen. She was deposed seven days after her husband's accession and sent out of the palace. She was nineteen. The story Seoul tells is that she hung her red skirt on a rock on Inwangsan, where the king could see it from the palace, and that he went to look. Whether he did or not, he never took her back, and she lived another fifty years as a private woman before dying in 1557. Her title was restored in 1739, and the grave became a royal tomb with the minimum of stonework: no screen, no rails, a single pair of figures. For most of the twentieth century the tomb sat inside a military zone north of Seoul and could not be visited at all. It was opened to the public in late 2019, the last of the forty to be.

Original Text

Where it is

Region

Yangju, Gyeonggi

Designation

Historic Site · 사적