King Jeongjo Royal Composition Chae Je-gong Noemun Gate Stele

This stele is inscribed with a noemun - a lament composed and sent personally by King Jeongjo to mourn the death of Chae Je-gong (1720-1799). A noemun is a piece of writing that prays to heaven, earth and the spirits for the repose of the deceased's soul. Chae Je-gong's clan seat was Pyeonggang and his pen name was Beonam; he was an eminent chief minister of the Namin (Southerner) faction who enjoyed King Jeongjo's favour and held a succession of key posts. The Noemun Stele stands inside a stele pavilion just below the tomb precinct. It takes the form of a stele body - the part bearing the inscription - set upright on a rectangular base stone and capped with a roof stone (a bangbu-gaeseok style). At the top of the stele body, made of black stone (oseok), is a horizontally written jeonaek (the seal-script heading giving the stele's title) reading "Eoje noemun" (Royal Composition: Lament). Neither the jeonaek nor the lament indicates who wrote the calligraphy. The date of erection is given only as "the twenty-sixth day of the third month of the gimi year," so the exact date cannot be fixed; however, the Beonamjip, Chae Je-gong's collected writings, records that the king "ordered a stele to be erected on the path to the tomb," from which it is judged that the stele was erected in 1799, immediately after Chae Je-gong's death, on King Jeongjo's order.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yongin, Gyeonggi

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산