Jo Seo-gang Tomb

Gyeongeun Jo Seo-gang was the son of Jo Ban, a meritorious subject who helped found Joseon. He passed the state examination in the fourteenth year of King Taejong (1415) and served as jangnyeong, a censorial official, then in the thirteenth year of King Sejong (1431) became a compiling official of the Chunchugwan, the office responsible for the dynasty's official records, and took part in compiling the Taejong sillok. He subsequently served as ugwanwon, then as Governor of Gyeongsang Province and Assistant Minister of the Board of Punishments, before becoming Chief Royal Secretary in 1441 and Vice-Minister of the Board of Personnel in 1443. In his later years he gave up that post to live in seclusion at Gajeong, his father Jo Ban's country villa. When he withdrew there, King Sejong sent a court painter to depict the scenery of Gajeong, and afterwards many scholars composed poems on the theme of Gajeong; Prince Anpyeong later gathered these into an album of paintings and writings called Seokhogajeong-byeorupdo. When he died on the tenth day of the third month of the twenty-sixth year of King Sejong's reign, the king bestowed 30 seok each of rice and beans, ten reams of paper, and an inner and outer coffin as funerary gifts, so that he might be given a generous burial. His tomb has a mound wrapped in a border stone within a rectangular base, the mound itself shaped with a square front and a round back; in front stand a memorial stele, an offering table and a pair of civil-official stone figures. The stele, whose body and base form a single piece, is inscribed "Tomb of Lord Jo, Vice-Minister of the Board of Personnel, of Gaseondaebu rank", and its capstone is carved to resemble a single lotus flower laid upside down; the characters on the back of the stele are worn almost beyond recognition. Jo Seo-gang's tomb and the stone furnishings in its burial ground date from the early Joseon period and retain their original form.

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Where it is

Region

Seohae-gu, Incheon

Designation

Provincial Monument · 시도기념물