The Joseon Dynasty’s ‘Corruption Chain’ Built by Elite Clans and Clerks

In July 1805, a palace attendant arrived at the office of a military administration clerk and claimed to carry King Sunjo’s orders. He told Ahn Gyeong-min that the clerk responsible for appointments had collected too much in bribes and that the king wanted to know how much Ahn had taken.

Ahn wrote down the amount: 1,530 nyang. The attendant, Lee Gyeong-wook, returned several hours later with another supposed royal instruction. The king would forgive Ahn this time, he said, if Ahn paid half the money and accepted a warning to take less in future. Ahn handed over 765 nyang and received a receipt.

The claim could hardly have been genuine. Once the case became known, Ahn was exiled, while Lee was executed and his severed head was displayed on a pole for several days. Yet the story drew on a practice that people across the bureaucracy already understood. The military ministry handled appointments for military officers, and local commanders were expected to pay its clerks before leaving for their posts. The civil ministry operated in much the same way. Newly appointed local officials paid money known as dangchamchae to its clerks. If they refused, the clerks went to the officials’ new jurisdictions to collect it.

Palace attendants were not outside this system. The roughly 40 attendants attached to the palace office also extracted payments from newly appointed officials, sometimes visiting their homes when the money was not forthcoming. Officials sometimes left behind documents called gopung as proof that they had paid.

The money did not simply come from officials’ private fortunes. After taking office, they recovered it from the people they governed, adding their own share. The article presents this as a chain that turned central bureaucratic bribery into money squeezed from ordinary people’s labor and taxes.

Authorities occasionally punished individuals, but they did not dismantle the structure. Clerks in central offices were often household agents of powerful elite families, appointed without a formal selection process. As long as those families and clerks shared the profits, the arrangement survived changes of kings, ruling factions and political slogans. Even reform-minded figures such as Park Ji-won, Hong Dae-yong, Seo Yu-gu and Kim Jeong-hui, the article says, did not challenge this system because they themselves belonged to the elite families that benefited from it.