Kim Pyŏng’yŏn, popularly known as Kim Sakkat, the rainhat poet, was born into a turbulent world: Chŏngjo died in 1800; the child Sunjo acceded to the throne; his grandmother Queen Dowager Chŏngsun acted as regent. For some time the spread of Catholicism had been threatening Neo-Confucian values. The Noron faction used the “heresy” of Catholicism as a pretext to root out the remnants of the Southern (Namin) faction, which had supported Chŏngjo, many of whom were Catholic. In the ensuing persecution, the Catholic leader, Yi Sŭnghun, was executed, and Tasan Chŏng Yag’yong, a favorite of Chŏngjo and one of the most prominent men of the age, was sent into exile. In the spring of 1811, the abuses of the dominant Noron party precipitated a popular uprising, and in December of that year the Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion occurred. The fact that the deputy magistrate of Sŏnch’ŏn, Kim Sakkat’s grandfather, Kim Iksun, was blind drunk when the rebellion occurred was not much of an excuse for his ignominious surrender. He was executed the following year with dire consequences for the family. In 1816, Basil Hall reached an island off the west coast of Korea. The British sailors wondered at the weird hats and extraordinary dress of the people, blithely unaware of the sensation caused by their own bell bottom trousers and the line of off-center buttons on their jackets, not to mention their unbelievable vulgarity in not being conversant with Chinese characters. It was not a very friendly visit. The visitors acted as if they were playing a role in an amusing comedy, unaware that the turbidity of the times threatened Korea to its foundations.
After Sunjo’s thirtieth birthday, health considerations precluded him from attending to state affairs. A series of disasters hit the country: rain damage north and south, and typhoon and flood damage in Honam. The crown prince died and Sunjo’s second son was appointed crown prince. Sunjo himself soon died; his second son also died and Hŏnjong came to the throne as a child king. Queen Sunwŏn, Hŏnjong’s grandmother, sometimes called Queen Dowager Kim, ran affairs behind the bead curtain. Hŏnjong married an Andong Kim, but she died childless as did Hŏnjong himself. In 1840 the Opium War broke out in China. Japan began to open her doors to the West, but Korea resolutely refused to open hers despite a chain of natural disasters and the constant threat to her shores posed by Western ships. Ch'ŏlchong died childless in 1863 and Kojong came to the throne, too young to rule. The regent, the redoubtable Taewŏn’gun, aware that China, Japan and the great Western powers were intent on swallowing the Korean minnow, was adamant in his opposition to their ambitions. The old feudal order was breaking up; neo-Confucian ideology and traditional values were being challenged; the Catholic Church continued to cause unease in the court; and while the Western powers were trying to open up Korea for trading purposes, China and Japan waited in the wings for suitable opportunities to use Korea for their own economic advantage. Corruption was rife: army service was waived for a suitable bribe, slaves bought their freedom, and yangban families purchased public office for their sons.
Kim Sakkat’s life spans the reigns of three ineffectual monarchs: Sunjo, Hŏnjong and Ch'ŏlchong. He died in 1863, the first year of Kojong’s reign. There is an enormous amount of anecdotal material linked to him, very little of it corroborated. There are stories of sexual encounters; tales of liaisons with kisaeng; an account of a putative marriage with an epileptic girl; reports of fiery exchanges with greedy yangban landowners, stingy sŏdang teachers, and inhospitable monks; and anecdotes of interaction with people in trouble whom he invariably liked to help. It is difficult to say how much is myth and how much is fact.
Six documents of varying importance contain Kim Sakkat related materials: Hong Kyŏngnae chŏn, edited by Yi Usŏng and Im Hyŏngt’aek, which is contained in Chosŏn hanmun tanp’yŏn chip, Ilchogak, 1990; Taedong shisŏn, compiled by Chang Chiyŏn, Seoul: Tonggwangsa, 1918; Taedong kimun, compiled by Kang Hyosŏk, Seoul: Taedong inswae chushik hoesa, 1926; Nokch’a chip, written by Hwang O, edited by Yi Chongso, Kang Shinyong et al, Seoul: Nokch’a ch’ulp’ansa, 1932; Haejang chip, written by Shin Sŏg’u (National Archives), 1852; and Hajŏng chip, written by Yŏ Kyuhyŏng, Seoul: Chŏnginsŏga, 1923.
All that can be garnered from Hong Kyŏngnae chŏn is that Kim Sakkat was the grandson of Kim Iksun and that he lived a life of pent-up resentment. Taedong shisŏn identifies Kim Pyŏng’yŏn with Kim Sakkat and makes the connection with the Andong Kim family. Taedong kimun, is an eclectic collection of literary works, unofficial historical tales (yadam, yasa), and events personally witnessed by the compiler. It notes the rivalry between Kim Sakkat and No Chin, who like Kim Sakkat was skilled in public (kwach’e shi) verse. No Chin wrote a satirical poem on the Kim Iksun affair in what proved a very successful ploy to drive Kim Sakkat out of the Kwansŏ area. Reputedly Kim Sakkat read the poem, admitted it was a fine composition and never set foot in the area again. This gives the lie to the popular account, accepted by many scholars, including Yi Ŭngsu, that Kim Sakkat wrote the poem excoriating his grandfather at a paegilchang gathering in Yŏngwŏl at which he was supposed to have taken first prize. The popular account tells how the young hero returns exultantly home after the competition only to discover the dishonorable history of the family and his own unforgivable disgrace in insulting the memory of his ancestors. Considering himself to be the greatest of sinners, the story goes, he left his mother, wife and son and embarked on the life of an itinerant literatus. We are assured now that this account is apocryphal.
Hwang O, author of the literary miscellany Nokch’a chip, was born in 1816. In broad terms he was a contemporary of Kim Sakkat and like Kim Sakkat he was a dispossessed yangban. In the section titled “Story of Kim Sarip” (sarip means sakkat, straw hat), he recounts how he met an eccentric itinerant poet in a friend’s house in Seoul. The account gives the Kim Sarip name and notes that he was both noisy and maudlin in his cups. It also notes that he had a great love for the Diamond Mountains.
Haejang chip, also a literary miscellany, provides the most detailed information, but even this is only a matter of a few pages. The material is to be found in volume 13 under “Ki Kim Taerip sa.” Written around 1852, the piece reflects back on a time twenty years earlier when Kim Sakkat was a mun’gaek (guest literatus) in the Seoul home of Pokkyŏng An Ŭngsu, where the Shin brothers Sŏg’u and Sŏghŭi met him. Kim Sakkat was a young man with ambitions toward public office. He was not yet the eccentric, flamboyant character of popular legend. Many years later, while talking with a friend, Nakpong Yi Sang’u, Shin Sŏg’u discovered that the man he met all those years ago in An Ŭngsu’s house in Seoul was the famous Kim Sakkat. He knew him then as Kim Ran or I’myŏng (I’myŏng was his cha, a courtesy name given to a young man to mark entry into adulthood). He reflects on the poet’s knowledge and skill in poetry and on the ‘disease of the soul’ that afflicted him. The disease of the soul apparently surfaced when An Ŭngsu and Shin Sŏkhŭi ridiculed the young man for belonging to an insignificant yangban line and refused to promote his official career. Presumably Kim Sakkat did not identify himself as an Andong Kim, nor did he mention his disgraced grandfather, Kim Iksun. How sad to reflect, Shin Sŏg’u says, that Kim Sakkat’s experience in An Ŭngsu’s household made him despair of ever getting preferment and led him ultimately to take to the road as an itinerant poet. How sad that his karma was to attain notoriety as an eccentric. Shin Sŏg’u notes that the poet dressed in hemp, wore straw shoes, did not wash, and behaved in an eccentric way. People liked him to visit, entertained him well with food and drink and delighted in giving him difficult rhymes and asking for a poem. Kim Sakkat composed spontaneously. The poems, however, in Shin Sŏg’u’s view, lacked the elegance and discipline of traditional hanshi; ultimately, he thought, they were a waste of a prodigious talent. On visits to the northern parts of the country, Shin Sŏg’u had encountered Kim Sakkat poems and anecdotes in various sŏdang. There were stories of appearances at kwagŏ examinations; sometimes he composed and sometimes he came out without writing anything. He was famous in winehouses near kwagŏ examination sites, though the proprietors feared his eccentric behavior. Sometimes he drank himself insensible, but payment was never demanded. The record notes that Kim Sakkat once took off a new suit of padded winter clothes and gave it to someone he judged to be in greater need than himself.
Hajŏng chip, also a literary miscellany, is critical of the quality of Kim Sakkat’s kwach’e shi. The author, Yŏ Kyuhyŏng, refers to Kim Sakkat as Kim Ch’omo and says his verse was like a leaning rice barn, without flow, elegance or literary merit, clearly at odds with the rules of classical poetry. He talks about Kim Sakkat’s noisy laughter and angry outbursts and dismisses him as a crank. Hajŏng chip does not have an exact date, but it is presumed to have been written well in advance of 1895.
The records are a flimsy base on which to reconstruct Kim Sakkat’s life. Inevitably conjecture plays an important role. Kim Sakkat was born in Yangju, Kyŏnggi Province in 1807, a satellite city of present-day Seoul but at that time a village north of the city. He belonged to the Changdong Kim family, which was the Seoul branch of the famous Andong Kim clan. When Grandfather Kim Iksun was executed in 1812 and the decree of extermination of the family was promulgated, the old family servant (slave), Kim Sŏngsu, took the boys, Pyŏng’yŏn and Pyŏngha, to his home in Koksan, Hwanghae Province. The boys grew up there and went to school there. The boys’ mother, a Hamp’yŏng Yi, brought the infant Pyŏngho to Ich’ŏn in Yŏju. In the aftermath of the affair, the boys’ father, Kim An’gŭn, took to his bed and died, and the servants ran away. Such was the contempt in which the local people held the family that when the decree of amelioration was announced, the mother took the children to a remote village near Yŏngwol in Kangwŏn Province.
We are told that by the time Pyŏng’yŏn was twenty, he had read all the classics; he was an intelligent young man of some ambition whose way to preferment was blocked by his grandfather’s history. He was married and had a son, Hakkyun. There are no details, however, on his education, nothing about his teachers or what he read other than the generic term “the classics.” Yŏngwŏl in the 1820s was a very remote place. The opportunities for schooling available there to a young man were presumably limited. Haejang chip makes it clear that when Kim Sakkat left home, he did not immediately become an itinerant poet. Apparently, he went to Seoul with the avowed purpose of pursuing a career in the bureaucracy. It was only when his experience in An Ŭngsu’s house brought home to him the futility of his ambition that he took to the road as an itinerant poet. After two years he returned home. When his elder brother, Pyŏngha, died childless, he gave the widow his eldest son, Hakkyun, as an adopted son. In 1831 after his second son, Ikkyun, was born, feelings of sorrow, compunction, regret and futility drove him to leave home for a second time, this time never to return.
The term yangban initially meant scholar, but gradually it began to refer to someone who had passed the kwagŏ examination and now held public office. In the latter stages of Chosŏn, a new category of yangban came to the fore, the so-called dispossessed yangban, men who for family or political reasons, or because of corruption in the government had no hope of passing the kwagŏ examination and procuring public office. The kwagŏ itself was a hotbed of abuse. There were huge numbers of exam candidates. One can imagine the confusion in organizing these gatherings. Substitute candidates often wrote the answer sheets. Only the powerful had any chance of success. The result was a huge class of dispossessed yangban who were reduced to the status of beggars. Village masters, indigent scholars (eking out a living by literary hackwork), and itinerant poets were numbered among the dispossessed. Many of the itinerant poets wore wide-brimmed straw hats pulled down over their eyes to shade out the rays of the sun. Kim Sakkat was just one of many so attired. He became known as Kim Sakkat, Rainhat Kim, Kim Rip (rip means rainhat in hanmun), Kim Taerip, and Kim Sarip.
Kim Sakkat’s travels took him to every corner of the country. The Diamond Mountains was a favorite haunt. He visited Seoul, Hamgyŏng Province, Kyŏngsang Province, Kyŏnggi and Kangwŏn Province. For several years he was master of the sŏdang in a village near Tosan sŏwŏn (Yi Hwang’s Confucian academy on the way to Andong) before he took to the road again. This time his travels took him through Chŏlla, Ch’ungch’ŏng Province and P’yŏngan Province. He went back to Koksan and stayed for a year as a teacher in the house of the son of Kim Sŏngsu, the old servant who had taken care of him after the Kim Iksun affair.
Kim Sakkat’s son, Ikkyun, came looking for his father on numerous occasions, but the old man always made some pretext to run away. Worn out by illness, Kim Sakkat died in 1863. Ikkyun took his father back to Yŏngwŏl and buried him on the slopes of T’aebaek Mountain.
Yi Ŭngsu, a north Korean scholar, was the first important collector of Kim Sakkat poems. He visited sŏdang and temples to collect the poems of the master, and he began to publish them in newspapers and magazines in the 1930s. Three poems in Kim Sakkat’s own hand survive in the museum in Yŏngwŏl. Whether other texts in the poet’s own hand survive is not clear. Yi Ŭngsu issued two editions of Kim Rip shijip (Poems of Kim Rip), one in 1939 with one hundred and eighty-three poems (including fifty kwach’e shi, poems for the kwagŏ civil service examination), published by Hag’yesa; the second in 1941 with three hundred and forty-three poems (including one hundred and twenty-six kwach’e shi), published by Hansŏng tosŏ chushik hoesa. The 1941 volume was reprinted twice in 1944, and once again in 1948, this time with a new publisher, Chongsam sŏbang. The reason for the great increase in poems in the 1941 and later volumes was that after the publication of the first volume in 1939, poems attributed to Kim Sakkat began to flow in from all over the country. Yi Ŭngsu produced a third volume in 1956, P’ungja shi’in Kim Sakkat. This book had ninety-five poems and was published in P’yŏngyang. The great discrepancy in the number of poems between the 1941 (1944, 1948) and the 1956 volumes is explained in terms of what was deemed politically correct in North Korea in the 1950s, which meant that risqué poems and poems thought to be ideologically unsuitable were excluded. This third volume was republished in Seoul in 2000 by Shilch’ŏn munhaksa.
Chŏng Taegu’s Kim Sakkat yŏn’gu (1990), originally a doctoral dissertation, has contributed much to the verification of Kim Sakkat’s oeuvre, but much remains to be done before a definitive collected poems can be published. There are numerous magazine and newspaper articles on the poems and a small number of MA dissertations, but Chŏng’s book is the only book length critical study available.
Chŏng Taegu notes some twenty collections published between 1941 and 1990, all of which rely on Yi Ŭngsu’s collections and provide little new material. A few Kim Sakkat poems were published in various volumes prior to Yi Ŭngsu’s collections: Taedong shisŏn (1918), edited by Chang Chiyŏn; Choya shisŏn (circa 1916 to 1919), edited by Yi Ki; Chŭngbo haedong shisŏn (1920), edited by Yi Kyuyong; and Taedong kimun (1926), edited by Kang Hyosŏk. Each of these volumes has a small number of Kim Sakkat poems. It would appear that Yi Ŭngsu was not aware of Taedong shisŏn or Choya shisŏn.
Ch’a Sangch’an’s article in Chung’ang (1936.2), “Puru Shi’in hyŏlchŏn,” lists nineteen Kim Sakkat poems, four of which are not contained in Yi Ŭngsu’s collections and two of which have different titles. Ch’a Sangch’an claimed to have collected three hundred Kim Sakkat poems, but there is no corroborating evidence. Yi Ŭngsu gives the name of each of his poem contributors, but Ch’a Sangch’an’s name does not feature. Pak Chaech’ŏng’s article in Shindong’a (1936.1), “Shi’in Kim Rip ŭi pangnang ilmyŏn kwa shi myŏt su”, lists eighteen Kim Sakkat poems; all except one are in Yi Ŭngsu’s 1941 collection. Others who introduced Kim Sakkat poems in the 1930s include the well-known literary figures Kim T’aejun, Kim Tongin, Kim Chaech’ŏl and Sŏng Il. Pak Oyang (1948, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1975, 1978, 1984), Pak Yonggu (1979), Aiba Sei (Japanese) and Hwang Hŏnshik (1982) also produced collections. Pak Yongguk from Yŏngwŏl introduced twenty-six new kwach’e shi and three regular poems. Hŏ Munsŏp (1994), Hwang Pyŏngguk (1998), Ch’oe Sŏgŭi (2003), and Yang Tongkshik (2007) produced collections of Kim Sakkat’s poems. Yang Tongshik’s volume was to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the poet.
Since Yi Ŭngsu’s time more than thirty Kim Sakkat related volumes—poem collections, anecdotal material, fictional accounts-— have been published. The collections offer little new except for a few corrections and explanations. While the large number of volumes of Kim Sakkat lore testify to the ongoing interest of the public in the Chosŏn dynasty’s greatest folk figure, the lack of quality critical writing reveals the continuing ambivalence of the academics.
Richard Rutt’s essay, “Kim Sakkat, the Popular Humorist,” printed in Humor in Korean Literature, International Cultural Foundation, 1977, is the only Kim Sakkat material of note in English. As always, Rutt’s writing is insightful, especially in view of the paucity of materials available to him in the 1970s. There is a delightful note at the head of the text, presumably penned by the editor, which says: “As a foreigner, he is fairly well acquainted with Korean culture and proves to be an excellent critic.” The stock of the aspiring foreign critic has not improved appreciably in the intervening years.