三道溝事件과 그 善後策

The San-Tao-Kou Case and Its Remedial Measure

In this article the author takes a general view of the development of the San-tao-kou(三道溝, the Manchuria-side upstream district of the Yalu River) case which in the eleventh year of the rule of King Sookjong (肅宗, 1685), Korean people digging ginseng across the border caused to murder the government officials of the Ching Dynasty, and then examines chiefly in the legislative aspect the change of national policy especially made upon this opportunity. That is because it will be helpful to disclose the current position of the incident and to judge an international relationship between Korea (Yi Dynasty) and the Ching Dynasty. In the early years of the 17th century, the Ching Dynasty with its prosperious period came to border, for the first time, on the north of Korea. As Korea would submit to the stronger country since the Ching Invasion in 1636, the international position of both th countries had been completely overturned, and the disposal of Korean problem could not naturally help having been pressed by the Ching Dynasty all the time. It is just one of the fundamental reasons that in later years, the border-crossing problem would be inclined to the side of Korea. On the other hand, the motives which this problem had occurred frequently must be included the economic, military, and geographic conditions such as the necessity of ginseng in Korea, the insufficiency of defence, and the obscurity of border line, but among them the most fundamental economic element, the problem of the utmost poverty, furthermore, had set spurs to the problem of crossing the border since the 1592-year Japanese Invasion and the 1636-year Ching Invasion. The San-tao-kou case dealt in this article also was not to get out of this category, but the problem was very serious because the damaged were not the civilians, but the officials of the Ching Dynasty. Thus, Korea, since the moment of the occurrence of the San-tao-kou case, could not help converting the policy of border by means of reconsidering the old policy, and came to take really various thorough and all-round measures such as the trade of border to control the demand of ginseng, the prohibition of Peking-bound messengers’ carrying ginseng as staple commodities, the limit of ginseng-dealers’ traffic between the north and the south, the reinforcement of guards to hasten the defence of the border, the dispatch of regius secret inspectors, the control of civilian arms, the fortifications of bulwarks, the policy of public welfare around the border, etc. The defensive preparations to prohibit in advance from digging ginseng across the border were reinforced again after the Lee Man-ki case had occurred in the thirty-sixth year under the rule of King Sookjong. At that time, at last the problem of demarcating the frontier-line had completed. In this paper, saying that such a lawful basic form and its necessities had already been accomplished and emphasized, a prelude to a probable historical fact before the erection of the Demarcation Monument of Mt. Pakdoo is to be examined in the aspect of policy.