文科設行과 疑獄事件

State Examination in Literature and the Scandals Thereto

In this paper the writer attempted to review in summary the background and instances of the scandals arising inherently in administration of the state examination in literature, taking examples from the Kee-myo-gwaok (己卯科獄)in the 25th year of the reign of King Suk-jong 1699. Unlike in mu-gwa(武科), the state examination for military officers, no such evils as the phenomenon of man-gwa(萬科) (in which no less than hundreds and thousands passing the examination at once) were seen in mun-gwa(文科), the state examination in literature for civil services, which together with the afore-said mu-gwa constituted the two wheels of the entire state examination system in Yi dynasty period. Yet what we cannot overlook is that mun-gwa was not entirely free of frequent scandals, these negative byproducts growing the more dismal as time went on. The reason is not far to seek. For, in a traditionally centralized political system, mun-gwa offered a base for any political faction to recruit more men in its interest to fight the struggle for power successfully, and without passing this gate to the bureaucratic aristocracy no one could ever get to the political arena, for all his ambition. Therefore, the scandals became more involved and ever grimmer in pace with the worsening factional feuds in the Yi dynasty, and the writer assures that one can see clearly an aspect of the mode of life of the bureaucrats of later Yi dynasty through the Kee-myo-gwa-ok, a model case of these scandls.