The last year of King Se-jo’s reign, 1468, witnessed a serious disturbance in Ham-gyŭng Province. A man named Yi Si-ă gathered about him a strong body of soldiers and sent word to Seoul that it was simply with a view to defending his district from the incursions of the northern barbarians. The provincial general went in person to investigate, but he was murdered by the followers of Yi Si-ă who were aided by a courtezan who occupied the general’s room with him and who at dead of night opened the window and gave ingress to the revolutionists. A messenger, Sŭl Kyŭng-sin was then sent to Seoul to say that the general had been killed because he had been conspiring against the king. At the same time the king was asked to make Yi Si-ă the general of the northeast. This man told the king that the three Prime Ministers were implicated in the plot against him. The king was suspicious but did not dare to let matters progress without investigation. He put the Prime Ministers in prison and at the same time raised a large army to go and oppose the too ambitious Yi. Generals Yi Chun, Cho Sŭk-mun and Hŭ Chŭng were put in charge. The last of these three was one of the great soldiers of Korea. Tradition says that he was of gigantic stature, that he ate a bag of rice a day and drank wine by the bucketful. A doughty man indeed, at least by the trencher. But his feats on the battlefield were commensurate with his gastronomic prowess for we are told that the sight of his face struck fear into the stoutest enemy. This army found the enemy before Ham-heung whose governor they had killed. The royal forces soon had the enemy on the run and at last brought them to bay on Man-nyang Mountain which projects into the sea and is impregnable from the land side. The royal forces took boat and stormed it from the sea while part of the force engaged the enemy from the landward side. The head of Yi Si-ă was taken and forwarded to Seoul. In this fight it is said that Gen. Hŭ Chŭng found his sword too small, so throwing it aside he tore up by the roots a pine tree twelve inches in girth (?) and swept all before him with this titanic weapon. Of course the king then set free the three Prime Ministers and confessed his mistake. The emperor called upon Korea to help in the castigation of the Keum-ju tribe beyond the Ya-lu, so the king sent a large force and accomplished it without the help of Chinese arms. Having destroyed the tribe the Korean general cut a broad space on the side of a great pine and there inscribed the fact of the victory. The emperor was highly pleased and sent handsome presents to the generals engaged. This same year the king resigned in favor of his son and retired to a separate palace to prosecute a line of study in which he was greatly interested, namely the art of estimating distances by the eye, a subject of importance to all military engineers and one in which Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have been an adept. But before the end of the year he died.