ordered killed at the house of Hŭ Jŭk. Not long after this the king began to make preparations to put away his queen. To this end he made the following statement. “For a long time I have been aware of the queen’s jealous disposition and evil mind, and I have borne with it patiently but now I can endure it no longer. Since I have taken the concubine Chang it has been still more unendurable. The queen and the concubine Kim have been putting their heads together in an attempt to frighten me into putting away Chang, but I saw through the plan. Now what shall we do?” Time and again the officials came pleading for the queen, but the king was utterly deaf to all they had to say. He piled unjust accusations upon her without deigning to give a single proof. Large numbers where banished and a few killed outright because of their intercessions with the king. The most notorious case was that of Pak T‘ă-bo whose name has passed into a proverb. He with two others memorialized the king begging him to drive away the concubine and retain the queen. The king’s rage knew no bounds. He came out and took his seat in front of the In-jŭng Gate of the Chang-dŭk Palace and had the man brought before him. When asked why he had written the memorial he answered, “Because of the treatment the queen has received.” The king then ordered red hot plates to be passed along his limbs. Still he would not express sorrow. Then bowls were broken into small pieces and the fragments were piled up on the mans already burned limbs, a plank was placed across them and men stood on either end of it and jumped up and down. The pieces of pottery were of course ground into the man’s legs. As he still remained firm he was tied with a rope and hoisted to the top of a high pole in a cruelly painful position. As he still remained unmoved he was banished to the south. His aged father accompanied him as far as the river and there he died of his wounds. This, so far from stopping the flood of petitions, only increased it, for immediately 16,000 men with Chöng To-gyŭng at their head sent in an appeal and likewise all the country scholars and all the students of the Confucian school. But every petition was returned by the passion-blinded king.