In spite of the oath that he had taken, the young king built a separate shrine to his father and worshiped at it in the same manner as at the ancestral temple. This was in accord with the letter of the oath, for he religiously refrained, from calling his father by that name. He likewise honored the memory of his father by decreeing that if anyone mentioned the fact that he had been enclosed in a box and starved to death it would mean death. He banished the son of the princess who had encompassed his father’s death. The high-handed Hong In-han who had worked so hard to prevent his accession was first banished to Yö-san and enclosed in a thorn hedge, and then was poisoned by royal edict. His first year of rule was marked by an attempt to assassinate him and put his brother on the throne, but the assassin was taken, knife in hand, and upon his confession Hong Sang-bom and his whole family were seized and put to death. At last in sheer self-defense the king was obliged to put his brother to death. At the same time he forbade the presence of sorceresses in the capital and banished many who had been instrumental in his father’s death. From this it would appear that there was a powerful clique in Seoul who were trying every means to accomplish his overthrow. Being without issue, the king, at the instigation of his mother, took a concubine, the sister of one of his favorites, Hong Kuk-yung. This resulted very unfortunately, for when this concubine died her father was drawn into treasonable operations. Many of the present customs of Korea date from this reign. The king first made the law that after the closing of the gates, they could not be opened except by special permission from himself. It was in his first year that the scholar Kwŭn Chŭl-sin gathered about him a company of disciples and went to a mountain retreat to study. They possessed one copy of a Christian work. This they diligently studied, and one and all determined to adopt the belief there inculcated. So far as they understood it, they practiced its teachings in secret. Two years later the king took as a second concubine the daughter of Yun Ch‘ang-yun, and Hong the father of the first concubine, because of his opposition to it, was banished. Up to this time very few officials had been drawn from the northern provinces or from Song-do, but now the king decreed that they were as worthy to receive office as any others and said that they should share in the gifts of the government. He ordered that, a record be kept of all the decisions in council and that they be preserved in a book called the Il-deuk-rok. Those were days of severe famine in the land and the king did all in his power to relieve the distress, giving from his private treasure large quantities of silver bullion, black pepper and dyewood, things of great value in Korea.