The Rice Box

copy at the library. Truly, the response has been just beyond anything I could have imagined, and it's so gratifying to see something you work on be out in the world. So thank you all so much. If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at Patreon dot com, slash Noble Blood Tales, where I released episode scripts, and also we're just starting back up on the miniseries Rain on Me where we discussed the c W show Rain, which is very exciting. We also have merch available at

d F t b A dot com. All of that info is in the episode description. One summer day in seventeen sixty two, the Prince of Korea's father called the boy into his private rooms. The King Young Joe, had always hated his son, his only heir, since he had been a child. There was nothing specific about the prince, no one single trait that the king could point to in order to explain his distaste for the child that

had lingered in his mouth for decades. Maybe it was the prince's seeming frailty, the way he had gravitated as a child towards art and drawing instead of athletics. Maybe it was the fainting spells and the strange mood that he had sometimes fell into. The King had wanted a strong, charismatic, dynamic air for the Jun dynasty. Instead he had this prince who had been a strange child, and then the strange child had turned into a monstrous adult because the

prince was monstrous. Even though the prince's wife tried to conceal the extent of her beatings, the court knew that she missed public events because of the bruises on her face. Her ladies in waiting were brutalized and sexually assaulted. Servants had gone missing. No one dared to make public accusations, but everyone knew that they had been murdered by the prince.

The Crown Prince of Korea, a man known most frequently by the name Prince Sado, whether it was due to mental illness or sadism or both, had turned his father's court into a place of terror. Putting him up for criminal trial would be a scandal, and because of Korean law at the time, it would mean that his own wife and child and would be forced to bear punishment as well. But still Sado needed to be dealt with.

No one wanted him to become the next king of Korea, and so what could his father do if he couldn't technically forced the prince to stand trial for his many crimes? And it was illegal to desecrate the body of a member of the royal family, and so it's not like Sado could have been quickly and conveniently killed himself. So what could the king do to kill a prince who wasn't allowed to be executed. Walking into his father's chambers that day, Sado knew something was coming. In a moment

of whimsy or panic. Earlier that day, he had asked his wife to bring him their son's cap for him to wear. His wife didn't want the prince anywhere near their son, didn't want their son involved in whatever was going to happen. She gave shaddo her own cap. The prince's wife, a woman named Lady Hia Yung, was there in the room to watch what happened. Next, the king called for a wooden chest, the type normally used to store rice. The chest was brought forth, a small box

with only about four square feet of space inside. It was a sweltering day in early July, and the court watched the proceedings breathlessly, trying to fan themselves as quietly as they could. King Young Joe told his son to get inside the crate. With no choice but to obey his father, Prince Sado did as he was told. The lid was closed and locked shut. Not long after, the screams began. The story of Prince Sado of Korea is

a tragic, gruesome one. It's the story of a young man, a mentally ill young man, who faced cruelty and responded with violence and sadism. But the story is also interesting for who tells it. We know the details of Prince Sado's life because his wife, Lady Ya, a woman who otherwise might have existed entirely on the periphery of history, wrote her memoirs later in life, several decades after the

brutal death of her husband. In the eighteenth century, from Asia to Western Europe, autobiography was a realm that was almost exclusively dominated by men, and yet Lady Young spent ten years of her life writing about her life in four parts. It's a series that's been widely translated and which is considered one of the most important texts in

Korean literature. Perhaps she knew even during her life that the story of her husband and his father would be exaggerated, that it would become legend, twisted for political purposes and ripe for conspiracy theories. Lady Hug Young was there, and she did us the favor of setting the record straight, or at least telling the story the way that she believed it should be remembered for posterity, with nuance and sympathy, but also with an unflinching eye to the violence and

terror in court. I'm Danis Schwartz and this is Noble Blood. A warning before we begin. This story contains almost every sort of violence imaginable, so if you're listening with young children or you're sensitive to that sort of content, please proceed with caution. The name Sado translates to thinking of with great sorrow, and even though it's the name by which the prince is most commonly known today, it was actually given posthumously. The prince was born Prince Yon on

February seventeen thirty five. For clarity's sake, I'll continue to refer to him as Sado. Prince Otto was his father's second son, the replacement for the former Crown Prince Hyogung, who died as a child seven years before Soto was born. The King Young Joe was heartbroken after his eldest son's death, and he immediately saw Sodo as a middling replacement for his golden boy. His golden boy, the dead son, the prince who would have been perfect if only he had lived.

Soto was a sickly boy who became a sickly young man at ten years old. He suffered from an unidentified illness that was so severe that he sometimes would pass out in the middle of rooms. His father, the King, resented his frailty. Sado was also artistic. We have records of small doodles that he made, drawings of dogs and other animals. Whatever kind of son the King Young Joe wanted Sado, wasn't it. The relationship between father and son

did not improve as the years went on. In fact, King Young Joe only increased in his bitterness and cruelty towards his only living son. There was nothing that Sato could do correctly, nothing he could do that didn't need to be picked apart endlessly with criticism. Some of the King's behavior seems unnaturally cruel. He would call his son into the throne rooms in the middle of the bustling court, in front of vassals, ladies in waiting unus, and guests,

and beate the prince there where everyone could see. Where the king could he borrowed Satto from important court events and forbade him from visiting the ancestral tombs. Sado, perhaps understandably, became extremely anxious and visibly distressed whenever he was in the same room as his father. His only comfort was his older sister, Princess Huajio. Their father didn't seem to

hate her as much as he hated Sato. The princess was mostly just ignored and overlooked, but at least she understood what came first with Sado, the mental illness or his father's hatred. Did the king only hate his son because he saw signs of insanity or cruelty bubbling below the surface, it's impossible to know. Regardless, Soto was the king's only son and only heir, and so Sado could hinued along on the path that was expected for a young prince, which meant that when he was nine years old,

he was married. We know the story of his arranged marriage from the memoirs of the woman who would become his wife, Lady Hiayung. She was nine years old too, one of the hundreds of girls who were brought before court officials to be examined to see if they would make a good wife for the prince. Initially, Lady Hia Young wasn't optimistic about her chances. Her family was noble

and well connected politically, but not especially wealthy or important. Still, she was brought to the palace one of the finalists, apparently, and she was brought before the king the selection was made. Lady Hia Young and Prince Otto, both pre preteen, were officially married, even though the marriage wouldn't be consummated until years later. It was around the time that they did consummate, round fourteen or fifteen years old, that Soto was given

a more formal royal position. He was made a regent of the kingdom. In theory, it was more responsibility, an opportunity for him to learn how to rule and prepare for him to one day be king. In effect, it was just more opportunity for his father to mock and belittle and undermine him. But for the time being, at least it seemed like Sodo was able to bear it. He liked his wife and he could confide in his

older sister. He was anxious and panicked around their father, but it was nothing he couldn't handle, at least until tragedy struck. In seventeen fifty two, there was a measles outbreak in Korea, and those Sado managed to evade the virus, his beloved sister died. It was the moosest relationship he ever had. She was only nineteen years old. Sado wrote a eulogy for her, quote, My elder sister was virtuous and chaste. She was born into the royal family and

had grown up with me in the palace. She lived to see twenty springs till one frosty snow took her to join the immortals. Who would have expected this? Now, I have rarely seen the wild geese flying across the sky. I could not believe that what had started as a minor illness would end up incurable. Mother, and I had been anxious over your deteriorating health day and night. You were sincere and filial till the end of your journey.

Upon hearing that His Majesty was about to visit you, you you rose from your sick bed, but your words drifted like flowing water and faded away with time. My grief is merely expressed through these humble offerings. Your virtue will be remembered as lingering fragrance. The next year, another massive life event would hit Sado. In addition to his wife, he took a royal consort, a woman named Young Ben,

and in seventy three she became pregnant. Sado was terrified that she would have a boy, knowing that a son would incite his father's rage. Though the king had continued to have daughters, the king had only been able to have one son Sado. In his panic, Sado tried to force his consort into taking a board of faisons while she was pregnant in order to allay his father's jealousy. Still, despite the attempts. The child was born healthy and it

was a son. Sado refused to deal with his mistress or his child at all, and so it was his wife, Lady Young Young, who provided or the woman and helped her find a safe place to give birth and a safe place to stay with the newborn. From that point on, Sado's mental wellness began to fully deteriorate. His anxiety began to bleed into paranoia and hallucinations and phobias. One evening, while reading a Taoist book about the thunder Daddy, he had a full hallucination seeing the thunder God in front

of him. In his vision, that God told him what he would need to do in order to avoid disaster. Sato became terrified of thunder, and he refused to touch any object that was engraved with the character for thunder from the book. He also developed a complicated compulsion around dressing and a fear of clothing called vesta phobia. It would take him hours to get dressed, and he would rip off items of clothing and reject outfits in a frenzy,

sometimes even lighting offending items of clothing on fire. His wife, he had Young, wrote quote for him to get dressed. I had to have ten, twenty, or even thirty sets of clothes laid out. He would then burn, some supposedly on behalf of some ghost or other. Even after this, if he managed to get into a suit of clothes without incident, one had to count it as a great good luck. If, however, those serving him were to make the slightest error, he would not be able to put

his clothes on, no matter how hard he tried. In the process, people were hurt, even killed. It was truly dreadful end quote. The prince was violent. People got hurt in the fires that he set, and sometimes he killed people outright. It seems that a major factor that provoked

the prince's violence was fear of his father. There After his father berated or mocked him, Prince Sado would go into something that some described as a manic state and turned that anger and humiliation onto someone else, someone beneath him in status or power, sometimes even going so far as to kill them. Once so distraught after an interaction with his father, the prince fled down a hallway and began to give chase to a random official that he

in turn wanted to break. As the prince ran, he knocked over a candlestick and burned down the entire building and the one next to it. Sado could be downright horrific in his violence. There's one story where he killed a eunuch that displeased him for some reason or another, and he beheaded him, and then the prince brought the severed, bloody head into his wife's chambers to shock her and her ladies in waiting. When Sado didn't kill the eunuchs outright,

he would beat them. Taking out his rage and grief and frustration. He began to violently sexually assault palace staff as well, and beat his wife to the point where she was missing formal events because of the bruises. On one occasion, in a violent rage or manic state, he threw a go board at his wife's face, and the injury was so bad that she didn't attend a royal ceremony for the king moving palaces. Lady Hia Young had been with her husband since they were nine years old.

Even if she couldn't love him, she still had tenderness for him and knew that someone needed to intervene when it came to his behavior. Lady hiug Young tried to report Sadow's behavior to his mother, the royal noble consort Young, but the consort begged Lady Hug Young to keep it quiet. The consort knew how terrible her son's behavior was, yes, but she didn't want it to turn into malicious palace gossip.

He was the prince and heir to the throne, after all, what would become of them, of all of them if people knew that he was unfit to rule. In seventeen fifty seven, Prince Sado took another second royal consort, a woman named Pingey. He claimed that they were in love, but there was a problem. Pingey had been a lady in waiting to his grandmother, which was culturally taboo considered incest.

The king was incensed, and depending on the story, the king either tried to force his son to jump down a well or he berated Sado so incessantly that Sado himself chose to jump down a well as a suicide attempt, only to be rescued by guards. Lady Hugyung knew that disaster was imminent, and she tried to protect Pingey from the outrage of the court and of Sado by bringing her to a hidden spot in the home of one of Sado's says stairs, but her restpite was only temporary.

A few years later, in a fit of random rage, Sado would assault his mistress Pingay and leave her alone on the floor, helpless and bleeding until she died. We don't know how long Pingaey laid on the floor alone. It was Lady Hya Young who prepared Pingay's body for the funeral. Rites When the lady returned from the burial, Sado never mentioned Pingay or her death. She was never

spoken of again by Sado, completely forgotten. Two more horrible events occurred that finally sealed the King's decision to do away with Prince Sado altogether. At Sado's twenty fifth birthday party, he began screaming at his family, at his mother, his father, his sister, and his children. By this point he had a son and two daughters by his wife. Sado demanded that his younger sister, there father's favorite, use her influence to force their father to let him visit the springs

at Onyon. If you don't, Sado said, glaring at his sister, I will kill you in front of our mother and my wife. Fortunately, in this one case, he was soothed and didn't resort to violence. Two years later, Sado made another death threat. An official angered him for some reason or another, and Sado claimed that he was going to kill his son, and so, in an effort to either follow through or to appear as though he was following through, Sado snuck into the upper chambers of the palace through

a water passage where the official's son lived. Fortunately, the son didn't happen to be there at the time, and so Sado just stole some of the boy's clothing and personal effects as a way to send a message. But here was the real problem. The King Young Joe also lived on the upper floors of the palace, and his rumors of Sado's trip upstairs began to circulate. The story became that Sado had actually gone up there to try

to kill King Young Joe. Enough was enough. It seemed Young Joe could tolerate erratic behavior, violent assaults, and multiple murders, but he would not tolerate even the rumor of a threat against his own life. But there were a few complications when it came to Young Joe's decision to do

away with his son. Prince Sado could not be tried in court because there was a practice of communal punishment at the time, which would have meant that his wife, Lady Hyagyung, and more importantly, their children would be punished as well. At this point, the couple had three surviving children, one son and two daughters. Sado was still the king's only heir, and Sado's son was directly in line for

the throne. And even more complicated, there was a rule at court that dictated that the body of a royal person could not be defiled. So where did that leave the king when it came to ways of getting rid of his son. On a hot day July four, seventeen sixty two, King Young Joe told his son to come into his rooms. While members of the court stood silently waiting to see what would happen next, the king ordered

his servants to bring out a rice chest. It was a wooden rice chest just over two ft long, empty, the lid was taken off. King Young Joe told his son, Prince Sotto, to get into the box. Maybe the prince thought of disobeying, Perhaps for a fleeting moment he thought of running, of fighting, But in the end, Prince Sotto obeyed his father and low word himself into the small wooden crate, tucking his legs beneath him. The king nodded to his servants, who closed the lid and locked it shut.

The court listened to the scratching, to the screaming, to the pleads from the prince, already sweltering inside his small wooden prison. The prince's wife, Lady Hiagyang, stood there watching with horror. She had already written a letter to the king begging for clemency for her and for her son. With another nod, the King had the box tied with rope and covered in grass and moved to the upper palace.

Lady Hiagyang's brother came that day and took his sister and her children back to their parents house for safety in a palanquin. From the rice box. The shouts and cries continued for another seven days. On the eighth day, the prince was finally silent. No one had touched the prince, not technically, and so the royal body had not been defiled. On July twelfth, seventeen sixty two, they removed the lid

and saw that Prince Sado was dead. He was twenty seven years old, The prince was buried on Mount Baibung Sang in yang Ju, and when the burial procession returned, the king forbade anyone in court from ever mentioning his son for the rest of his reign, at least in order to continue the line of succession without technically including Sado.

King Young Joe had Sado's son posthumously adopted by Sado's older brother, the deceased Prince, who had died long before Sado was even born, and though there were some challenges from the court and the country about the legitimacy of the boy, when the king died in seventeen seventy six, Sado's son Jong Joe became the next king. As soon as he was crowned, Jong Joe undid the messy fake

adoption nonsense of his grandfather. He proudly declared that he was the son of Prince Sado, whom he posthumously renamed King Shein Moon Huan MoU jong hun Gwanga the Great. The new king also moved his father's body to a royal tomb some miles outside of Seoul, and when his mother, Lady Young Young, died four decades later, she was buried next to her husband. That's the story of the short and incredibly tragic life of Prince Sado of Korea. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a

little bit more about theories surrounding his death. Our primary source for a detailed account of Prince Sado's madness and his eventual execution murder are from the memoirs of his wife, Lady hiang Yung, who wrote her reflections several decades after

her husband's death. Some historians and political theorists point out the possibility that her account might have been politically motivated, not that the actual events that she described didn't happen, but that the way that she framed them was meant to protect and defend her family. Some point out that by emphasizing Sato's brutality and insanity, Lady Hiagyung is tacitly giving us a defense of her own inaction of having,

in theory, stood by while her husband was killed. Some even go so far as to argue that Sado's death was entirely politically motivated, that Lady Hyayung exaggerated the Prince's insanity in her memoirs in order to in part cover up what had been a political conspiracy to kill him. The idea is that the prince was an outspoken opponent of the Norn political party, which his wife's family just

happened to be. Prominent members of the Norn Party had been essential in helping King Young John establish his claim to the throne, and so some argue that they called in a political debt in order to get the king to eliminate his troublesome son. I think it goes without saying that to some degree, of course, anyone writing their own memoir is going to frame the events in a way that focuses on their own experiences and defends their

own actions and thinking. But I also think the strangeness and cruelty of Prince Sado's death sometimes gives modern audiences more sympathy for him than they otherwise might have. The fact of the matter is cruel and unusual, as his death was. Prince Otto did murder people. We have multiple historical records of the servants who were killed in the princess fits of passion. Even still, in Soto and his wife were posthumously elevated to the status of Emperor and Empress.

They were given fancy new tombs for people to visit, the type of tombs that people might visit and stand at for a while and wonder what type of person could be buried there. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Minky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rema Ill Kali and Trevor Young.

Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M M.