Note 57 — Chapter XII · RULERS AND PEOPLE

During all my visit in Korea it was commonly reported by those intimate at Court that the Crown Prince was an imbecile both in body and in mind. But in his boyhood he was rather more than ordinarily bright, and his mother, the murdered Queen, was the most clever and brilliant Korean woman of her time. It is not strange, then, that since his accession to the throne and in view of his obviously sensible way of yielding to good advice from others, in spite of the evil influence of his father, the impression has been made that he might have been feigning imbecility in order to escape plots to assassinate him, which were formed in the interests of a rival claimant to the throne.