Hi everyone. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. It's the end of the academic year right now,

and in addition to all of the craziness that normally goes with that, particularly in a year like this one,

I also have some continuing work going on in my house, wrapping up some of the processes around

moving into this new place, getting it set up, all that

fun stuff. And long story short, thanks to a combination of just general busyness and crazy

scheduling, I have some folks working in my house right now as I'm trying to record. I'm going to do my

best to minimize the noise bleed through and to deal with any loud noises happening with the work they're doing so that you don't hear too much of it, but there's probably going to be a little bit you'll pick up in the background.

I do apologize for that. It should only be an issue really this week and next week, and then after that, hopefully we should be done.

In the meantime, part four.

The year was 1420, and Song Hui-Gyong was on a journey to visit Japan.

Song was Korean, a member of the Yangban aristocracy which had come to power under the new

Korean ruling dynasty, the Joseon.

The Joseon were a fairly fresh face in the political arena. Only 28 years earlier, the first

Joseon king, King Tejol, had established this new dynasty by overthrowing the previous

one, which had collaborated with Mongol rulers and generally mismanaged the Korean state.

Now, the fourth king of Joseon, Sejong, was trying to solidify his new dynasty's hold over Korea.

He spent his reign doing just that, with everything from reforms to the legal code, to overhauling

the nation's relationship with its powerful Buddhist religious institutions, to revising the very

nature of the Korean language,

supporting the development of Hangul, the phonetic alphabet that today allows students of

Korean to dodge the thousands of hours of ideographic character memorization expected of those of us

who study Japanese or Chinese, the lucky bastards.

...