Joseon Royal Banquets and Their Uigwe

Everyday royal meals, the surasang and its cooks, are covered in royal court cuisine. This page is about the court's great occasions: the formal banquets, or yeonhyang (연향), held for a king's anniversary on the throne, a queen dowager's birthday or another dynastic celebration. They are unusually well documented because the Joseon court recorded them in uigwe (의궤), illustrated books that set down every stage of a state event, down to the dishes, vessels, flowers, musicians and costs.

Jinyeon, jinchan and other names

Court banquets went by several names, and their meanings shifted over time. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture's entry on banquet paintings explains that the Gyeongguk daejeon law code listed the jinyeon (진연, 進宴) as the court banquet, though early Joseon still held larger Goryeo-style feasts. From the mid-seventeenth century the jinyeon became the standard, somewhat scaled-down celebration, chiefly for a king's anniversary on the throne or the birthday of a senior royal. The jinchan (진찬, 進饌) was associated above all with long-lived queen dowagers and grand queen dowagers, and most nineteenth-century banquets took this form. Another Encyclopedia entry describes the jinchan as simpler in ceremony than the jinyeon. Other terms, jinjak (진작) and sujak (수작), emphasized the ceremony of offering wine cups. Because the sources define the categories slightly differently, it is safest to treat them as overlapping names for court feasts.

Preparations began months ahead. A temporary office was set up to plan the event; a date was chosen; guests, dishes and vessels were settled; and cooks worked in a temporary kitchen called the sukseolso (숙설소).

Food piled high

The defining feature of a banquet table was height. Food was stacked into towering arrangements, goimsang (고임상), decorated with artificial flowers called sanghwa (상화). The Encyclopedia describes typical stacks of about 30 to 90 centimeters, depending on the scale of the event and the rank of the person served. Cones of tteok, hangwa confections, fruit, nuts, dried meats and fish rose in tiers. These were not eaten at the ceremony: afterward the stacked food was sent, still intact, to the homes of royal relatives and high officials. The Encyclopedia notes that such gifts spread court dishes into elite households, and that the stacked tables at private weddings and sixtieth-birthday feasts imitate the custom (see life-ritual foods). Smaller trays for actual eating, and tiered rewards of food for guards and cooks, completed the hierarchy.

The 1795 Hwaseong banquet

The best-known Joseon banquet is the one King Jeongjo gave his mother, Lady Hyegyeong, in 1795. That year marked her sixtieth birthday and the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of her husband, the late Crown Prince Sado. In the leap second month Jeongjo escorted her on a royal procession from Seoul to Sado's tomb, Hyeollyungwon, and to the new fortress city of Hwaseong in present-day Suwon. On the 13th day of the leap second month, the third day after their arrival, the banquet was held in Bongsudang hall of the Hwaseong detached palace, with court dances, music and Jeongjo offering a symbolic peach of longevity. A further birthday celebration followed in Seoul in the sixth month.

The whole journey was recorded in Wonhaeng eulmyo jeongni uigwe (원행을묘정리의궤), compiled by the office that organized it and printed in 1797. The Encyclopedia notes that it was the first uigwe printed with movable metal type, and that it contains 112 pages of woodblock illustrations, including the banquet at Bongsudang, a feast for elderly residents, and the distribution of rice to the poor. One volume lists the dishes, vessels and costs. The Encyclopedia's entry on the event refers to it as a jinyeon, while the painting of the scene, "Bongsudang jinchan-do," calls it a jinchan; most modern accounts use the latter. Later banquets for queen dowagers in the nineteenth century took the 1795 jinchan as their precedent.

Other uigwe

According to the Encyclopedia, sixteen banquet uigwe survive. The oldest records the jinyeon of 1719 celebrating King Sukjong's entry into the Office of the Elders. Seven are jinchan records, from 1828 to 1901, including feasts for Queen Sunwon's sixtieth birthday in 1848, for Queen Sinjeong's sixtieth, seventieth and eightieth, and for Emperor Gojong's forty-first birthday in 1892. They follow a common pattern: dates, officials, illustrations of the hall, dances, flowers and vessels, then the menus, or chanpum (찬품), costs and rewards. Food historians have used these lists to reconstruct banquet dishes, and they underpin modern restorations of court cuisine.

Why the banquets matter

Court banquets were politics as well as celebration, displaying filial piety, ritual order and royal generosity. For food history, their uigwe offer something rare: precise, dated menus from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Combined with Joseon cookbooks and the tribute foods sent from the provinces, they show what the Joseon elite ate on its grandest days.