Eom Heung-do
Joseon civil servant (1404-1474)
Eom Heung-do (Korean: 엄흥도; Hanja: 嚴興道; 1404 – 26 February 1474) was a local official during the Joseon dynasty. He is remembered as a figure of loyalty for secretly retrieving and burying the body of the deposed King Danjong in 1457 despite King Sejo's threats.
Burial of King Danjong and exile
Eom Heung-do served as the hojang (local headman) of Yeongwol. In 1457, King Danjong was demoted to Prince Nosan and exiled to Yeongwol after being dethroned by his uncle King Sejo. He was later killed but the cause of his death is disputed: some say that he died from drinking poison while others say that he was killed by strangulation with a bowstring after refusing to drink poison given by King Sejo.
Danjong's body was later thrown into Dong River. Eom retrieved his body, conducted a funeral, and secretly buried him in Dongeulji mountain despite Sejo's threats that anyone who did so would have three generations of their family killed. After the funeral, he fled to Yeongnam and spent the rest of his life in seclusion. Eom's tomb is thought to be in Uiheung, Gunwi.
Posthumous honors
In 1516 (11th year of the reign of King Jungjong), Danjong's grave was found and a burial mound was established.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Eom Heung-do” is joseon civil servant (1404-1474). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Heung-do, Joseon and civil, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16220112. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1404, 1474, 1457 and 1516.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eom Heung-do” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.