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List of fictitious kings in Korean genealogies

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 17, 2026
Entity authorityQ6625252 ↗
Source-derived summary

This is a list of fictional monarchs appearing in the genealogies of three Korean descent groups: the Cheongju Han, the Haengju Gi, and the Taewon Seonu. These groups claim descent from a line of putative kings of Gojoseon and Mahan founded by the legendary Chinese figure Jizi, who is said to have introduced Chinese civilization to Korea. However, the association between Jizi and these clans is considered an Early Modern fabrication. The records of the Goryeo dynasty make no link between Cheongju Han individuals and Jizi, despite the fact that the official veneration of Jizi as a culture hero was patronized by the state. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources also report that the descent group had been founded either by Han Ran(한란,韓蘭), a tenth-century general in the service of Taejo of Goryeo, or by Han Gang(한강,韓康), a thirteenth-century minister in the government of Gojong of Goryeo.

In the case of the Cheongju Han, the creation of the myth appears to have involved the integration of reports from the third-century Chinese history Weilüe, in which King Jun is said to have fled south and proclaimed himself King of "Han" after losing his throne to a Chinese usurper, and the Jewang ungi, a thirteenth-century epic poem in which King Jun is said to have become the king of Mahan. However, the histories never actually state that King Jun was a descendant of Jizi. The genealogies claim that King Jun's descendants ruled Mahan for a while before losing the throne, at which point the last king's three sons scattered to the Three Kingdoms of Korea and founded the Han, Gi, and Seonu.

The first evidence of Koreans claiming descent from Jizi and the Gojoseon kings appears in a Joseon Veritable Records entry for September 1603, when a discussion about Jizi between King Seonjo and his ministers digressed into a discussion on whether Jizi had traceable living descendants. The ministers, such as Yun Kŭnsu, reported that it was said that the Cheongju Han and the Taewon Seonu were descended from Jizi; the king remained skeptical.

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This entry incorporates text from “List of fictitious kings in Korean genealogies” 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.