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Crown Prince Maui

the last crown prince of Silla

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ3662876
Source-derived summary

Crown Prince Maui (Korean: 마의태자; Hanja: 麻衣太子; born 912), born Kim Il (김일; 金鎰) was the last Silla crown prince as the son of its last ruler, King Gyeongsun.

The name Maui means "hemp dress", and comes from the fact that he spent his whole life wearing clothes made of hemp linen when he went into self-imposed exile after the fall of Silla. Due to the decline of Silla, which had lost control over much of its former territory and had its capital brutally sacked, his father surrendered Silla to Goryeo. After hearing the news, Prince Maui opposed the surrender and fled to Mount Kumgang. Currently, the Buan Kim clan and the T'ongch'ŏn Kim clan regard Prince Maui as their founding ancestor.

In popular culture

TV series & dramas

Portrayed Lee Byung-wook in the 2000–2002 KBS1 TV series Taejo Wang Geon.

Portrayed by Ahn Chi-yong in the 2009 KBS TV series Empress Cheonchu.

Novel

Portrayed in a historical novel Crown Prince Maui, written by Yi Gwangsu and was serialized in The Dong-A Ilbo from May 1926 to January 1927. It was published in January 1928 as a book in the Bakmunseogwan (博文書館). The story tells the life of Maui as a young man on Mount Kumgang, after his father, Gyeongsun of Silla, tried to surrender to Taejo of Goryeo.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Crown Prince Maui” is the last crown prince of Silla. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Crown, Prince and Maui, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2000, 2002, 2009, 1926—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Crown, Prince and Maui is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

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The phrase “the last crown prince of Silla” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3662876. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2002, 2009 and 1926.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Crown Prince Maui” 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.