Joseon hid the heir's mother's fate from the heir — the truth purged the court twice

In 1476 the future King Yeonsangun of Joseon was born to King Seongjong and Consort Yun; three years later his mother was deposed, and in 1482 she died. The court raised the prince without telling him: he grew up believing another queen was his mother, and took the throne in 1494 with the truth still sealed in the palace records.

In 1504 the secret surfaced. When Yeonsangun learned how his birth mother had been deposed and put to death, and which ministers had urged it, the grief became the Gapja purge: officials who had counselled the deposition a generation earlier were dragged back, executed, mutilated or exiled, and the anger reached into the inner palace itself.

The purge settled nothing. In 1506 senior ministers and palace troops deposed Yeonsangun and exiled him; he died within months, at thirty. The succession had been arranged to spare the heir a truth; the cost was a court purged twice and a reign destroyed by the very secret that was meant to protect it.