Jo Heon

Jo Heon (1544–1592) was a civil official, Confucian scholar, and thinker on statecraft of the mid-Joseon period, who passed the higher civil service examination in 1567 and held government posts. When the Japanese invasions began in 1592, he raised a volunteer army in Okcheon and fought the Japanese forces advancing north at Geumsan, where he fell together with 700 of his soldiers—men later honored in the tomb known as Chilbaeguichong ("Tomb of the Seven Hundred"). Embodying the integrity of a scholar who joined learning with action in a time of national crisis, he was posthumously granted several high offices and enshrined in the Confucian shrine.