Goryeo Dynasty

Follow Korea's Goryeo Dynasty, from founder Taejo Wang Geon through the kings who gave Korea its name — nearly five centuries of rulers mapped across births, marriages and migrations on RootsLore.

People in this family tree

• Taejo · 877–05/943 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Founder of the Goryeo Dynasty, the warlord Wang Geon, who supplanted his lord to take power in 918 and by 936 had reunified the Later Three Kingdoms into a single Korean state. To bind the realm he married into some two dozen regional clans and left his heirs the “Ten Injunctions” as a charter of rule; he reigned until his death in 943, and the Western name “Korea” derives from his dynasty.
• Hyejong · 912–945 · Naju, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Second king of Goryeo and eldest son of Taejo, who succeeded his father in 943. Born of a lesser clan and lacking strong backers, he reigned barely two years amid repeated plots against his life by his ambitious half-brothers, and died in 945, the throne passing to one of them.
• Jeongjong · 923–949 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Third king of Goryeo, a son of Taejo who came to the throne in 945 with the help of military strongmen after the death of his half-brother Hyejong. A devout Buddhist, he planned to move the capital north to Seogyeong (Pyongyang) to escape the entrenched Kaesong clans, but the costly scheme was abandoned at his early death in 949.
• Gwangjong · 925–975 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Fourth king of Goryeo and a son of Taejo, the dynasty’s great consolidator of royal power. He freed those who had been wrongfully enslaved, curbed the merit nobility, and in 958 introduced the civil-service examinations on the Chinese model to build a bureaucracy loyal to the crown. He married his own half-sister, Queen Daemok, and reigned until 975.
• Gyeongjong · 955–981 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Fifth king of Goryeo, son of Gwangjong and Queen Daemok, who came to the throne in 975. In 976 he established the Jeonsigwa, the field-and-woodland stipend system that granted officials land rights according to rank — a lasting foundation of the Goryeo state — before his early death in 981.
• Seongjong · 960–997 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Sixth king of Goryeo, son of Daejong, who gave the dynasty its enduring Confucian shape. Following the counsel of the scholar Choe Seungno, he built a centralised provincial administration; in 993 he turned back the first Khitan invasion through the famous diplomacy of Seo Hui, gaining territory without a battle. He died in 997.
• Queen Heonae of Hwangju · 964–1029 · Hwangju, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Queen of Gyeongjong and mother of Mokjong, who as the dowager Cheonchu wielded great power during her son’s minority. Her affair with a kinsman and the rise of their faction provoked the crisis that brought Mokjong down in 1009. Of the Hwangju Hwangbo clan, she died in 1029.
• Mokjong · 980–1009 · Kaesong, Korea → Chungju, Korea — Seventh king of Goryeo, son of Gyeongjong, who came to the throne in 997. His reign ended in violence: amid a court crisis stirred by his mother, the dowager Cheonchu, and her favourite, the general Gang Jo marched on the capital, deposed Mokjong and had him killed in 1009 — the act that triggered the second Khitan invasion.
• Queen Janghwa of Naju · ? · Naju, Korea — A queen of Taejo, Lady Oh of Naju, of relatively humble birth, whom the founder met during his southern campaigns. She bore his eldest son and successor, Hyejong, whose modest maternal line left him politically exposed among the great clans once his father was gone.
• Queen Sinmyeongsunseong of Chungju · ? · Chungju, Korea — A queen of Taejo, Lady Yu of the powerful Chungju clan, whose backing made her sons strong contenders for the throne. She was mother of two kings, Jeongjong and Gwangjong, who in turn ruled after the short and troubled reign of their half-brother Hyejong.
• Queen Sinjeong of Hwangju · ? · Hwangju, Korea — A queen of Taejo, Lady Hwangbo of Hwangju, mother of Prince Wang Uk (the posthumous Daejong) and of Queen Daemok. Through this line — and the marriage of her daughter to her half-brother Gwangjong — her descendants carried the main royal succession of early Goryeo.
• Daejong · ?–969 · Kaesong, Korea → Kaesong, Korea — Wang Uk, a son of Taejo who never reigned but was honoured posthumously as King Daejong when his son ascended the throne as Seongjong. His marriage within the royal kin was part of the dense intermarriage by which the house of Wang kept the crown among Taejo’s descendants.
• Queen Daemok Hwangbo · ? · Kaesong, Korea — Daughter of Taejo and Queen Sinjeong who married her own half-brother King Gwangjong — and so appears in the tree as both a child of the founder and a queen of the next generation. Mother of King Gyeongjong, she embodied the close royal endogamy of early Goryeo, used to concentrate the bloodline and the throne.
• Queen Seonui of Gyeongju · ? · Gyeongju, Korea — Wife of Prince Wang Uk (the posthumous Daejong) and mother of King Seongjong, honoured as Queen Seonui. Of the Gyeongju clan, she stood within the tight web of royal marriages through which the house of Wang preserved its claim to the throne.