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Deadly Family Spats Through the Centuries

Khalid Elhassan January 4, 2021 33 min

Canterbury Cathedral - Archbishop of Canterbury — The death of Thomas Becket. Encyclopedia Britannica

14. King Yeongjo Ordered His Son Executed Via Starvation

Still from a movie depicting the sealing of Prince Sado in a rice chest. SBS Australia

Prince Sado’s shocking conduct and murderous ways made him widely feared throughout Korea as a serial rapist, serial killer, and all-around dangerous psychopath. Eventually, the crown prince’s father, King Yeongjo, had enough. He determined that he could not, in good conscience, inflict his criminally insane son upon the Korean people as their next monarch. So on July 4^th, 1762, Sado was summoned by his father, who ceremonially struck the floor with a sword and declared the crown prince deposed.

The kind of rice chest in which Prince Sado was starved to death. Troo Adventure

However, that still left unanswered the question of just what to do with Sado. His father ordered him to take the honorable path by committing suicide, but the prince refused to do so. Court rules and taboos prohibited the outright execution of member of the royal family. So the king had Sado placed inside a heavy wooden chest used for storing grain, and locked him inside. There, the deposed prince was left to starve to death. It took him eight days to die.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.