광동 진씨(廣東 陳氏) — A Korean clan of Chinese origin founded by Chen Lin (陳璘), the Ming admiral who fought the Battle of Noryang with Yi Sun-sin. After the fall of the Ming, his grandson Jin Yeong-so came to Joseon, and his descendants took root in Hwangjo Village, Sani-myeon, Haenam.
A Korean clan of Chinese origin founded by Chen Lin (陳璘), the Ming admiral who fought the Battle of Noryang with Yi Sun-sin. After the fall of the Ming, his grandson Jin Yeong-so came to Joseon, and his descendants took root in Hwangjo Village, Sani-myeon, Haenam. In the 2015 Census the 광동 진씨 clan numbered about 2,397 people, one of Korea's major surnames and clans. Even among people surnamed 진, a different clan seat (bon-gwan, 광동) means a different lineage. New to these terms? See the bon-gwan, pa & hangnyeol guide.
The Gwangdong Jin clan (廣東 陳氏) is a Korean clan of foreign origin whose ancestral seat is Guangdong Province in China. Its founder is Chen Lin (陳璘, Korean: Jin Rin, 1543-1607), the Ming admiral who brought a naval force to Korea in the second Japanese invasion (Jeongyu War) and fought the Battle of Noryang alongside Yi Sun-sin. Chen Lin himself went back to China after the war. The family took root in Korea through his grandson Jin Yeong-so (陳泳素), who crossed the sea after the fall of the Ming. The clan therefore honors Chen Lin as its founder and Jin Yeong-so as its first ancestor in Joseon. The seat name refers to Chen Lin's home, Wengyuan County in Shaozhou Prefecture, Guangdong, which is now Wengyuan County in Shaoguan.
It is a completely separate lineage from the Yeoyang Jin, the largest Jin (陳) seat in Korea.
According to his biography in the History of Ming (Mingshi), Chen Lin had the courtesy name Chaojue and came from Wengyuan in Guangdong. He rose through the ranks from the 1560s by putting down rebels and pirates in Guangdong. After the Luopang campaign he served as the regional commander of the newly created Dong'an County. He was known as a capable strategist, but he was impeached several times for greed and was dismissed and reinstated more than once.
When the Jeongyu War broke out in 1597, he led 5,000 Guangdong troops to aid Joseon. The next year he became Regional Commander against the Japanese and took command of the whole Ming navy. In the 7th lunar month of 1598 he reached Gogeumdo, now part of Wando County. There he joined Yi Sun-sin's Joseon fleet, and on the 19th day of the 11th lunar month the allied fleets crushed the Japanese at Noryang. Yi Sun-sin and the Ming deputy commander Deng Zilong (鄧子龍) were both killed in that battle. When the Ming court assessed merit for the war, it ranked Chen Lin first.
After returning to China in 1599 he helped suppress the Bozhou rebellion of Yang Yinglong and Miao uprisings in Guizhou. He was later transferred to command in Guangdong and died in office in 1607. He was posthumously made Grand Guardian of the Heir Apparent. Korean sources and the clan say he was made Count of Guangdong (廣東伯), but this title does not appear in his Mingshi biography.
Clan tradition and local records say that after the Ming fell to the Qing in 1644, Chen Lin's grandson Jin Yeong-so came to Joseon in keeping with his grandfather's wishes. He first stayed on Gogeumdo, where Chen Lin's naval headquarters and his Guan Yu shrine had been, and then moved to Haeri, around present-day Haenam-eup. Korean Wikipedia adds that he had held the post of gamguk suwisa in the Ming and sailed from Nanjing, landing first at Jangseungpo on the south coast before moving to Gogeumdo.
In the next generation the family is said to have moved to what is now Deoksong-ri, Sani-myeon, Haenam, and named the village Hwangjo (皇朝, "imperial court") to mark themselves as subjects of the fallen Ming. The details differ by source, however. The Digital Haenam Culture encyclopedia's entry on the shrine names Jin Seok-mun (陳碩文) as the founder of the village. Its entry on Deoksong-ri instead says Jin Yeong-so's sons Jin Seok-gwon and Jin Yun-gwon moved to Haenam. In a 2014 Kyunghyang Shinmun report, the clan gave the grandson's name as Jo (詔). That account says he died 16 years after his exile, leaving a fourteen-year-old son, Seok-mun, who wandered as an orphan before settling at Hwangjo in his early thirties.
Hwangjo Village in Deoksong-ri, Sani-myeon, Haenam County, South Jeolla, remains the clan's main village. In 2014, 60 of its 72 households, or 82 people, belonged to the clan, and there had been more than 100 clan households in the 1990s. It is said that most houses in the village face west, toward China.
Halfway up the hill behind the village stands Hwangjo Byeolmyo (皇朝別廟). It enshrines the spirit tablets of Chen Lin, his son Chen Jiujing (陳九經), his grandson Jin Yeong-so and his great-grandson Jin Seok-mun. An altar to Chen Lin was set up around 1679, and the shrine building was erected in 1871. The portrait of Chen Lin there was painted and presented by the government of Wengyuan County in 1997. Haenam County designated the shrine as Local Cultural Heritage No. 10 in 2003, and the clan holds a major rite there every year.
In 1598 Chen Lin founded a shrine to Guan Yu on Gogeumdo. Research shows that it first honored Guan Yu together with the sea goddess Mazu. By 1666 Chen Lin and Yi Sun-sin were enshrined together in the east hall. In 1791 King Jeongjo granted it the name Tanbomyo (誕報廟), and Deng Zilong was added, so that Chen Lin and Deng Zilong occupied the east hall and Yi Sun-sin the west hall. The shrine was torn down under Japanese rule. After liberation it was restored as a site honoring Yi Sun-sin and designated a Historic Site as the Admiral Yi Sun-sin Site on Myodangdo, Wando. Its main hall now honors Yi Sun-sin and Yi Yeong-nam.
The national census counted 1,222 members in 2000 and 2,397 in 2015. Hwangjo Village is the clan's center. A place-name tradition from Hanja-ri, Hwangsan-myeon, also in Haenam, says members of the clan came to live there in the late Joseon period. Clan members say many people switched to other Jin seats, some under Japanese rule to avoid surveillance and others after liberation, so the real number of descendants is likely higher than the census figure.
The clan founded its first clan association in 1999 and published its genealogy in 2005. Copies are reportedly kept in university libraries in the Chinese-speaking world, including Peking University, Nanjing University and National Taiwan University. A 2022 Xinhua report says the Korean clan association compiled a genealogy jointly with descendants in China. During the COVID-19 pandemic it also sent more than 30,000 masks to Yunfu.
Hwangjo Village became known in China in the early 1990s through the research of the Chinese scholar Shang Yuhe (尚玉河). Exchanges began in 1994, when 13 clan members from Hwangjo-ri visited Wengyuan at the county's invitation. In October 1999 Haenam County and Wengyuan County became sister regions; Wengyuan is Haenam's only overseas sister region. Some 3,000 descendants of Chen Lin also live in Dong'an, where he once served and which is now Yun'an District of Yunfu, and exchanges with them have continued since 2004. Haenam and Yun'an signed a friendship agreement in 2024.
In a July 2014 lecture at Seoul National University, Chinese President Xi Jinping noted that descendants of the Ming general Chen Lin still live in Korea. In a December 2017 speech at Peking University, President Moon Jae-in likewise said about 2,000 of Chen Lin's descendants live in Korea. Hwangjo Byeolmyo is also cited as a reason why successive Chinese ambassadors to Korea have visited Haenam.
Views of Chen Lin differ. Joseon records such as the Jingbirok and the Annals of King Seonjo describe him as arrogant and harsh. They also say he took credit for Korean victories and was reluctant to fight, which led to friction with Yi Sun-sin. Yet the story that he came to revere Yi Sun-sin and wept at his death is also widely told. Members of the clan have long regretted that he is usually portrayed only as greedy and passive. Chen Lin appears in works such as the drama Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin (2004-2005) and the film Noryang: Deadly Sea (2023).
Sources: Mingshi vol. 247; Digital Haenam Culture encyclopedia; Yu Seong-ung and Jang Gyeong-hui, "A Study on Gogeumdo Gwanwangmyo" (2015); Kyunghyang Shinmun (Sept. 19, 2014); Xinhua (July 9, 2022); Wikipedia. Accounts of the settlement and the names involved differ between sources and are given as tradition.
No separate sub-branches of the Gwangdong Jin clan are recorded. In practice the clan consists of the descendants of Chen Lin's grandson Jin Yeong-so, who settled in Hwangjo Village, Deoksong-ri, Sani-myeon, Haenam County, South Jeolla. In 2014 members said that 15th- and 16th-generation descendants, counting Chen Lin as the first, lived together in the village.
Tradition says that after the fall of the Ming in 1644 Jin Yeong-so came by way of Gogeumdo to Haeri in Haenam. In the next generation the family moved to the present village and named it Hwangjo (皇朝) as subjects of the fallen Ming. Sources name the village's founder either as Jin Seok-mun (陳碩文) or as the brothers Jin Seok-gwon and Jin Yun-gwon. Hwangjo Byeolmyo, built in 1871 on the hill behind the village and designated Haenam Local Cultural Heritage No. 10, holds the tablets of Chen Lin, Chen Jiujing, Jin Yeong-so and Jin Seok-mun.
The village mainly grows rice and napa cabbage, and its farmland expanded greatly after large-scale land reclamation around the village from the late 1980s. The lineage founded a clan association in 1999 and published a genealogy in 2005. Since 1994 it has kept up rites and visits with the Chen lineage of Wengyuan County, Guangdong, Chen Lin's birthplace.
Branch divisions vary by lineage and jokbo; confirm your own branch in your family's records.
진린(founder; Ming naval commander at Noryang), 진영소(Chen Lin's grandson; first ancestor in Joseon)
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The 광동 진씨 clan association can be found in the Korean E-Jokbo Library clan-association directory.
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