The preceding chapters describe the natural environment, animals and humans across the Korean peninsula while emphasising the centrality of the chase. By the fourteenth century, hunting acquired new meaning, and more people seemed to participate. In the aftermath of the Qadan attack, King Ch’ungnyŏl's authority as a militarised monarch solidified. The incident set a template for later kings. The attack also reinforced hunting as an important military skill and time spent in the field as a significant definer of rulership and masculinity based on a neo-nomadic ethos where the king held power over the realm including wild beasts. This era also marked a time of transition that reinforced bonds with the Mongol Empire and helped affirm royal control within the dynasty. On his trips to Mongol lands, for instance, King Ch’ungnyŏl occasionally hunted with his father-in-law, the emperor Kublai Khan. These became moments for them to bond and discuss political affairs and the dealings of other royal family members. For later Koryŏ kings, and the men who supported them, authority over the land and wild beasts expressed domination in several ways. Hunting helped them build allegiances outside the bureaucracy to counter the power of civil officials at the court and competing elites in the countryside and navigate the changing dynamics of Northeast Asia.

Korean kings replicated this pattern of male comradery and bonding through the chase. The stories of rulers such as King Sin U (r. 1374–88; 禑) illustrate the centrality of hunting and time spent among the animals of the wild to rulership as it displayed a sense of martial valour and a renewed affinity with the military. Framed within the hunt of the late Koryŏ and wider climate change, this chapter outlines the shifting worldviews and political strategies on the peninsula and in Northeast Asia in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. Some of those forces impacting the peninsula were regional – for instance, the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in the 1360s and the rise of the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) – and unleashed political, religious and cultural shifts throughout the region that I detail below.