Yi Kyubo

(1168 - 1241)

A statesman, poet, and Confucian scholar during the Koryo dynasty, Yi Kyubo passed the civil service exams in 1190 and became first privy counselor under the Ch’oe family, which had seized power following a coup twenty years earlier. His Collected Works of Minister Yi of Korea, containing an estimated two thousand poems and prose works, was one of the first officially printed texts by a Korean writer.