As we have seen, from the earliest confederacies and kingdoms on the Korean peninsula, people, including rulers, hunted. After the founding of the Koryŏ Dynasty in the late tenth century, royal and elite hunting seemed to lose popularity. This may have been due to the strong Buddhist sentiment present in the court, which adopted precepts against the killing of animals, or perhaps it was because court scribes did not deem recording such things necessary. Elite hunting re-emerged in the Mongol–Koryŏ era in the 1270s. Hunting and spending time in the field as a definer of royal authority and masculinity fluctuated over the next two centuries. Kings and their hunting parties, whether large-scale, royal military Kangmu hunts or smaller, personal hunting parties, travelled away from the capital to find game in the forests and mountains. Korean kings, royal family members and like-minded officials wanted to hunt, while other bureaucrats tried to control such pastimes and moved to end hunting by outlawing it as a royal pursuit. The maturing of Confucian institutions after the founding of the Chosŏn Dynasty in 1392 – and the diehard Neo-Confucians who staffed it – coupled with human population expansion, the outbreak of disease and a fluctuating climate, created a political and natural environment that finally pushed hunting and other wild animal encounters out of the minds of kings and the court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Domination of wild beasts through the hunt, a public symbol of monarchical power in the Koryŏ–Mongol era that survived into the early Chosŏn, shifted from the responsibility of the king to the responsibility of the bureaucracy with the death of King Yŏnsan’gun, a ruler who literally blurred the boundaries between wilderness and civilisation when he brought wild and domesticated animals into the royal palace. After him, the fate of the Kangmu, falconry and other hunting activities mainly rested in the hands of professional soldiers who hunted animals, local and provincial scholar officials who delegated tax demands (animals as tribute), and commoners and slaves who ventured onto the lands around them to hunt, trap and collect wild animals that the state needed in order to conduct business, heal bodies or calm the weather.