Beginning with the Mongol era in the late thirteenth century, the royal hunt empowered kings, allowing them to legitimise their authority over nonscholars and Mongol imperial personnel through a Northeast Asian cultural practice that many in powerful positions in the bureaucracy, scholarship and the Buddhist institutions regarded as a threat. Hunting was an occasion for feasting and an activity that brought royalty and non-royalty outside the Confucian bureaucracy together. Because elites often mimicked the practices of their leaders – emulating royal behaviour – hunting became the definition of elite masculine identity, a neo-nomadic ethos, among those connected to the king and other influential politicians. By the fourteenth century, more Korean kings and yangban elites had begun participating in the hunt and gained access to power through their hunting skills. It was while participating in the hunt that royal family members and elites assumed roles that mimicked imperial connections and shared favours between Koryŏ rulers and Mongol emperors.

These issues speak to the complexity of Koryŏ political identity. Koryŏ leaders blended philosophies and belief systems while scholar elites perceived the land as both an empire and a kingdom. Within this complex worldview, the political system constructed in the first half of the Koryŏ Dynasty favoured the bureaucracy and thereby weakened the political legitimacy of central authority.

One challenge of reading sources is that they were written by men not well inclined to document the royal hunt. Confucian scholars were dedicated to recording the history of both the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties. Official historical records reflected the Confucian moral objection to hunting, especially when such events involved members of the royal family. This was especially true during the Chosŏn Dynasty with its strong adherence to Confucian philosophies. Chronicling the history of the previous Koryŏ Dynasty in the early fifteenth century, Chosŏn government officials witnessed the world through the Confucian lens of morality, and disdained martial or leisure activities as interfering in scholarship and study, placing the dynasty at risk economically, socially and morally: