Yi Seok

[4] Yi promotes the creation of a constitutional monarchy alongside the existing presidential system.

In August 2006, Yi founded the Imperial Cultural Foundation of Korea (황실문화재단) to support this proposal.

Yi's guesthouse in the Jeonju Hanok Village has been visited by Presidents Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in.

His father, Prince Yi Kang, was 62 and his mother, former telephone operator Lady Hong Chŏng-sun, was 19.

[7] Of his childhood in occupied Korea, Yi later recalled in his autobiography: "I still remember clearly how my father fired a revolver into the air and ranted, 'I shall banish those Japanese who stole our country!

After the outbreak of the Korean War, Yi and his family fled from their residence in Samcheong-dong and were reduced to poverty.

[13] During the war, Yi was wounded and needed to return to Korea; around the same time, his mother died of stomach cancer.

[13] In the 1980s he moved to the United States as an illegal immigrant, doing jobs including lawn mowing and cleaning swimming pools and buildings.

[14] In August 2004, Yi started running and living in a guesthouse Seunggwangjae in Jeonju Hanok Village.

[15][21] In 2016, Yi explained his rationale as follows: Our country requires a system in which the royal family symbolically exists, even if there is already a president.

[20] The Statue of King Sejong in Gwanghwamun Plaza was erected on 9 October 2009, and Yi Seok attended the unveiling ceremony.

The statue's face was based on that of Yi and a portrait of Grand Prince Hyoryeong, King Sejong's older brother, which is now preserved at Gwanaksan.

"[25] On 6 October 2018, Yi declared Andrew Lee, a distant Korean-American relative and an entrepreneur, to be the "Korean Crown Prince".