A History of Korea
Page 7
In the first month of 1135 Myoch’ng, Cho Kwang, and the other leaders orchestrated a swift takeover of most of the administrative centers of P’yngan province, incarcerating officials sent from the capital and cutting off the major pass that connected this region to the south. They proclaimed their new realm the Empire of Taewi (“Great Purpose”). King Injong, meanwhile, appointed Kim Pusik, a high official, to lead the government armies as Supreme Commander for the Pacification of P’yngan Province. Kim’s forces entered the breakaway region and issued ultimatums to local leaders, who for the most part quickly capitulated, and soon surrounded the rebels in Pyongyang. In fear and hope for clemency, Cho Kwang, who by now was acting as the true ringleader of the uprising, beheaded Myoch’ng and the other rebel leaders and sent the heads to Kim Pusik as a sign of surrender. But Kim would have none of it, and Cho Kwang in turn decided to fight to the end, which came after many more months of bloodletting—including the killing of government negotiators by Cho. Eventually, Cho’s troops, holed up in their fortress, ran out of provisions under the government siege. The defeat of the rebels came in the second month of 1136, more than a year after the eruption. It would take much longer for the region to return to normalcy, and for Pyongyang, the city would never be the same.
AFTERMATH
Myoch’ng’s antagonist in this ordeal, Kim Pusik, would go on to exert an influence on Korean history far beyond his leadership in suppressing the uprising. As the prime representative of the power elite of the Kory capital region, however, his latter exploits can be considered an extension of his role in the Myoch’ng saga. Kim was a descendant of the old Silla royal family, which constituted one of the key components of the emerging capital-based aristocracy that the Kory founder, T’aejo, had collectively incorporated into his ruling order. This was significant because Kim would eventually make another mark on Korean history through his compilation, a decade later, of the court-sanctioned history of the pre-Kory era, the History of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk sagi). This work serves to this day as the core source of understanding of ancient Korea. Beginning with Sin Ch’aeho, who called the Myoch’ng Rebellion the “most important event in a thousand years” of Korean history, many modern historians have condemned Kim Pusik’s impact. In particular, they have bemoaned Kim’s attempt in the History of the Three Kingdoms to strengthen the historical legitimacy of Kory through an emphasis on Kory’s status as the successor to Silla. This move, they claim, downplayed the standing of Kogury both in the history of the Three Kingdoms era and as a source of the Kory dynasty’s own identity.
Furthermore, the capital-based aristocratic elite that Kim represented, which coalesced around bureaucratic domination and hence maintained itself as the official class, would come to be known as yangban (“two orders”), in reference to the two sets of high officials, the civilian and the military. But, as symbolized by Kim, a renowned Confucian scholar-official, a firm hierarchy developed between these two strains of the central officialdom, with civilians like Kim enjoying supremacy. The Myoch’ng Rebellion and Kim Pusik’s centrality in its outcome may have strengthened this civilian domination to the point of excess, and a backlash to this ordering came relatively soon thereafter. In 1170, military officials rose in revolt and implemented a hundred-year period of military domination of the government (Chapter 6), much like the Shogunal system in premodern Japan. But this represented merely a short hiatus in the millennium of Korean history from the tenth to the twentieth centuries, when on the whole the principle of civilian supremacy and military subordination prevailed. Kim’s victory over Myoch’ng reinforced this order and likely contributed to the permanent branding of Pyongyang, and the northern regions as a whole, as the preserve of the military, rebellious, even uncivilized underbelly of the country. This perspective constituted a very real prejudice in the ensuing Chosn dynasty, when the northern regions, considered a backwater, suffered social and political discrimination, and Pyongyang fell further from civilizational centrality.
Little wonder, then, that in the early nineteenth century, another uprising, the Hong Kyngnae Rebellion of 1811–12, erupted with remarkable resemblances to the Myoch’ng episode: a charismatic malcontent from Pyongyang, preaching the north’s geomantic superiority, fought to break away from the capital-based power structure. This, too, was eventually suppressed, and not until the circumstances of the mid-twentieth century brought to center-stage yet another magnetic military leader from Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung, did finally the northern part of the country succeed in recovering its long-lost glory, but at the cost of a nation divided permanently.
6
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The Mongol Overlord Period
CHRONOLOGY
1231 First Mongol invasion of Korea
1261 Assassination of the Last Ch’oe dictator, end of military rule in Kory
1270 Final capitulation of Kory court to Mongol siege, beginning of Mongol overlord period
1274 First of two joint Mongol-Korean invasion attempts of Japan
1320s Lady Ki’s travel to Yuan Dynasty China as a “tribute woman”
1333 Lady Ki named an imperial concubine
1339 Birth of Lady Ki’s son, the future crown prince and emperor of the Yuan dynasty
1340 Marriage of Lady Ki to the Mongol emperor as secondary imperial consort
1356 Purge of Empress Ki’s family members in the Kory court by King Kongmin
1365 Empress Ki’s ascent as primary consort
1368 Ming dynasty’s conquest of China
THE MARRIAGE OF LADY KI TO THE YUAN EMPEROR, 1340
Kaegyng, the capital of the Kory dynasty, was abuzz with news from China in the summer of 1340. Seven decades had passed since the Korean kingdom had succumbed to a long siege by invading Mongol forces, and in the intervening period Korea had become suffused with all things Mongol—its culture, politics, and even its monarch bore the stamp of Mongol dominance. Now Koreans received word of an event that showed that Korea, in turn, could wield influence over the stupendously powerful Mongol empire based in China, the Yuan dynasty. Lady Ki, a Korean and favored concubine of the Yuan emperor, had in the previous year given birth to the likely crown prince, and was now being
crowned formally as an imperial consort through her marriage to the Yuan emperor. This turn of events could hardly have been anticipated two decades earlier, when she was sent as a captive prize of submission to the Mongol rulers. Indeed she and hundreds of other “tribute women” sent to Mongol-controlled China had embodied the Mongols’ comprehensive control over the kingdom of Kory, a period in Korean history normally viewed with utter shame.
The period of Mongol dominion over Korea, however, resists easy judgment. Empress Ki’s story, in fact, represents a microcosm of Kory’s complex relationship to the Mongol empire—an experience of tragedy and horror, to be sure, but also of reform, opportunity, and valuable exposure to the outside world. This period also highlighted important features of Kory as a civilization and its place in Korean history, especially for practices and customs regarding women. In these and other ways, the Mongol era constituted a seminal turning point in Korean history: on the one hand, it directly led to the fall of the Kory dynasty, but in the larger scope of national history it represented a time when Korea was integrated into the world order to a degree not seen again until the twentieth century.
THE MONGOL CONQUEST
The first Mongol invasion, in 1231, led by the son of the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, came six decades after the 1170 institution of military rule in Kory that had turned the Korean monarch into a mere puppet. Notwithstanding the many incursions across the northern border, the administrative reforms over the first century of the Kory dynasty in the tenth century had helped to establish firmly the principle of civilian rule. Hence the military officials gradually experienced a decline in authority over the next 150 years, even to the point of humiliating deference to their civilian counterparts. This, apparently, led to the military coup of 11
70, which purged top civilian officials and gave military officers power over not only the government but also the throne. By the turn of the thirteenth century, the Ch’oe family emerged to constitute a mini-dynasty of military strongmen, who ruled a land racked by bouts of unrest, including a large-scale slave rebellion at the beginning of the Ch’oe dictatorship. The devastating Mongol invasions, beginning in 1231, eventually led the House of Ch’oe to flee to the confines of Kanghwa Island, just to the south of the capital. There the Kory court under Ch’oe control successfully resisted final capitulation, even as the rest of the country suffered. The final Ch’oe generalissimo, however, was assassinated in 1261, and this opened the door for the court to enter negotiations of surrender. Given the continuing decimation of the countryside, including the destruction of countless cultural artifacts, the Kory monarchy had little choice but to accept Mongol overlordship. Despite the lingering resistance to the Mongols on Cheju Island off the southern coast, which was eventually put down, for all intents and purposes Korea was now part of the Mongol empire.
That Kory maintained a semblance of autonomy through the maintenance of its own monarchy and government might be considered a fortunate outcome of its defeat, given that the Mongols could have easily wiped out the entire leadership. But such autonomy was severely curtailed, as the Mongols dictated the general direction of the government. This was soon made apparent when the Korean state was forced to provide manpower and expertise for the next stage of Mongol expansion, into Japan, in 1274. Koreans, long known as master seafarers, built and guided the ships, which were loaded with thousands of soldiers from the joint Mongol-Korean forces. This armada twice attempted, and failed in, an invasion of Japan. The military organ devised to oversee these invasions, the Eastern Expedition Field Headquarters, remained intact even after its original purpose expired, serving as the institutional representative of Mongol domination in Korea. The nominal head of this institution was the Korean king, but in reality this and other powerful organs were controlled mostly by Mongol overseers whose interference in Korea was not limited to foreign relations and military matters, but extended to internal Korean affairs as well. The Mongols, in fact, established commanderies in various parts of Kory to reinforce their suzerainty, and this does not even count the northern quarter of Kory territory that now came under direct Mongol control.
Needless to say, politics in the Kory court often hinged on tendencies and sentiments regarding the Mongols, as the monarch himself politically—and in other ways as well—was severely weakened. The Mongols, in fact, dictated everything from the kings’ reign names, which humiliatingly bore the word “loyal” (“ch’ung”), to the clothing and even the consorts of Korean kings. The Mongol court also controlled who would be king, on several occasions returning a Kory monarch to the throne not long after deposing him. But on another level, these signs of subservience might have been moot, for within a few decades the Kory king himself was barely Korean. Under the arrangements of Korea’s surrender, the crown prince of the Kory royal house had to spend his childhood in the Yuan dynasty capital, where he would marry a Yuan princess, and then return to Korea when it was his turn on the throne. The first such monarch, King Ch’ungnyl, married a daughter of the third Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan (of Marco Polo fame), and hence thereafter all the Kory kings, except the last one, were direct descendants of Genghis Khan himself. One could argue that the Korean court had to submit in order to prevent mass slaughter and hence preserve Korean nationhood, or even in order to escape domination by Korean military officials. But one also has to wonder whether the Kory kings under Mongol rule held a meaningful identity as Koreans. Even the monarch credited with anti-Mongol policies in the mid-fourteenth century, King Kongmin—who, by twist of fate, was mostly Korean and served as the last of the Mongol-era kings—was married to a Mongol princess, whom he adored and famously mourned with obsession upon her passing.
This brings us to the greater implications of these circumstances, and here we must tread with some sensitivity. For not only was the Kory monarchy infused with Mongol ancestry, but intermarriage with the Mongols took place among other Korean groups as well, from the aristocracy down to the lowest status groups who had no choice on the matter. This accompanied the significant spread of Mongol influence in Korean culture in the fourteenth century, from language, food, hairstyles, and clothing to even family and marriage customs—to be expected, given the political and military domination under which the Koreans lived. Together, these two levels of Mongol influence led to what many Koreans today would consider embarrassing at best: a significant strain of
Mongol provenance in the Korean people and culture. DNA analysis, which strongly hints that central Asians share widespread common descent from Genghis Khan, would probably show not an insignificant number of Koreans today with the same ancestry. Such are the results, repeated thousands of times throughout world history, of conquest. We can imagine the often horrific circumstances under which such a mixture of peoples took place, and we can abhor, from the Korean perspective, the shameful consequences. Whether one condemns this particular episode in Korean history or examines it with scholarly detachment, however, it undoubtedly complicates any sacrosanct notion of Korean homogeneity.
If we can take a difficult step back from the horrors of war and forced subjugation to forge a longer-term perspective, we should also consider the salutary impact of Mongol domination on the history of the Kory dynasty and of Korea. Under the Mongol empire, Koreans had many more occasions to make their way to China as tributary officials, diplomats, scholars, traders, and others, and once in the Yuan dynasty capital (present-day Beijing), they encountered a teeming tapestry of peoples and cultures from throughout the vast Mongol empire. The exchange of books, ideas, and other artifacts of both high and low culture from these encounters integrated Koreans, for the first time in their history, into a truly global order. The Chinese civilization that Koreans had emulated always aspired to be universal, but in geographical scope and the willingness to embrace other cultures, it paled in comparison to the Mongol empire. And among the great influences that these cultural currents yielded was the introduction of both the cotton seed and Neo-Confucian philosophy to Korea. But this interaction drove the flow of influence in the opposite direction as well.
KORY WOMEN IN THE MONGOL EMPIRE
Among the most intriguing areas of Mongol influence in Kory lay in marriage and family customs, particularly as they affected women. Scholars have suggested, for example, that the practice of taking multiple wives, not uncommon in the late Kory aristocracy, might have expanded under Mongol rule. If so, such an influence presents an interesting comparison with native Korean customs characterized by a relatively high social and familial position of females. This is not to suggest that the Kory era featured something approaching equality between the sexes. It is now commonly accepted, however, that Korean women enjoyed far greater standing in marriage, inheritance, and social status in the Kory than in the succeeding Chosn era, especially in the latter Chosn period (Chapter 8).
Whatever benefits that Korean women might have enjoyed, the Mongol period reinforced the submissive standing of females through the demand for “tribute women” exacted upon the vanquished Kory. Government records indicate that, between 1275 and 1355, there were approximately fifty instances of the Kory court sending tribute women to the Mongol court, which took almost two hundred girls. But this is likely a gross under-estimation, for the officially recorded instances only counted the mostly aristocratic females sent to become concubines for the Mongol royalty and aristocracy, and did not include the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lower-status females sent under more wretched circumstances. Like the other major group of Kory people sent to China—those males bound to serve as eunuchs for the Yuan court—the Korean tribute women represented little more than human booty, in effect slaves handed over as a sign of tributary subordination. Out of these terrible conditions, however, a fraction of both the eunuchs and tribute women man
aged to ascend to the highest levels of court life in the Chinese capital. And among these examples, the most fascinating and powerful figure was Lady Ki.
Lady Ki, daughter of a lower-level official’s family, was sent, like many others of her status, as a tribute woman to the Mongol capital some time in the 1320s. Little is known about how she came to catch the emperor’s attention, but as noted in her biography in the official history of the Yuan dynasty, it is likely that her beauty and her talents in singing, dancing, and poetry were extraordinary. She was formally named an imperial concubine in 1333. The Mongol emperor, who as a boy had fallen victim to political strife and spent over a year in exile on an island off the west coast of Korea, might have had a favorable disposition to Koreans in the first place. And having developed an intense affection for Lady Ki, he treated her as the preferred companion over his queen, who in fact came from a family of political enemies. When he tried to promote Lady Ki to official status as the secondary consort (second wife), it aroused staunch political opposition because it digressed from the standard practice of taking imperial queens only from a certain Mongol clan. In 1339, after she gave birth to a son, who would later become the Yuan monarch, the emperor’s determination stiffened, and over weakening political opposition he had her crowned as the secondary imperial consort in 1340. In 1365, as the Yuan dynasty’s grip on China was dissolving, Empress Ki ascended to the position of primary imperial consort.