A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  Historical events and documentary evidence from the early Chosn dynasty bear witness to the fits and starts of this wide-ranging effort to implement Confucian family law throughout the realm. Work on producing a final version of the dynastic code, or Kyngguk taejn, which would serve as a kind of constitution for the remainder of the Chosn, in fact took seven decades following the establishment of the dynasty, with promulgation coming finally in the 1460s. But the dynastic code represented just the first step, and the greater challenge of Confucianization lay in getting the people, beginning with the aristocratic elite, to follow the code’s instructions in their own family practices. This is why documents such as the Yi family inheritance testament of 1541 are so illuminating, for they reflect the ongoing, though not always smooth, transition to a Confucian family system that would eventually transfer privileges—as well as responsibilities—exclusively and permanently to males.

  The Yi family inheritance document in fact suggests the resilience of older practices mixed with the demands of the new, even as late as the mid-sixteenth century. Strikingly, it shows a female, albeit a female aristocrat, holding considerable economic resources in her name and, apparently, at her disposal. This female, Lady Yi, would go down in history as the maternal grandmother of the great philosopher Yulgok, whose deeply affectionate biography of his grandmother provide all we know about her, aside from the information presented in the will. As to be expected for a local aristocrat, Lady Yi had impeccable family credentials, with both of her parents coming from prestigious lineages. She had grown up in Kangnng, on the east-central coast, and had wed a young man from Seoul with the surname of Sin (pronounced “sheen”). Following long-established native practices, after her wedding the couple lived initially in the wife’s natal home before, in accordance with Confucian teachings, moving to Seoul to be with the husband’s family. But she quickly returned to her natal home, with blessings from her husband and in-laws, to care for her aging parents. She and her husband lived apart like this, interspersed with frequent visits, for over a dozen years. In Kangnng she raised their five children, all daughters, including the second daughter, Sin Saimdang, who would become the mother of Yulgok.

  The 1541 inheritance testament, however—drafted nearly thirty years, as it turned out, before Lady Yi’s death—provided no special consideration for Sin Saimdang. In accordance with a long-held custom, Lady Yi’s substantial estate of 173 slaves was divided more or less equally among her five daughters, with the inheritances ranging from twenty nine to thirty five slaves each. The document meticulously notes the name, age, gender, family relationship, and current residence of each of the slaves, who were scattered throughout the country except for the northwest and southeast regions. While this shows a continuation of native inheritance practices that divided estates equally among children regardless of gender or order, the Confucian demands made their presence felt in the special designation of the “ritual heir,” the descendant responsible for leading the ancestral rites. The extant inheritance documents from the early Chosn show a gradually increasing appearance of this provision until it became standard practice by the late sixteenth century. Here the Yi family will is especially instructive, for, in the absence of any sons, the person designated to lead the ancestral ceremonies was none other than a five-year-old grandson, Yulgok, who was given land and five slaves to provide the financial wherewithal to sustain this task indefinitely. One presumes that, had Lady Yi died soon after this document was drafted, either this boy’s father or an uncle would have temporarily taken responsibility, but this provision is still notable on two levels: first, that it was the third son of the second daughter who was chosen, suggesting that this boy, Yulgok—who later, as a thirteen-year-old, would pass the introductory level state civil service examination, in first place (!)—was already demonstrating his precociousness; and second, that no daughter, despite receiving a substantial inheritance, could be deemed fit to lead the sacrificial rites, suggesting strongly that some legal and, by now, customary restrictions on females were taking hold.

  In the late Chosn dynasty, this trend would become even more restrictive, with far greater social consequences. By the eighteenth century, the increasing centrality of the ancestor rites in the Confucian lineage system standardized the practice of primogeniture, or preference for the oldest son, not only in selecting a ritual heir, but, due to the cost of such a responsibility, in inheritance practices as well. Daughters and even younger sons received far less, if anything, and when it came to the children of concubines, the exclusion was complete. Indeed, when families in the late Chosn era encountered a similar situation as that of Lady Yi in 1541—that is, lacking a (non-concubine’s) son—the prevailing practice was to adopt a nephew, however distant, from the same lineage, to act as both the ritual and family heir. Customs like primogeniture that later developed out of the Confucian family system hence eventually weakened the standing of women in many ways. They left women mostly with few possessions and hence little economic independence, in stark contrast to Lady Yi. They diminished women’s ritual and lineage roles. And they stigmatized the descendants of secondary wives, whose status as concubines reinforced the centrality of sexual exploitation in the social hierarchy.

  It is no wonder, then, that contemporary women in South Korea look back on the early Chosn with deep regret about what might have been—that is, without the incorporation of Confucian family practices. In modern terms, as noted above, the Yi family inheritance document and other evidence suggest strongly that pre-Chosn Korea was relatively “advanced” in the social and familial standing of females. Without Confucianization, so the thinking goes, the country might have taken a more enlightened historical path. The sixteenth century, more specifically, is fascinating in this regard, for it could have represented the last gasp of relatively high female standing before the momentum of state instructions would overwhelm it. At the court, for example, for two decades in the early sixteenth century, practical power was wielded substantially by two women: the first was the mother of a young king who acted as his regent, and the second was her niece, who had begun her life as a slave and ascended to a position in the court that allowed her to push for greater social opportunity for the lower classes. And in literary circles, two other women, H Nansrhn and Hwang Chini, appeared far more accomplished than even Sin Saimdang.

  Given this, one could suggest that Lady Sin might not have been the Bank of Korea’s best choice even from her own historical period. In any case, one can understand the disappointment expressed by women’s organizations over the selection of Lady Sin, long celebrated for her supposed dedication to Confucian family values in her role as a daughter, wife, and mother. Critics of this choice suggested that Lady Sin’s claim to fame was based not on her artistic talents, however admirable they might have been, but rather on the fact that she raised a celebrated scholar and statesman who, along with his admirers, placed Lady Sin on an undeserved pedestal. Lady Sin, in other words, was seen as a paragon of traditional (male) Confucian—not modern—virtue, and hence her selection was considered somewhat patronizing. Tellingly, before the selection South Korean women’s organizations and feminist groups had put forward another female, Yu Kwansun, as their preferred candidate for the new currency. As a cultivated teenage girl armed with modern schooling, Yu had been martyred while rallying her home town’s residents to participate in the independence movement of 1919 against Japanese colonial rule. Within the overarching, persistent framework of nationalism and modernity, then, Sin Saimdang serves as another symbolic object of contestation over the place of tradition, especially the Confucian heritage, in contemporary Korean identity. But all four historical figures, including Sin Saimdang, who are now celebrated on the South Korean bills hail from the first two centuries of the Chosn dynasty. This suggests strongly, then, that the early Chosn era continues to hold a commanding significance in Korean history.

  9

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  The Great Invasions, 1592–1636<
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  CHRONOLOGY

  1590 Dispatch of Korean diplomatic mission to Japan to gage Japanese leader’s intentions

  1592 Japanese invasion of Korea; Chinese entrance into the war in Korea’s defense

  1597 Second Japanese invasion

  1598 Retreat of the Japanese; end of the war

  1601 Establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan

  1623 Overthrow of the Korean king by pro-Chinese monarch

  1627 First Manchu invasion of Korea

  1636 Second Manchu invasion

  1644 Manchu conquest of China

  THE RETURN TO DUTY OF ADMIRAL YI SUNSIN, 1597

  Though little known outside of Asia, the East Asian war of 1592–8 stands as one of the major events in world history. For the first time since the aborted Mongol invasions of Japan in the thirteenth century, the major civilizations of East Asia became embroiled in a single conflict, with consequences that would far exceed any other in this region’s history until the late nineteenth century, perhaps indeed until the Pacific War of 1937–45. Begun through the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 in a bid to conquer Ming dynasty China itself, this war, fought exclusively in Korea, brought together all three countries in a fierce seven-year period of conflict. The destruction was enormous—to the Chinese who sent huge armies in Korea’s defense, and even to the Japanese. In Korea, the

  scale of the devastation can scarcely be imagined: hundreds of thousands killed, millions injured or uprooted, and a poisoning of relations with Japan that would never disappear.

  That Korea survived this onslaught is itself a miracle. The most common Korean perspective relates that the country was rescued by its greatest military hero, Admiral Yi Sunsin, who helped staunch the destruction in 1592 by leading the Korean naval forces to key victories over their Japanese counterparts. Not long after his heroics, however, Admiral Yi found himself in a Seoul jail, awaiting judgment on charges of treason and incompetence. When, after four years of stalemate, peace talks collapsed and the Japanese sent another invasion force in 1597, Admiral Yi was freed and ordered back to the Korean coast to coordinate his command with the Chinese allies. This helped bring the conflict to an end in 1598. But the significance of this conflagration, albeit different in each country, would extend both geographically and temporally thereafter. It may have even paved the way a few years later for the rise of the Manchus, who also launched destructive invasions of Korea. For the Koreans, these wars exposed grave problems in the Chosn polity, but they eventually provided also an opportunity for sharpening their national identity and reassessing their civilizational standing in the northeast Asian region.

  PROBLEMS IN THE KOREAN RESPONSE

  Although some Korean officials had suspected trouble brewing in Japan and even anticipated a conflict, the utter scale and catastrophic force of the Japanese assault in the spring of 1592 came as a shock: a landing force of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of soldiers. The county officials of Tongnae, now part of the city of Pusan in the southeastern corner of the peninsula, managed to send messengers immediately on horseback to Seoul before the siege overwhelmed the Tongnae fortress. But the samurai soldiers, taking two invasion routes northward, tore through the country so quickly that within two weeks they were at the gates of the capital. After much hand-wringing with every report of the collapse of the country’s defenses, the Korean monarch, King Snjo, took the advice of his ministers urging him to abandon Seoul and flee northward. Along his path of evacuation, common Koreans, who enjoyed no such option, pleaded with him not to forsake his duties of protecting the capital, but clearly any attempt to withstand the barrage would have proved suicidal.

  With the failure of its land defenses, the Korean court had to turn to its formidable navy, sending the two naval commanders for the southernmost provinces, Wn Kyun and Yi Sunsin, to engage the Japanese within a few days of the invasion. Admiral Yi Sunsin, in particular, enjoyed tremendous successes in these battles, destroying much of the Japanese fleet and thereby managing successfully to cut off Japanese supply lines along the coast. He is credited in particular with skillful deployment of smaller, highly maneuverable attack ships, including the famed “turtle boats” that were protected by a spiked armored shell. These breakthroughs proved sufficient to hold off the invaders until the Ming dynasty forces, sent by the Chinese emperor at the request of the Korean monarch, arrived to halt the Japanese advance in the decisive Battle of Pyongyang. The combined Korean–Chinese army pushed the invaders gradually southward, and as the Japanese retreated to fortresses along the southern end of the peninsula, negotiations began for a peace settlement.

  Meanwhile, in spite of the recognition of his heroics accorded him by the court, Admiral Yi found himself embroiled in the factional struggles among high officials over responsibility for the stunning failure to prepare for, then counter, the invasion. Factionalism, a form of party politics, had evolved from the early-Chosn ideological conflicts among the throne and high officials (Chapter 7) to a system, ironically institutionalized in King Snjo’s reign, of hereditary political affiliation. Perspectives on Chosn dynasty factionalism have varied widely among historians, while the Japanese who colonized Korea in the early twentieth century cited factionalism as another example of the debilitating Korean political system.

  Regardless of its ultimate significance in explaining Chosn dynasty politics as a whole, factionalism did play a central role in this period of major invasions from 1592 to 1637, as partisan disputes became entangled in formulating the court’s responses. One key example of this phenomenon came in the two years preceding the Japanese attack, when the Korean monarch sent a diplomatic mission to Japan to gage the intent of Toyotomi Hideyoshi,

  the Japanese leader who would later launch the invasions. The embassy’s report to King Snjo showed a division among its top two officials, members of rival factions. In implementing a response, one official’s warnings of an imminent Japanese invasion lost out to the reassurances of peace by the second official, whose faction enjoyed the upper hand in court. The court’s fateful decision not to mobilize the country in preparation for war proved disastrous. And, once again, partisan politics inserted itself into the government’s handling of crisis amidst the Japanese war, as Admiral Wn Kyun, who, in contrast to Yi Sunsin, had largely failed in his efforts to defeat the enemy at sea, blamed Yi for not carrying out orders to support him. As a stalemate in the war ensued, Wn’s factional ties to those in power in Seoul produced the amazing scene of Admiral Yi’s becoming incarcerated for insubordination and incompetence, and indeed of even being sentenced to death. The scramble to save his life by a few top officials was enough to prolong the stay of execution until the second Japanese invasion of 1597, which highlighted the folly of locking up Admiral Yi. Freed from prison and reinstated to his command, he immediately turned his attention to the southern coast. Alas, his leadership appears to have been critical to the conclusion of the war in 1598, as the joint Ming-Chosn forces, buoyed by news that Hideyoshi had died, chased the remaining Japanese soldiers off the peninsula—though not before a stray bullet killed Admiral Yi.

  NARRATIVES OF HEROISM

  Admiral Yi’s death in a blaze of glory has served as the integral conclusion to the great narrative of heroism centered on this figure, whose feats of bravery and skill in the face of impossible odds are commonly recounted by Korean schoolchildren. By all viable historical accounts, Yi Sunsin was indeed an accomplished soldier, gifted strategist, and charismatic commander. From a prominent aristocratic family that had produced mostly civilian officials, he chose another path in his youth and, after passing the military examination with honors, soon ascended the ranks of the military officialdom. As naval commander of Chlla province, he stood as one of the few officials who foresaw the danger from Japan, and his preparations appear to have served him well once he engaged in battle, as chronicled in his diary-like official reports to the court. These sources, as well as other eyewitness accounts and government records, all poi
nt to Yi’s great deeds. But perhaps the source that contributed most to the mythologizing of Yi Sunsin as Korea’s greatest war hero was the Book of Corrections (Chingbirok), written by Yi’s staunchest supporter in the upper echelons of government officialdom, Yu Sngnyong. Yu had acted as one of Yi’s early patrons before the outbreak of war, and the Book of Corrections, in reference to the lessons that must be learned from the country’s failures in the Japanese invasion, likened Yi to a great spiritual force who almost single-handedly saved Korea. And Yi’s stoic righteousness in the face of factional injustice only heightened the impression of his purity.

  In the modern era, another source of heroism has gained prominence in the conventional perspective on the Japanese war: the “Righteous Army” guerilla bands mobilized throughout the country to attack the invaders and obstruct the Japanese lines of communication and supplies. In the North Korean account of this war, for example, it is the Righteous Armies, representing the mass of the common, downtrodden people, who came to the rescue when the upper classes, including the monarchy, utterly failed to protect the nation. Such a populist perspective has become more accepted in South Korea as well, but, as scholars have pointed out, these bands, for all their effectiveness, appear to have been led by local aristocrats and thus replicated the hierarchies of society at large. To what extent these militias played a decisive role in the war’s outcome remains a point of contention. But regardless of the precise impact of these guerilla units, it seems fitting—given who suffered the brunt of the Japanese invasions—that they would be featured prominently in the national memory of the war. Indeed, their deeds lingered in the popular imagination thereafter, as seen in the reprisal of the “Righteous Army” moniker for ragtag militias that formed in the early twentieth century to resist, once again, the Japanese. In this sense, the prominence of the Righteous Armies