The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

by Samuel Hawley

  During the middle years of the Ming dynasty China did enjoy a prolonged period of stability. But it did not last. There were inherent weaknesses in the system, as established by the Hongwu emperor and altered by subsequent generations of bureaucrats, that made the empire increasingly difficult to govern and increasingly vulnerable to external threats.

  First there was the problem of money, or more precisely the lack of it. The Hongwu emperor’s insistence on frugality, low taxes, and self-sufficiency had worked well enough during his own reign, for he kept his palace expenses low and ensured that his nascent empire was managed with minimum expense by taking a personal—and if necessary heavy-handed—interest in the affairs of government. Unfortunately, the notion of imperial frugality did not long outlive him. Palace expenditure steadily increased with each subsequent monarch and became a serious drain on the national purse. The collection of taxes also became a haphazard affair. Tax quotas became hopelessly out of date; units of measure varied from region to region, causing endless confusion; most taxpayers were illiterate and did not fully understand what was expected of them; others simply did not pay, their debts eventually being written off for want of a means to collect them. The taxes actually received by the government, therefore, never came close to even the modest levels established by the Hongwu emperor.

  The Hongwu emperor’s vision of a self-sufficient government bureaucracy also proved problematic. He pegged government salaries so low that officials could scarcely afford to feed themselves and their families, let alone run government offices and regional administrations. Most had no recourse but to charge “fees” for the services they provided, a practice that further ate into government revenues and inevitably led to abuses.

  Lack of money was not the only of the Ming dynasty’s troubles. Equally serious were the inefficiency and at times incompetence of its leaders. Since a man’s ability to enter government service depended entirely on his command of the classics, and his success in rising to power depended entirely upon his personal virtue, government officials not surprisingly possessed little of what would be regarded today as administrative ability or technical expertise. To China’s sixteenth-century Neo-Confucian elite, personal virtue was administrative ability, for a man so equipped could accomplish anything. This sense of confidence not infrequently moved public-spirited officials to take on tasks for which they were singularly unsuited, including the planning of military campaigns and even the direct command of armies, secure in the belief that their lack of practical experience was more than made up for by their knowledge of the classics. In many situations it was a recipe for mismanagement, even disaster.

  This emphasis on personal virtue not only left China’s leadership ill-equipped to deal with situations requiring technical solutions or specialized knowledge, it also led it into all sorts of divisive wranglings that rendered it all the more ineffective. The fundamental reason for this was that there was no one standard for what constituted “personal virtue.” A case in point is the collection of “fees” that most government bureaucrats had to engage in to survive. Strictly speaking this was corruption, but it was such a necessary part of the system that most preferred not to examine the issue too closely. A few rare officials were scrupulous in refusing any sort of additional payment for their services, and lived in abject poverty; others took full advantage of their positions, and amassed incredible fortunes, while the vast majority fell somewhere in between. So where should the line be drawn? As Ray Huang has aptly described it, “Should a county magistrate, who by official order was entitled to an annual compensation of less than thirty ounces of silver, still be considered honest if he helped himself to 300 ounces, but not if he took 3,000? If he appropriated 5 percent of the district’s gross tax proceeds, or 10 percent? At what point was honesty defined?”[30]

  Of course it could not be defined. But that did not prevent Ming government officials from trying to do so. There was in fact a branch of government, the censorate, whose sole purpose was to monitor the conduct of government officials, from the lowest ninth-grade newcomer all the way up to the emperor himself. These censors were a fierce and at times dangerous lot. They wore badges on their chests featuring a hsieh-chih, a legendary beast that reputedly sniffed out men of immoral character and tore them to pieces—exactly what a censor could do to a government official’s career if his virtue was found wanting. Every Ming official was subjected to the regular scrutiny of these morality police—every three years for regional officials and every six for those posted in the capital—and faced immediate demotion or discharge if even the slightest hint of misconduct was unearthed. During the first part of the dynasty these evaluations were particularly brutal, for the number of individuals passing the civil service exam and entering government service exceeded the number of retirees, necessitating large-scale dismissals to avoid overstaffing. It was only natural in the face of such a threat that civil servants began to band together into cliques, junior officials aligning with influential seniors for protection, senior officials in turn gathering a loyal following of juniors to help fend off or launch any political attack.

  By the middle of the sixteenth century this process of alignment had resulted in clearly defined factions. Attempting to remain above the fray simply left one without any support, an easy target to be run out of office by one of the competing camps so that your post could be handed to one of their own. It was therefore expedient to choose sides. Government officials still spoke in the same pious terms of virtue and impropriety. The high-minded accusations of profiteering and indiscretion continued: charges that this man was getting rich from the public purse, that that man had not observed the correct mourning period for his deceased parent, and that another had had an indiscreet liaison with someone else’s wife. But the words now concealed a deeper and more damaging struggle—a struggle for power.

  In addition to having an incurable case of financial anemia and a government divided by factional strife, Ming China was also faced with the increasingly worrisome fact of its own declining military strength. It was once again a problem with roots reaching back to the dynasty’s beginning. To extend his ideal of self-sufficiency to this traditional drain on the imperial purse, the Hongwu emperor had established garrisons (wei) at strategic points throughout the empire, allotting each a tract of government land upon which the soldiers were to grow their own food and provide for their own maintenance. These wei garrisons, with a nominal strength of 5,600 men, were subdivided into 1,120-man companies called so; hence this Ming military organization is often termed the “wei-so army.”[31] This notion of a self-sufficient military that could switch as needed from peacetime pursuits to a wartime footing had worked well for the Mongols in the preceding Yuan dynasty, the transition from nomadic horseman to warrior having come naturally to those foreign invaders. It did not work, however, for the Ming. Its domesticated army became just that, domesticated—farming communities where military discipline was forgotten and the arts of war seldom practiced. They were never fully self-sufficient either, but came over the years to require more and more government support, first in the form of grain shipments, for the soldiers were unable to grow enough for themselves, and later, when grain became scarce, in silver.[32] Eventually even this was not enough to keep the soldiers from starving. They rarely received the entire sum they were due, and corrupt officers frequently withheld the rest. It therefore became common for men to bribe their officers to allow them to leave the garrison to engage in outside work, often never to return. This practice, coupled with unrecorded deaths and desertions, had drastically reduced the actual size of China’s wei-so army by the mid sixteenth century, even as the cost of its upkeep was spiraling ever higher. It has been estimated that in some extreme cases garrisons were reduced to only two or three percent of their nominal strength.[33]

  There was no official record kept in Beijing of these dwindling numbers. Garrison commanders were not in the habit of submitting accurate figures; many did not even know how many
men were under their command. Most were happy to leave inflated figures on the books, for this ensured that inflated amounts of financial support continued to flow into the garrison’s coffers, of which the commanders themselves often claimed the lion’s share. Throughout the Ming dynasty the Board of War therefore simply copied the names of soldiers and commanders from old lists to new and sent these on to the emperor, leading him to believe that he still had a force of two million men under his command.

  All but the most obtuse officials must have known, however, that the true figure was much lower, for there was ample secondary evidence of the military’s drastic decline. In the 1550s, for example, Mongol raiders under Altan Khan were easily able to penetrate China’s supposedly well-guarded northern frontier to haul off whatever prisoners and loot that they wanted. When they began pillaging in the vicinity of Beijing itself, the Board of War had great difficulty mustering just 50,000 men from garrisons near and far to repulse them, this despite the fact that there were supposed to be more than 107,000 soldiers stationed right there in the city. By the early 1570s there were in fact so few soldiers left cultivating garrison farms along the northern border that vast stretches of territory had reportedly turned to desert, even though the military rosters in Beijing still listed tens of thousands of troops stationed in the region.

  As the number of soldiers in China’s standing army dwindled, so too did their quality. Relying increasingly on local conscripts, press-ganged vagabonds, and hired mercenaries to fill the gaping holes in the wei-so ranks, the Ming army by the mid sixteenth century had become, in the words of the Minister of War, “an undisciplined mob.”[34] In the face of battle it was often only the threat of instant death at the hands of their own officers that kept Chinese soldiers from fleeing; sometimes even this was not enough. They were a terror to friendly populations, stealing and looting with such abandon that locals at times regarded them with greater fear than any “enemy” they had been sent to quell. “This is their nature,” wrote the Minister of War in 1562, “swinish greed and wolflike brutality. They practice extortion and robbery in broad daylight; by night they pollute the women. Should anyone resist, then out comes the sword and that person’s dead; they don’t give murder another thought! Hence the proverb says, ‘Cross, if you must, a Japanese bandit’s path, but never a garrison soldier’s.’ Run into a Japanese, and there’s still a chance you’ll get away. But meet a soldier, and you’re done for.”[35] Another official, who generously placed the army’s total strength in the 1550s at around 900,000 men, cautioned that fully two-thirds of them were of no use whatsoever, but rather “burden the country and are the source of many troubles. They start riots and try to revolt whenever the authorities are slow in paying them. They have even dared to kill government officials and rob and burn the houses of the people.... Nowadays much of our revenue is spent on the maintenance of these soldiers who are not only useless but are a cause of endless anxiety to the country.”[36]

  This breakdown in discipline reached a climax in March of 1592, when troops along the northwestern frontier mutinied over pay arrearages. They murdered the provincial governor, forced their commander in chief to commit suicide, and installed one of their own as leader. It took the shaken Ming court seven months to put down this mutiny, which they subsequently dressed up as a campaign against Mongol rebels rather than an internal insurrection by their own army.

  As bad as the soldiers in China’s armies could be, the officers could be worse. In Neo-Confucian Ming China, military leadership was a low-prestige career, which was commonly passed down from father to son. Officers were regarded by government officials as mere technical support staff and were treated accordingly. Even the highest-ranking and most experienced commanders were allowed no say in larger strategic matters, and could expect every decision they made in the field to be scrutinized and questioned by officials in Beijing, men who had never held a sword, witnessed a battle, or spent a night in a tent. To the Ming there was nothing odd about this, for by their reckoning no amount of practical experience could equal the wisdom of an official with a classical Confucian education. In the face of such disdain, military leaders themselves tended to treat their profession with a similar disregard. Hereditary ranks became family sinecures, a source of financial support to be worked like a business. Others simply bought commissions and got rich by misreporting garrison numbers to keep the grain and silver shipments coming and by expropriating salary payments from their men. Many officers were illiterate or semi-literate, had little knowledge of military tactics or leadership, and made little effort to learn. They neglected the training and discipline of the men under their command, putting them to work instead as laborers and personal servants and allowing many to slip away entirely in return for a bribe. When ordered against a foe, their primary concern often was not to win a legitimate victory, but rather to concoct the appearance of a victory to garner honors and rewards and to further their careers.

  It was in the practice of taking heads that this degradation of both soldiers and officers reached its lowest point. In Ming China fighting prowess came to be quantified by the number of enemy heads taken in battle, with rewards and honors distributed accordingly. This practice led to horrendous abuses. In quelling the many border incursions and internal revolts that came increasingly to plague China in the sixteenth century, soldiers killed innocent civilians and beheaded them for the reward—even the women, whose sex could be disguised by beating the head with a wet sandal. In campaigns against the broad-faced, small-mouthed Manchus, the heads of friendly Chinese noncombatants were lopped off and steamed to make them swell up to an appropriate size. Commanders were known to cut off the heads of their own fallen soldiers in order to turn a defeat into a victory. Some officers who came away from an engagement short of the 160 heads required for the award of first-class merit would kill civilians to make up the number. Rebel forces, meanwhile, picked up on this Chinese lust for heads and turned it to their advantage, driving local villagers in front of them at the scenes of battle, knowing this would satisfy the Ming forces and spare their own ranks. In this manner victory upon victory was reported to the government in Beijing as internal rebellions and border incursions continued unabated.[37]

  The general weakness of China’s military was brought into sharp focus by the pirate raids that devastated the nation’s rich east and south coast regions for a period of twenty years beginning in the 1540s. These pirates, an on-again, off-again problem in both Korea and China since the fourteenth century, were traditionally regarded in both countries as being from Japan, and thus were called wokou, “Japanese raiders”—waegu to the Koreans, wako to the Japanese. The marauders active in the mid sixteenth century were in fact mainly Chinese with some Japanese and a few Portuguese adventurers mixed in, many of them operating out of bases on the Japanese island of Kyushu. They had turned to a life of brigandage in response to the strict prohibition on foreign trade that the Ming government had imposed after the relatively relaxed policies favored in the dynasty’s earlier years. This naturally led to smuggling, an initially benign activity pursued by otherwise law-abiding citizens who became increasingly defiant as government attempts to clamp down on the problem drove the more determined smugglers to band together and take up arms. Branded now as outlaws and with nothing left to lose, such men started to live the outlaw’s life, raiding and pillaging coastal towns and taking whatever they liked. It was easy work. Finding the coastal regions of the supposedly invincible Middle Kingdom almost entirely unprotected by either army garrisons or naval ships, the wokou fearlessly began to pick vast stretches of territory clean, sometimes in raids so large they resembled invasions. It was in the small raids, however, that piratical brazenness reached its peak. In one extraordinary episode that occurred in the autumn of 1555, a small band of renegades landed on the southeast coast aboard one or two ships and embarked on an inland rampage all around the former capital city of Nanjing, looting every town along the way without encountering any opposition
from the 120,000 soldiers that the Board of War’s outdated troop rosters still claimed were garrisoned nearby. “Finally,” concludes the official account of the affair in the Ming dynasty annals Ming shih, “they were caught up at Yang-lin-ch’aio and exterminated. Throughout this episode there were only sixty to seventy persons, yet a distance of several thousand li was covered, the casualties totaled almost four thousand killed and wounded, and the raiding lasted more than eighty days.”[38]

  The Ming government initially tried to bring the wokou under control by military means, launching a campaign of “extermination” against them rather than a campaign of “pacification” through appeasement, the method it commonly employed on its northern frontier to co-opt external threats like the Mongols under Altan Khan. The pirates, after all, were operating in the heartland of China, not on the vulnerable northern border, where potential enemies had to be handled with care. They thus did not require pacifying; they required wiping out. The army commander and civilian governor in charge of the most badly affected areas were accordingly arrested and executed for dereliction of duty, inefficient regional administrations were bullied into shape, defunct military garrisons were roused to life, and eventually some telling blows were delivered against the pirates. It was not this, however, that ultimately solved the wokou problem. That would come later, in the late 1560s, when Beijing eased the restrictions on foreign trade that had given rise to the problem in the first place. It was an effective solution; by the end of the decade pirate raids had for the most part ceased. But it was also a sign of weakness, an instance where Beijing was forced to employ a policy of pacification through appeasement after finding itself unable to overcome the pirate problem solely by military means.[39]