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

by Samuel Hawley

  This, then, was Ming China in the late sixteenth century. It was huge and rich and awesome, and commanded the nominal allegiance of many far-flung lands. Beneath this veneer of omnipotence, however, lay a host of weaknesses—political, economic, and military—that in turn gave rise to a never-ending succession of crises. For officials in Beijing, the act of governing entailed keeping the empire functioning and in one piece, putting out a fire here, papering over a problem there, then racing on to the next crisis that had in the meantime arisen. If it was not wokou pirate depredations in the southeast, it was Mongol raids in the north, an army mutiny on the Manchurian frontier, clashes on the Burmese border, a famine in the west—a crisis almost every year from the 1570s until the 1610s.[40] Beset by this cavalcade of threats, the Ming government became like the man in the circus who spins plates atop rods, immersed in the task of simply keeping the whole precarious setup from tumbling to the floor. Given the state of China in the late sixteenth century and the resources available to it, this was the best that it could possibly do.

  It was in part glimpses of this weakness that led Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the unifier and self-appointed lord of Japan, to believe starting in the late 1580s that he could topple the Ming dynasty, conquer all of China, and then lay claim to its tributary states. Nor was he the only one entertaining such grand ideas. Spaniards and Portuguese residing in the Far East at this time, in Macao, the Philippines, Japan, and China itself, were eyeing the Middle Kingdom greedily as an incredibly rich but weak prize that was ripe for the picking. In 1576, for example, Francisco de Sande, the governor of Spain’s recently acquired colony in the Philippines, sent a report home to Madrid from Manila recommending that King Philip II dispatch a military expedition to conquer China. The job could be accomplished, de Sande suggested, by four to six thousand well-armed Spaniards plus some Japanese and Chinese pirates who would gladly join the enterprise. They would sail to the southern Chinese coast from northern Luzon aboard a fleet of galleys built locally using the trees that grew so plentifully on the island. Once there a force of two or three thousand men would storm ashore and seize one Chinese province. “This will be very easy,” de Sande assured the king, for the people “generally have no weapons, nor do they use any. A corsair with two hundred men could rob a large town of thirty thousand inhabitants. They are very poor marksmen, and their arquebuses are worthless.” After that all the other provinces would naturally fall to the invaders, for the Chinese were a downtrodden people and would take the opportunity of the Spanish conquest to revolt against the Ming. “[F]inally,” de Sande concluded, “the kind treatment, the evidences of power, and the religion which we shall show to them will hold them firmly to us.”[41]

  Approval of de Sande’s scheme was not forthcoming from Madrid, so nothing more was done for the next ten years. Then, in April 1586, a second plan for the conquest of China, this one much more detailed and larger in scope, was presented at a meeting of colonial authorities and leading citizens in Manila and then sent to Madrid for the approval of King Philip II. This time the envisioned expeditionary force would be composed of several hundred Spaniards currently residing in the Philippines, 10,000 or 12,000 reinforcements sent out from Spain, and if possible 5,000 or 6,000 local Indians and an equal number of Japanese recruited by Jesuit missionaries in Japan—between 20,000 and 25,000 men all told. It was additionally suggested that the Portuguese be invited into the enterprise to make the invasion force even more overwhelming, so that its “mere presence and a demonstration will suffice to cause the Chinese to submit, with no great bloodshed.” Great care should be taken in selecting the men to lead the expedition, “for it is very probable—nay, almost certain—that if this be not done, things will fare just as they did in the island of Cuba, and in other countries [i.e., the Aztec and Inca empires] that were once thickly peopled and are now deserted. If the Spaniards go into China in their usual fashion, they will desolate and ravage the most populous and richest country that ever was seen.” The invasion plan called for Spanish forces to sail north to the Chinese coast from a staging area on northern Luzon aboard a fleet of ships built locally by natives working under the direction of Spanish shipwrights. They would land at Fujian Province while the Portuguese thrust simultaneously into Guangdong Province from their colony at Macao. The two armies, accompanied by China-based Jesuit priests serving as guides, would then independently slash their way north to Beijing and there establish themselves in ultimate authority, being careful to leave the existing Ming government apparatus in place because it was so effective at maintaining order among such a huge population. As for timing, the memorandum strongly advised that the invasion be launched as soon as possible or not at all, for the Chinese were becoming increasingly wary. A few years before, presumably when de Sande submitted his proposal, their vast country could have been snatched “with no labor, cost, or loss of life; today it cannot be done without some loss, and in a short time it will be impossible to do at any cost.” It was therefore essential that the king give his immediate approval to the plan, for it “offered to his Majesty the greatest occasion and the grandest beginning that ever in the world was offered to a Monarch. Here lies before him all that the human mind can desire or comprehend of riches and eternal fame.”[42]

  Philip II never did approve the planned conquest of China. Had he done so and sent the requested reinforcements, the conquistadors of Manila would almost certainly have set sail, for they were completely serious in their intent and possessed the same extraordinary bravado that had already seen fellow Spaniards seize vast chunks of the New World with astonishingly small armies. Francisco Pizarro, for example, began the conquest of the Inca empire in the 1530s with as many men as would fill two highway buses. Who knows how far such boundless confidence and 25,000 men would have taken the Spanish in China? Considering the amount of time that China’s ponderous military administration typically needed to rouse itself and respond to a threat, it is conceivable that a Spanish army, equipped with modern arquebuses and acting with decision, could have marched to the very gates of Beijing before being finally bogged down and overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the land.

  * * *

  In 1573 a ten-year-old boy named Zhu Yijun ascended the Celestial Throne in Beijing and took the reign name Wanli. He was the fourteenth Ming emperor in a line extending back two hundred years to the dynasty’s despotic founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu emperor. Zhu Yijun would go on to become the longest-reigning of these fourteen, occupying the throne until his death in 1620 and thus presiding over China during the years marking the Ming dynasty’s final slide into morbidity, where its ultimate demise—in 1644 as it would turn out—was only a matter of time.

  The young emperor’s court officials must at first have regarded him with a certain measure of foreboding, for his recent progenitors were less than perfect monarchs. His granduncle, the fox-faced Zhengde emperor (reigned 1506–1521), had been much too energetic and independent for what by then had become a highly stylized and tradition-bound monarchy. He played games, drank, galloped about on horseback, refused sedan chairs and walked, left the confines of the Forbidden City, ignored protocol, and in general kept his officials in a constant state of apprehension. The Wanli emperor’s grandfather, the Jiajing emperor, became intolerant of criticism and increasingly distracted from his royal duties during his long reign (1522–1566), surrounding himself with toadies and yes-men as he searched for an elixir to prolong his life. The Wanli emperor’s father, the Longqing emperor (1567–1572), would not or could not even make the prescribed utterances during court audiences. For the first year of his reign he just sat on the throne like a statue while his secretaries spoke for him. After that even these appearances were cancelled.

  It was thus with great joy and relief that the young Wanli emperor’s courtiers came to perceive in him the makings of a great monarch. He took to his lessons in calligraphy, history, and the classics with delightful precocity and obediently tried to embody all the virtues as they w
ere explained to him. In one particularly promising episode the eleven-year-old boy-emperor composed and wrote in a remarkably steady hand “Present Me to Goodness and Purify Me.”[43] Yes, here was the makings of a virtuous and benevolent sovereign, just the sort of sage-king Ming China needed to restore its flagging fortunes.

  During his childhood years the Wanli emperor was allowed to perform only a few simple royal functions. Until he came of age, Senior Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng—“Tutor Zhang” to the young emperor—held the actual reigns of power. Zhang ran a tight ship. He did not countenance the overspending and ponderous inefficiency that had become the accepted norm in China. He cut palace expenditures on food and clothing and decorations, cancelled extravagant court functions, and took great pains to teach the young Wanli emperor to be frugal. He insisted that all taxes be collected, with no excuses, and with the resulting proceeds refilled government granaries and coffers. He dismissed officials suspected of profiteering, replaced inefficient governors and ministers with innovative newcomers, and expected every member of the government to lead the sort of austere lifestyle that their Confucian ideals demanded.

  Zhang also tried to do something about the woeful state of the military. Knowing that the army’s decline was due in part to the low caliber of its officer corps, he promoted capable, well-educated men to high command, and gave them the autonomy they needed to achieve results.

  One such man was Qi Jiguang, probably the most successful general in the entire Ming dynasty. Qi was born into a hereditary military family in 1528. He was given a well-rounded education for the times, covering both the classics and the military arts, and inherited the rank of assistant commander upon his father’s death in 1544. Qi was an intelligent and able officer and was soon given important commands, most notably in the eastern and southern coastal regions then being devastated by wokou pirate raids.

  It was in his campaigns against these marauders that Qi Jiguang began to form his ideas on how to mold an untrained, undisciplined rabble into an effective fighting force. His reforms would never affect the entire Ming military; only top officials wielded that sort of overriding influence. What Qi was allowed to do was to recruit and train essentially his own personal army, a crack expeditionary force that the court could dispatch to wherever it was needed. To build this force Qi relied first upon discipline—iron discipline. He made numerous offenses punishable by having one’s ears cut off, while disobedience or cowardice in battle were met with instant death. Training was equally essential, for as Qi astutely observed, even experienced soldiers rarely are able to put more than twenty percent of their fighting skill to use in the confusion of battle, while those who could utilize fifty percent “would have no rival.”[44]

  Qi also devised battle tactics that were cautious, heavy on defense, and ultimately very effective. In the 1550s he came up with something he called the “mandarin duck formation,” a twelve-man unit consisting of a leader, shield men, lancers, fork men, a cook, and four men wielding a crude weapon of Qi’s own devising: a length of bamboo with its leafy branches left intact to ensnare enemy swords and spears. The unit trained and fought as a team, protecting each other and above all the leader, all the while advancing slowly but inexorably against the enemy. Qi later improved upon this formation by devising a “battle wagon,” a huge, two-wheeled cart, protected on all sides by wooden screens, which operated in some ways like a crude tank. Each was manned by twenty soldiers. Ten formed an assault party, four armed with muskets and the rest with swords, spears, and shields. As they advanced, the ten men remaining in the wagon would push it along, so that the assault team was never more than ten meters from safety. When the enemy attacked, all the men would fall back inside the wagon, where they would fight with their personal weapons and their fo-lang-chi guns, a crude, small-bore cannon so named because it had been introduced into China by the farangi, the Portuguese, a century before. For large-scale engagements, these wagons could be drawn into an impenetrable fighting square, with cavalry units sheltered within.[45]

  With his emphasis on discipline, training, and cautious, well-thought-out tactics, General Qi Jiguang was instrumental in the 1550s and 1560s in quelling pirate raids along the coast. He was then reassigned to the northern frontier, where he reorganized defenses, repaired the Great Wall, built observation towers and training centers, and generally helped keep the Mongols in check. Finally, in 1574, having never lost an engagement in thirty years of service, he was promoted under Zhang Juzheng’s tutelage to senior commissioner in chief, the highest military rank the Ming court had to give. For the next several years Qi was regarded as a hero, a general who knew how to train men, win battles, and get results. His manuals on tactics and training were widely read, and his collected works published and republished.

  Then, in 1582, Senior Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng died at the age of fifty-seven. During his tenure in office he had stepped on toes, threatened vested interests, and made many enemies in his drive to force efficiency upon the ponderous bulk of China. This enormous anti-Zhang faction now rose up to tear his reputation apart and undo everything he had done. From a modern perspective this might appear a disappointing and counterproductive backlash, for surely Zhang was the sort of man China needed to whip it into shape. Many of Zhang’s contemporaries, however, did not see it that way. They regarded his reforms as upsetting the balance of things in the Celestial Empire, where inefficiency was the imperfect but unavoidable state where equilibrium lay. In demanding that everything work properly, Zhang was asking for more than the country could reasonably give. When he died, therefore, and the iron grip of his “hard policies” was loosened, China slipped inevitably and inexorably back into the comfortable inefficiency that had existed in the past. Tax collection once again became haphazard. Palace spending rose. Government coffers ran dry. Morally upstanding but administratively inept officials dismissed by Zhang were recalled, while those he had favored were demoted or purged.

  Among them was General Qi Jiguang. His victories, his books, his success in building a formidable fighting force from the ground up all counted for nothing with his protector now dead and gone. He was a Zhang man, and so he had to go. The ailing general was turned out of office in 1583. His wife left him soon after and, with no income or personal wealth, he spent his declining years in poverty and unhappiness. Qi finally died on January 17, 1588, reportedly so poor he could not afford even medical care. By 1590 his mandarin duck formation was a forgotten curiosity and his formidable battle wagons an idle dream buried in unread books.

  And what of the Wanli emperor, that promising young monarch who was now an obese, full-grown man with a deep, authoritative voice? The death of Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, his tutor, his mentor, and in many ways his father, changed him entirely. Anti-Zhang officials wasted no time in running to the throne with stories of Zhang’s perfidy and succeeded in deflating the emperor’s high regard for the man—perhaps too well. Zhang, he learned, was a hypocrite. He had insisted that everyone, including the emperor, live frugally while he himself resided in a grand mansion heaped with wealth. Zhang was a tyrant. He had dismissed virtuous men from office who should now be reinstated. Zhang was a fornicator. He had brought on his own demise through excessive sexual activity, bucking up his flagging libido with exotic aphrodisiacs.[46]

  For the Wanli emperor it was devastating. That this man who had filled his head with so much talk of virtue was himself so clearly not virtuous led the emperor first to question the moral lessons of his youth and then cynically to reject them. After his austere childhood he now became greedy and grasping, building a personal fortune with the aid of his inner coterie of corrupt court eunuchs. He would no longer countenance the remonstrances of civil officials. When they criticized him in proper Confucian fashion for his overspending and inattention to duty, he had them beaten. When he perceived that some ambitious officials actually courted such beatings for the career-enhancing moral stripes it earned them, he simply ignored everything they said and wrote
and sat in the Forbidden City doing nothing. He would not attend audiences. He would not approve appointments. He shirked his royal responsibilities and whiled away the days. It is hard to fully appreciate just how much frustration and anguish this caused for the men trying to keep the government running without the emperor’s participation, but there are some telling glimpses in the historical record. On one occasion a grand secretary, after being repeatedly denied an audience with the emperor to discuss some important issue, became so agitated upon finally being admitted into the imperial presence that he lost control of his bladder and fell into a coma for several days.[47]

  The Wanli emperor’s contrariness reached its zenith in the late 1580s, when he refused to allow his firstborn son by his unloved empress to be installed as heir, insisting instead that a younger son by a favored concubine succeed him on the throne. At first he simply put off the succession ceremony year after year. Eventually, however, the issue was forced into the open and a deadlock occurred, one that the Ming government had neither the legal means to break nor the classical precedents to understand. This crisis of succession was the overriding concern of the Chinese court and civil service at the beginning of the 1590s. It was more serious than famines and droughts, economic woes and factional strife. It was more threatening than minority rebellions in the west, mutinies in the army, and renewed border incursions by the Mongols to the north.

  As for developments in a faraway island nation called Japan, inhabited by a people referred to disparagingly in the Chinese dynastic histories as “dwarfs,” they were scarcely given a thought in Beijing. As far as it was concerned, Japan was a tributary state of long standing—but not a very important one, since its territory was not contiguous to China’s—with an on-again, off-again record of tribute missions dating back to at least the early seventh century. At the moment relations seemed to be off. No Japanese mission had arrived since 1549, bringing to a close a century and a half of friendly intercourse.[48] The Japanese currently seemed to be caught up in some sort of internal struggle, and the shogun, who the Ming emperor had invested with the title King of Japan back in 1401, was no longer in control. When they eventually managed to put their house in order, they would undoubtedly return to their proper place in the Chinese-centered world and resume the noble task of trying to emulate Sino-civilization.