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

by Samuel Hawley

  The Koreans found Shen Weijing far more secretive during his second visit to their country. He did not let them know much of the nature of his mission, and he kept his distance from government interpreters, the only Koreans who understood the Chinese language he spoke. Board of Rites minister Yun Gun-su was one of the few officials who managed to extract any information from him of the talks that had taken place in Pyongyang. Yun was not happy with what he heard. When they had met previously, Yun reminded Shen, “I told you that if the Japanese returned the two princes and all other prisoners, together with all the land they have seized, then and only then can peace negotiations go ahead. If even one of these conditions is not met, however, there can be no peace.” Shen replied that it had not been possible to negotiate with Konishi for the return of the captive princes, Imhae and Sunhwa, as they were not under his jurisdiction, but rather were being held by Kato Kiyomasa. Konishi was responsible only for Pyongyang, and so a Japanese withdrawal from Pyongyang was all he could arrange. Yun Gun-su was not satisfied with this, and began pressing Shen to have the Ming army sent south to drive the Japanese out of Pyongyang. Shen explained that dispatching troops was entirely up to the supreme civil administrator, Song Yingchang. He himself had no say in the matter. “But Song will listen to you,” Yun continued to press. “Please urge him to send the army.”

  Finally Shen lost his temper. “If your country is so anxious to kill the Japanese, then go ahead and kill them yourselves!” he said, adding a disparaging comment about the Korean army that indicated he thought it was not up to the task. Then: “The Japanese vanguard forces holding Pyongyang are very strong, and would be difficult to beat. If we can trick them into withdrawing, however, even if there are 100,000 enemy soldiers in Seoul we can easily defeat them.” In the meantime the Koreans were to set aside any suspicions they had that China was concerned only with protecting itself and did not plan to send an army to Korea. “If China only wanted to defend its own borders,” he said, “we would be pursuing a different strategy. Why would we go to all this trouble if we did not wish to help Korea?”[394]

  With that Shen Weijing resumed his journey north to Beijing. He was stopped in Liaodong Province by Ming commander in chief Li Rusong, who was by this time advancing toward Korea with his 35,000-man expeditionary force. Upon hearing of Shen’s friendly talks with the Japanese at Pyongyang, Li became so outraged that he ordered the hapless envoy arrested and put to death. It was only thanks to the last-minute intercession of a member of Li’s staff that Shen did not die that day. The livid commander was urged to spare Shen and leave the Japanese in Pyongyang with the impression that negotiations were still under way, for they would then not expect an attack. Li saw the wisdom of this, and placed Shen in custody in case he might prove useful later on in furthering the ruse.[395]

  And so Li and his army resumed their march toward Korea with prisoner Shen Weijing in tow. They passed through the Willow Palisade, the wall of wooden stakes intended to keep the Jurchen tribes of Manchuria out of Liaodong, then struck into the mountain wilderness that lay between China and the kingdom of Choson. The going was difficult, for it was now January, the route was rough and covered with snow, and the weather deathly cold. Finally, on January 26, they reached the north bank of the frozen Yalu River. Commander in Chief Li mounted a crimson sedan chair as suited his position, and banners were unfurled. Then the great Ming army marched across the ice and entered the Imjin War.

  * * *

  King Sonjo was waiting to greet Li Rusong at the gate into Uiju on the Yalu’s south bank. “We are here,” announced the Ming commander, “to destroy the vicious enemy, so your majesty can put his heart at rest.” Sonjo responded with words of gratitude and profound relief. The Japanese invasion, he said, had done great harm to the country and driven him to take refuge in this remote corner. “But now, thanks to the emperor’s generosity, you have come with a great army, and will drive the Japanese out of our land and bring our government back to life.”[396]

  Sonjo’s relief at the arrival of the Chinese army was completely sincere and unsullied by doubt, for it marked for him the end of many months of despair and rekindled hopes that the war could be won. But not everyone regarded this event in an equally positive light. Now that the Chinese had arrived on the scene in force the prosecution of the war would pass unquestionably into their hands, leaving Korea a bystander in many of the battles and events to come. This fact had already been amply demonstrated by the negotiations that had taken place in Pyongyang between Shen Weijing and Konishi Yukinaga. The Koreans were excluded from both rounds of talks and had had difficulty even obtaining information as to what had taken place. There was also the problem to consider of feeding these additional 35,000 Chinese mouths—and just as important, keeping them away from mischief, for the soldiers of Liaodong were known to be an unruly bunch, often little better than thugs. The question that hung in the air was: Did the arrival of the Ming army really spell Korea’s salvation? Or would it be yet another burden for this troubled kingdom to bear?

  Commander in Chief Li Rusong’s expeditionary force was joined at Uiju by the Chinese troops that had been encamped there over the past several months as a bodyguard to King Sonjo. When he began the march south at the end of January, therefore, his command had grown to some 43,000 men.[397] They would be joined at Sunan, the Korean army headquarters thirty kilometers north of Pyongyang, by 10,000 native troops led by Yi Il, the Korean general who had been defeated by Konishi Yukinaga’s first contingent at the Battle of Sangju in June the previous year, and by regional commander Kim Ung-so. At nearby Pophung monastery, meanwhile, 4,200 monk-soldiers led by the revered monk Hyujong, “Great Master of the Western Mountain,” were assembled and ready to march.[398] The allied force of Chinese and Korean soldiers poised to attack Pyongyang thus totaled approximately 58,000 fighting men. They would be armed with arrows and swords and light cannons, but few muskets. In the coming battle they would face 15,000 highly experienced Japanese troops, well equipped with muskets but possessing few cannons.[399]

  The Japanese defenders holed up in Pyongyang remained unaware of this gathering storm until it was almost upon them—which was exactly what Commander Li had planned. While en route south from Uiju, Li sent a message ahead to the Japanese stating that official Ming envoys were on their way to Pyongyang to continue with the next phase of peace negotiations. It was of course a ruse, but Konishi did not see through it. With Korean guerrilla activity having deprived him of virtually all his native spies, and in turn of any intelligence of what was going on beyond the walls of Pyongyang, he could only conclude that Shen Weijing’s shuttle diplomacy had borne fruit. The news of the approaching envoys was greeted with delight by Konishi and his comrades, and prompted the monk Genso to write a poem heralding the coming peace:

  Japan has ceased fighting and China has surrendered.

  Kyushu and the four seas will now become one family.

  The spirit of happiness will melt the snows.

  In the coming spring, the flower of peace will bloom.[400]

  Eager to reach a settlement so that they could all go home, Konishi sent a party of twenty men north to greet the Ming envoys and escort them into the city. Most of the men did not return. One version of events has it that they were welcomed by Shen Weijing at Sunan and the two sides sat down to a banquet. Then, when the conviviality was at its height, the Japanese were surrounded and attacked and all but three were killed.[401] According to a second version, the Japanese escort was simply ambushed on the road.[402] In any event a handful of survivors managed to race back to Pyongyang and raise the alarm, awakening Konishi at last to the fact that there would be no peace settlement with the Chinese, but only a bloody war. For the men of Kyushu under his command, cold and hungry, sick of battle and far from home, the dominant reaction was likely despair.

  * * *

  February 5, 1593. The great allied army of Chinese and Korean soldiers, a force of nearly sixty thousand men, arrived in the vicinity
of Pyongyang, “the flat place,” and proceeded to set up camp on the frozen ground north of the city. The spirits of the men were high; they were eager to rush the walls with their vastly superior numbers and teach the Japanese a lesson. The sight of this multitude and their tens of thousands of horses must have sent a wave of foreboding through the ranks of Konishi’s men, a grim realization that for the first time in the Korean campaign the odds were stacked heavily against them. They nonetheless managed to make a good show of their defiance, lining the walls in their thousands, shouting, firing their guns, sounding horns and beating drums and generally making as much noise as they could. Inside the city behind them Konishi Yukinaga prepared for what he knew would be a hard-fought battle. Two thousand-man units were assigned to each of the four gates where attacks would probably come: the Chilsong Gate on the north, the Potong Gate on the west, and the two gates piercing the wall on the south. He would hold the rest of his force in the center of the city as a mobile reserve.[403]

  There were not supposed to be any Korean civilians still residing in the area. Ten days earlier, in his meeting with King Sonjo at Uiju, Commander in Chief Li Rusong had recommended that a message be sent ahead calling for the evacuation of the city and its environs, for once the fighting started no distinction would be made between Korean and Japanese. Everyone would be killed. King Sonjo agreed to do so.[404] Now, encamped outside Pyongyang, Li Rusong gave any Koreans still in the vicinity one last chance to remove themselves to safety, erecting a white flag with the following words written upon it: “We will kill everyone except those Koreans who surrender now and come under this flag.” The annals make no mention of anyone coming forward.[405]

  The battle began the following day with an attack by Hyujong’s monk-soldiers against the walled temple complex of Yongmyongsa on Moranbong hill commanding the northern approaches to the city. It was occupied by one thousand enemy troops under Matsuura Shigenobu. So long as Moranbong remained in Japanese hands, the allied Chinese-Korean force would be vulnerable to counterattack from the rear. It was thus essential that it be taken. Li Rusong assigned Hyujong’s monk-soldiers to the task because they were more experienced in mountain warfare than his own men and the Korean regulars, and had the patriotism and determination necessary to succeed with an uphill attack against withering opposition. The monks did not let him down. The fight for Moranbong raged for two days and nights and claimed the lives of more than six hundred of Hyujong’s men. Finally, with Chinese troops under Wu Weichong providing support from the west, Matsuura and his surviving men were forced to fall back to Pyongyang.[406]

  With Moranbong taken, the main assault on the city could begin. Early in the morning of February 8 Li Rusong held a ceremony with burning incense to ensure that the omens were good. They evidently were. After his men had eaten breakfast, he ordered them to fall into line and led them south to attack Pyongyang. They advanced slowly out of camp, their closely packed ranks “looking like the scales on a fish,” the hooves of the horses pulverizing the ice on the road into a multitude of tiny crystals that rose into the air like a haze and sparkled in the sun. As they drew near the city they could see the Japanese lined up along the walls to meet them. They had adorned the ramparts with colored banners and sharpened spikes, and now exposed the blades of their swords menacingly for the advancing Chinese and Korean soldiers to see. The allies then fanned out around the city, the central Ming column under Yang Yuan and Zhang Shijue taking the north and the west, the left column under Li Rusong’s younger brother Li Rubo the southeast, and the Koreans under Yi Il and Kim Ung-so the southwest. (The city’s east wall bordered the Taedong River and thus was not approached.)

  When all the units were in position a cannon was fired to signal the attack. Chinese and Korean archers went to work setting the buildings of the city ablaze with their fire arrows while the gunners began pounding the gates with cannonballs. While this was going on scaling ladders were brought forward and wave after wave of men surged up the walls. It was hard going through a hail of musket balls and arrows and stones, then over the sharpened spikes that bristled along the top of the wall. During the course of the morning’s fighting these defenses proved too much for the allies, and their assault gradually petered out. Commander in Chief Li Rusong, observing that his soldiers were losing spirit, rode up near the wall, lopped off the head of a man who was attempting to retreat and carried the object lesson from unit to unit for everyone to see. Then he shouted, “Five thousand liang of silver to the first man over the wall!”

  Driven forward by the threat of execution and the promise of reward, the allied troops roused themselves for a renewed assault. Ming commander Wu Weichong, leading his men from the front, was wounded in the chest, and another had his feet crushed by a large stone dropped from above. But the attacking forces did not falter. Finally a handful of men managed to claw their way up to the top of the wall and, after fierce hand-to-hand fighting, cleared an opening on the parapets for their comrades to follow. At about the same time the Chilsong (Seven Star) Gate gave way to the incessant pounding of cannons, leaving a gaping hole through which the Chinese and Koreans could flood into Pyongyang.

  The Japanese had already made preparations for this breach in their defenses. When it became clear that the city’s outer perimeter could no longer be held, they pulled back from the walls and into their last line of defense, an earth and log fort previously constructed in the tight northern corner formed by Pyongyang’s triangular wall. The Chinese and Koreans, seeing that resistance had ceased along the ramparts, poured into the city through the breached gate, thinking they had the battle nearly won. The Japanese, however, were not done yet. As the allied attackers pressed forward toward the rough inner fortress, a jostling mass of horses and soldiers and banners and flags, Konishi’s men leveled their muskets through the hundreds of loopholes that pierced their barricades and began to fire. The result was a slaughter. Barrage after barrage of lead balls and arrows tore into the closely packed ranks of the Chinese and Koreans, leaving hundreds dead and dying and throwing the rest into a panicked retreat back through the smashed Seven Star Gate and out of the city.[407]

  That was the end of the Battle of Pyongyang. Li Rusong sounded the gong signaling a withdrawal and returned with his men to their camp north of the city to pass the night, leaving a guard of mainly Korean troops behind to watch over the Japanese holed up in their fort. Li had breached the walls as planned, but had sustained heavy losses in doing so, and still had not defeated the enemy within. On the contrary, with the Japanese now cornered and their firepower concentrated, it would take the sacrifice of hundreds if not thousands more Chinese and Korean attackers to complete the job and snuff them out. Anxious to avoid such a costly second round, Li sent a message to his opponent Konishi Yukinaga, offering him the chance to evacuate the city without a fight. “My army is quite sufficient to annihilate you to the last man,” he wrote. “But I do not wish to kill so many. I will therefore leave a way open for you to withdraw. Take it, and leave at once.”

  It was an offer the pragmatic Konishi could not refuse. The first day’s fighting had cost him as many as twenty-three hundred casualties, a loss his already depleted numbers could not bear. A large portion of his supplies had also been captured. When the Chinese and the Koreans attacked again, he and his men might be able to hold out for a morning, a day, perhaps two or three. But no amount of courage could resist the onslaught of fifty thousand men. Ultimately the Japanese defenses would fall and, as Li had said, everyone would be killed. Konishi thus wrote back to the Ming commander, “We will withdraw. See that our way is not blocked.” Li agreed, and issued orders to the Koreans to let the Japanese army leave the city unmolested. The evacuation took place later that night, Konishi’s men silently filing out of Pyongyang through its southern gate, crossing the frozen Taedong River and marching south on the road to Seoul.[408] “Wounded men were abandoned,” samurai chronicler Yoshino Jingozaemon writes, “while those who were not wounded but simply exhaus
ted crawled almost prostrate along the road.”[409]

  The retaking of Pyongyang was bittersweet for the Koreans. They had reclaimed their city as intended, but the victory had not really been their own: with the arrival of Ming commander Li Rusong and his army, native troops under Yi Il and Kim Ung-so had been reduced to mere helpers. Li also was clearly not committed to destroying the Japanese invaders, but was intent only on driving them away from China and back toward the south. His decision to allow Konishi and his men to leave Pyongyang without a fight must have frustrated the Koreans immensely, for they were thirsting for revenge for what the Japanese had done. There was even talk that Li had accepted a bribe from Konishi in exchange for allowing him and his men to retreat.[410] The inevitably bad conduct of the Ming troops was also becoming an aggravation. In the Battle of Pyongyang the Chinese made little distinction between Japanese soldiers and Korean civilians when it came to killing “enemies” and claiming their heads—just as Li Rusong had warned King Sonjo would be the case. News of these abuses found its way to Beijing and resulted in the sending of an official to Korea to investigate. Nothing came of it, however, for in the end the outraged Koreans declined to press the matter for fear of offending Commander in Chief Li.[411]