Everlasting

Flower
A History of Korea

Keith Pratt
Everlasting Flower
Everlasting Flower
A History of Korea

Keith Pratt

 
This book is dedicated to my friends Lee Chaesuk and Chu Sangon,
who epitomize the very best qualities of Korean people

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

 Great Sutton Street
London  , 
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 

Copyright © Keith Pratt

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain

by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Pratt, Keith L.
Everlasting flower : a history of Korea
. Korea - History
I. Title
.

-:    

-: ----
 Contents

Preface 
Maps: Early Kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula 
Modern Korea 
Chronology of Korean History 

Introduction 
I The Creation of State Identity
 From Earliest Times to  : Cultural Patterns in Flux 
 Unified Silla,  ‒: The Building of Confidence 
 Koryŏ, ‒: The Struggle for Independence 
 Early to Mid-Chosŏn, ‒: The Search for an
Acceptable Orthodoxy 

II A Century of Insecurity
 The Hermit Kingdom, ‒: Tradition at Work 
 Incursion, Modernization and Reform, ‒:
Tradition at Bay 

III A Century of Suffering

 Culture under Threat, ‒: The Colonial Era 
 Partition and War, ‒: Return to Disunity 
 Post-War Korea: Tradition and Change 
Sources and Further Reading 
Discography 
Acknowledgements 
Index 
 Preface

This is not the kind of in-depth study that comes from concentrated
research and a well-earned h thesis. Rather, it is a personal impres-
sion of a country, formed over half a lifetime’s subjective and loving (if
sometimes frustrated) acquaintance with it. Originally I suggested
‘The Role of Culture in the Evolution of Modern Korea’ as a subtitle.
The publishers thought that this was too cumbersome, and were prob-
ably right. It did have the merit of giving the reader some idea of what
to expect, though it may have given an exaggerated idea of what I was
aiming at. My approach has been to offer a series of snapshots of what
seem to me to be important elements in the formation and develop-
ment of the modern Korean state and its national psyche. I have tried
to convey the pride that Koreans have in their country’s ancient traditions
and to explain the insistence they place on their nation’s independence
in the history of East Asia. For all the heritage they unquestionably
share with China and Japan, Koreans emphatically proclaim that they
and their culture are quite distinguishable from their neighbours and
theirs. Nationalism is strong, in both North and South Korea. The
world needs to understand it, though not necessarily to fear it: it shapes
the character of the Koreans who live and work at home and abroad, and
it drives the ideologies, economies and foreign policies of the two Koreas.
It has been regularly apparent in the opening years of the twenty-first
century, fuelling arguments, for example, over China’s (successful)
submission to  for World Heritage recognition of Koguryŏ sites
in eastern Manchuria, and Japan’s claim to sovereignty over the Tokto
islands in the East Sea / Sea of Japan.
In writing the book I have consulted the Korean dynastic histories
(Samguk sagi, Samguk yusa, Koryŏsa and Chosŏn wangjo sillok); early com-
pendia such as Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s Tongguk t’onggam () and Han Ch’iyun’s
eighteenth-century Haedong yŏksa; Chinese dynastic histories and ency-
clopedias including the Cefu yuankui; and Xu Jing’s Gaoli tujing. Some of


the secondary sources that I have found particularly helpful will be found
in the suggestions for further reading at the end of the book.
Transliteration of Korean terms and names follows the McCune-
Reischauer system, except in the case of prominent figures and place
names for which alternative usages are better known, and of individuals
who prefer or preferred alternative spellings of their names. Chinese
titles and names follow the Pinyin system.
A series of boxed Picture Essays illustrate subjects mentioned in
the text and provide more detailed information.

Picture Essays and Charts

 Portrait of Dong Shou 
 Grey stoneware jar 
 Grey stone funerary vessel 
 Funerary headware of King Muryŏng 
 Soapstone relief of a boar 
 Decorated roof-tile 
 Pagodas at Pulguk-sa 
 Temple bell from Sangwŏn-sa 
 Wooden mask 
 Confucian sacrificial music 
 Printing blocks for the Korean Tripitaka 
 Inlaid celadon jar 
 A page from Sŏkpo sangjŏl Han’gŭl cha 
 Building a turtle boat 
 Hwasŏng fortress 
 Chŏng Sŏn, Manp’okdong 
 Detail from a nectar ritual painting 
 Kim Hongdo, Wrestling (ssirŭm) 
 An eight-panel screen 
 Yi Hanch’ŏl, Portrait of Kim Chŏnghŭi 
 Independence Gate 
 A Ŭigwe screen 
 Map of Seoul 
 Kisan, Chess Players 
 The former Japanese Government-General Building, Seoul 
 Yi Insŏng, One Autumn Day 
 Yi Chungsŏp, Family 
 Taedong river, December  
 Making long-stem bamboo pipes 
 Hwang Yŏngyŏp, Human Being 
 The Seoul Arts Center; The Whanki Museum 
 Song Shiyŏp, The Sound of Creation 

Chronology of Korean History 

Principal Events in Korea, – 
The Korean War 

      
 Early Kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula


Modern Korea


   

±   Neolithic communities evolve on the Korean peninsula.

nd m. Development of agriculture
±  The Korean Bronze Age begins
±  Emergence of Old Chosŏn along the Taedong river basin
±  The Korean Iron Age begins
early nd . Wiman Chosŏn succeeds Old Chosŏn
 Han armies invade Wiman Chosŏn; Chinese commanderies
are set up across the north of the peninsula
early st . Formation of Koguryŏ around the upper Yalu and Tumen
river reaches


st . Lelang develops as the principal Chinese commandery; rivalry
grows with Koguryŏ
st–rd . The Proto-Three Kingdoms period. Silla, Kaya and Paekche
emerge from the tribal federations of Chinhan, Pyŏnhan and
Mahan in southern Korea
- Chinese commanderies of Lelang and Daifang fall to
Koguryŏ and Paekche
late th . Buddhism is accepted at the Koguryŏ and Paekche courts
 Silla recognizes Buddhism
 Silla mops up Kaya
 Silla destroys Paekche with Chinese help
 Silla conquers Koguryŏ with Chinese help, ending the ‘Three
Kingdoms’ Period
 Unified Silla expels the last Chinese troops from its soil
th . Unified Silla prospers at the heart of flourishing East Asian
civilization (China, Korea, Japan)
 Later Paekche proclaimed by Kyŏn Hwŏn at Chŏnju
 Kungye raises the standard of Later Koguryŏ at Kaesŏng
 Wang Kŏn overthrows Kungye and proclaims the state of
Koryŏ
 Wang Kŏn enters Kyŏngju and reunites the country under
the Koryŏ banner
th . North-east Asia tolerates an uneasy balance between Khitan
Liao rule in Manchuria, Song in China and Koryŏ in Korea
 Liao falls to the Jurchen Jin dynasty in Manchuria and
northern China; Jurchen armies raid Koryŏ
 The Koryŏ court falls under control of military dictatorship
led by the Ch’oe clan
– Mongol invasions establish foreign command over peninsula
,  Unsuccessful Mongol attempts to invade Japan bring suffering
to Korea
 Mongol power in East Asia collapses; Korean relations with
the new Ming dynasty in China boost Neo-Confucianism
 Yi Sŏnggye leads the revolt against the Koryŏ court and
founds the Chosŏn regime


- The reign of King Sejong the Great, marked by economic
and cultural advances
mid-th . Growth of factionalism, breaking into open rivalry in 
– Hideyoshi commands catastrophic Japanese invasions
(Imjin waeran), which are repelled with Chinese assistance
,  Manchu invasions; the Chosŏn court submits to the immi-
nent () Qing dynasty rulers of China
mid-th . Genesis of the sirhak (‘Realistic Learning’) movement
– Reign of King Yŏngjo
 Death of Crown Prince Sado
– Reign of King Chŏngjo
 The first Christian church is set up secretly at a house in Seoul
 Hong Kyŏngnae’s rebellion reveals widespread discontent at
maladministration
– Reign of King Kojong
– The Taewŏn’gun rules as de facto regent
 Kojong marries his queen, Min; the General Sherman incident
brings the  to the Chosŏn court’s notice
±  Growth of the Self-Strengthening Movement
 The Treaty of Amity and Commerce with  (the ‘Shufeldt
Treaty’), followed (–) by treaties with eight European
nations
 America appoints its first minister to Seoul
 The Revd Horace Allen arrives in Korea; the Kapsin Coup
bares Sino-Japanese diplomatic rivalry on the peninsula
 Chinese and Japanese troops withdraw following the Treaty
of Tianjin
 The first Korean legation in Washington is opened
– The Tonghak Rebellion sparks the Sino-Japanese War; success
strengthens Tokyo’s ambitions in Korea, displayed in the Kabo
reforms
 The assassination of Queen Min drives King Kojong to
sanctuary in the Russian embassy
 Kojong declares himself emperor of the Great Han Empire
– The Russo-Japanese War consolidates Japanese imperialist
moves in North-East Asia
 The Protectorate Treaty gives Japan unprecedented powers
in Korea
 Korea snubbed at The Hague Peace Conference
 The Treaty of Annexation inaugurates the Japanese
colonial era
- Japanese Government-General conducts a Land Survey
 The March First Movement lifts the lid on Korean resentment
at the Japanese occupation; Korean Provisional Government
established in Shanghai
 The death of ex-Emperor Sunjong sparks new independence
demonstrations
 The Kwangju Incident heightens anti-Japanese tension
 Japan launches military aggression in Manchuria


 Japan creates the puppet state of Manzhouguo in China’s
three north-eastern provinces
 The Japanese invasion of China proper begins
 Koreans are forced to take Japanese names
 Liberation is followed by division along the th parallel:
North Korea comes under Soviet influence, the South under
the American Military Government (-)
 The Autumn Harvest Uprising

(Feb.) The  forms the Korean People’s Army
(April) The Cheju Rebellion
(May, August) Elections held in South and North fail to form a pan-Korean
government
(Dec.) National Security Law enacted in the 
– ’s First Republic, under Syngman Rhee as president
– Kim Il Sung rules the 
 Outbreak of the Korean War
 The Korean War ends in stalemate; an armistice divides the
land along the 
 -Japan Treaty of Basic Relations
The Soviet Union supplies the  with an experimental
nuclear reactor
 Launch of the New Community Movement (Saemaŭl
Undong)
 Introduction of the Yusin Constitution
 Assassination of President Park Chung Hee
 The Kwangju massacre
 Start of the ’s Sixth Republic, moving in the direction
of democratic reform
Seoul Olympic Games
mid-s Famine in North Korea leads to World Food Programme aid
 Ex-Presidents Chun and Roh convicted of treason and other
crimes
 International Monetary Fund intervenes to counter 
economic collapse
  admits inspectors from the International Atomic
Energy Agency
 Summit between President Kim Daejung and Chairman Kim
Jong Il
 Korea and Japan co-host the football World Cup


 Introduction

Early European mapmakers showed Korea as an island off the north-

east coast of China. The Jesuit priest Martino Martini got it right in
his Chinese atlas published in Vienna in , but to this day some
Westerners still find it a bit of a mystery. Its name may not immediate-
ly conjure up an image of the shape, size, or even the exact location of
the peninsula whose situation at the far eastern end of the Eurasian
land mass makes it one of the most strategically sensitive small coun-
tries in the world. In the past, some people have likened it to a rabbit,
facing China with its ears pointing north-eastwards towards the
Russian frontier; others to a dagger, pointing away from China in the
direction of the Japanese island chain. More often it has been described
as a bridge or pathway between its two better-known neighbours – not
a very long path, just some  miles from top to bottom, a distance
that an army could cover in a few weeks. Even the water splash in
which it ends, and that separates it from the Japanese island of Kyūshū,
is no wider than that between Wales and Ireland, and in its middle
there is a convenient stepping stone to help the traveller over, the island
of Tsushima.
Since  the Korean peninsula has been divided into the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea () in the north and the
Republic of Korea () in the south. An estimated  million people
live in the  and a further . million in the . The partition,
roughly along the th parallel, is a political one, not following any
ancient or logical pattern, either ethnic or topographical. It gives the
 rather more than half the surface area, , square miles to the
’s ,. Both have major rivers – the Tuman (Tumen), Amnŏk
(Yalu), Ch’ŏngch’ŏn and Taedong in the North, the Han, Kŭm and
Nakdong in the South – which open up access to the interior and have
been well used by friend and foe alike since neolithic times. The North


is more mountainous and has greater mineral resources, whereas the
South benefits from richer agricultural land. Running across the top of
the peninsula, the Changbaek range forms the backbone of the moun-
tains. From its highest peak, Mount Paektu, the Tumen and Yalu rivers
flow east and west respectively into the East and Yellow seas. In winter
they freeze hard, the whole region is deep in snow, and the barrier
between Korea and China looks impenetrable. Yet where there’s a will
there’s a way: in January  the first Western missionary to enter
Korea, Father Pierre Maubant, secretly stole over the frozen Yalu. And
to present-day Korean refugees intent on migrating in the opposite
direction neither rivers nor mountains are a real deterrent. Southwards
from the T’aebaek Mountains, like the rabbit’s backbone, runs a chain
containing the famous Diamond Mountains, Kŭmgang-san. Beloved for
centuries by artists, poets and philosophers, they were the first destina-
tion to be offered to South Korean tourists when the North tentatively
cracked opened its door in .
The West watched this experiment with interest, but not so very
long ago Europeans and Americans had seen little relevance to their
own lives in the concerns of East Asia. Then came World War Two and
Pearl Harbor, the Chinese civil war and the attack on  Amethyst, the
Korean War and the sacrifices of United Nations troops. Memories of
the nineteenth century’s so-called yellow peril were revived, and to a
‘free world’ in the grip of Cold War, the implications of communism in
China carried added danger. Later in the twentieth century fear gave
way to grudging respect, and as ‘tiger’ economies boomed in Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, the British prime
minister, Tony Blair, was among those suggesting that the West might
have something to learn from East Asia’s traditionally linked systems
of social organization and business management. But admiration soon
turned to caution. As European economies faltered in , commen-
tators advised that lessons should be learned from the spectacular
Japanese financial collapse in ; as South Korean chaebŏl conglom-
erates began to waver, even European drivers of Kia and Daewoo
motor cars grew anxious; and, to put the cap on it, in early  Kim
Jong Il, ‘Dear Leader’ of a country defined by President George W.
Bush as part of an ‘axis of evil’, talked up a nuclear crisis while famine
stalked his land, and even President Kim Daejung’s ‘sunshine’ policy
of accommodation with his difficult neighbours failed to win American
support. The pendulum of political interest swings fast, but never
again will the West write off the nations of East Asia as irrelevant to its
own future. What happens in and between the  and the  mat-
ters to us all.

                
 Like Europe, East Asia has a long history that has seen close
alliances and bitter wars. Nowadays a sense of regional integrity is
developing, born of economic imperatives, in which respect for the
contributions of all member states is acknowledged. But there is still a
long way to go. The People’s Republic of China () hankers after
reunion with the Republic of China (Taiwan), by force if necessary.
The Korean War remains unfinished, with hostilities between the
states on either side of the Demilitarized Zone () halted only by an
armistice. And neither China nor Korea is satisfied that Japan has made
sufficient apology or reparation for the way it victimized and humiliated
their people from  onwards. Political tension among these five
states often runs high, with the , Russia and the European Union
ever ready to give commands, advice or offers from the touchline. At
the very heart of this vital region, politically, economically and cultur-
ally, is Korea. And paradoxically, a proper picture of its nationalist
spirit is essential to understanding the prospects for an integrated East
Asian unit. We need to know what makes Koreans feel different from
their Chinese and Japanese neighbours, as well as what they have in
common. Almost the first thing my teacher of Korean musical history,
Professor Lee Hye-ku, said to me in  was: ‘You must not come
here as so many Westerners do, just expecting to find a repository of
Chinese and Japanese civilization. Of course our culture has been over-
lain by theirs and we can still see signs of that, but what you must also
look for are the native traditions of the Korean people underneath.’ So
we have to recognize Korean distinctiveness in cultural as well as polit-
ical terms, to see how its leaders have identified Korean best interests,
and to identify the artistic tastes and skills of which they were and
still are proud. The key to understanding modern Korea lies in under-
standing what the land meant to its people in the past.

Korea has gone by many names, official and unofficial, in the course of
its history. ‘Korea’, and its earlier spelling Corea, can be traced back to
Marco Polo’s attempt to transliterate the name that he was familiar
with at the time of his sojourn in thirteenth-century East Asia. The
Chinese often referred to a neighbouring country by the title of its
ruling dynasty, and Marco Polo made Koryŏ, ‘High and Beautiful’, into
Cauli. Early Koreans themselves were happy with the rather prosaic
Dongguk, ‘Eastern Country’, until in  the newly self-styled
emperor and former king, Kojong, upped the nation’s image when he
proclaimed the Great Han (Taehan) Empire. Echoes of that name still
resound through present-day South Korea, the ‘Great Han Republic’
Taehan Min’guk. Nineteenth-century Western sobriquets, like Hermit

 
Kingdom and Land of Morning Calm, were popular if misleading.
Among twentieth-century literary epithets one drew attention to the
mountainous backbone running down the peninsula by referring to it
as Cheyŏk, ‘Plaice Country’, and the poem adopted by the Republic of
Korea for its national anthem in  quotes a contemporary name,
‘Hibiscus Land’ (Kŭnyŏk), when it sings of ‘Thirty thousand leagues
of mountains, streams and deathless flowers’. (The hibiscus, which
Koreans call the everlasting flower, is the national flower of the .)
However I try to define and explain Korea, I do so as an outsider. I
can strive to make my assessment as fair and objective as possible, given
that I am observing the country and its people from the other side of
the world and that I view all history and culture – my own just as much
as others’ – with Western, and far from agreed, preconceptions and
prejudices. But from within East Asia, the picture of Korea is liable to
look quite different. Over the centuries, the Chinese, the Japanese, and
especially the Koreans themselves, have all seen Korea in a different
light, reflecting their own assumptions and priorities. To the imperial
Chinese court, from the Han dynasty ( ‒ ) to the Qing
(–), the peninsula was one of the closest parts of tianxia, ‘all
under Heaven’, for which the emperor accepted theoretical responsi-
bility on behalf of Heaven. It was the most cooperative partner in the
so-called tribute system, which formed the basis of the Chinese world-
view in imperial times. In return for the benefits of Chinese civilization
and the offer of military protection, the rulers of vassal states pledged
their (similarly equivocal) allegiance to the Dragon Throne and under-
took to send it regular gifts. Educated Koreans and Japanese knew very
well what forms of etiquette the Chinese preferred and were quite
capable of performing them when required, on sending seasonal greet-
ings to the imperial court, for example, or entertaining visiting Chinese
embassies. To the Chinese it was only natural that Korea’s intelligentsia
should learn and copy superior Sinic etiquette and culture, even if its
lower-class majority understood little of these arcane rites and led their
own daily lives differently. As far back as the Han dynasty, the classic
Chinese geography, the Shanhaijing, had used the flattering term
‘country of gentlemen’ in possible reference to the peninsula.
The Japanese regarded Korea in more pragmatic terms. For cen-
turies before direct shipping lanes were established with China, it was
the route via which they obtained the fruits of mainland cultures and
economies. The stepping-stone island of Tsushima had a mixed popu-
lation of Koreans and Japanese and was governed by a Japanese daimyō.
Both sides benefited from trade, and relations were often cordial. Twice
in their history, however, Japanese leaders used Korea as the pathway

                
towards what they hoped would be continental domination, and with
shattering effect. The first attempt was from  to , when the
armies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded and partially occupied the
peninsula. The second followed events in the late nineteenth century,
which resulted in the Japanese colonization of Korea in  and pre-
pared the way for the invasion of China. Both stemmed from the vision
of a pan-Asiatic sphere under Japanese leadership in which Korea would
play a largely anonymous role. The first period saw the widespread
destruction of buildings and works of art, a foretaste of the attempt
by colonizers in the second to deal a fatal blow to Korea’s cultural
individuality. Chinese foreign policy-makers might have contented
themselves that all states were ‘under Heaven’ and that by extending
Chinese influence over as many as they could, the emperor’s soldiers,
diplomats and scholars were distributing Heaven’s bounty widely across
this one big family. Yet although their books did sometimes record an
interest in the habits of what they called the ‘barbarian’ races, they
themselves did not really expect to change the lives of ordinary Koreans,
Vietnamese, Burmese, Japanese or central Asian tribesmen. It was up
to local rulers to pass on what they learned of ideal Chinese behaviour.
The twentieth-century Japanese colonial administration, however, went
further, by annexing Korea and then trying to impose Japanese ways on
the whole of its society. Its anthropologists set out to justify the occu-
pation on the postulated grounds that the peoples of eastern Siberia,
Manchuria and Korea shared common ethnic roots with Japan. Koreans
began to find out what it meant to be newly recognized but undervalued
members of Japanese society.
Dominated by China on one side and periodically harassed by Japan
on the other, Koreans themselves have long been used to assessing their
part in regional structure. Nationalism coloured much of their writing
on this theme in the later twentieth century, and we get inklings of its
presence in two earlier periods also. The first was in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, when the scholar-official Kim Pusik compiled a
comprehensive history of Korea, the Samguk sagi (‘History of the Three
Kingdoms’), and the monk Iryŏn complemented this rather orthodox
account with a collection of legends and folk tales. Compiled around
, he called it Samguk yusa (‘Additional Material on the Three
Kingdoms’), and it has given pleasure to its readers for many centuries.
One of its tales is that of the semi-divine Tan’gun, whom Iryŏn cred-
ited with laying the state’s foundations as far back as the third millen-
nium . In the days of the mythical Chinese emperor Yao, he wrote, the
supreme god Hwan’in allowed his son Hwan’ung to descend to earth.
Ung took with him , attendants and three talismans that his father

 
had given him, and landed under a tree on T’aebaek Mountain. (It is
not certain where this was. There is a T’aebaek in modern Kangwŏn
province, but this is an unlikely contender. Mount Myohyong, north
of P’yŏngyang, has some supporters, but most opinion favours Mount
Paektu.) There he turned a female bear into a woman called Ungnyo,
‘Bear Woman’. When the tiger with which she shared a cave was unable
to keep the strict rules that Ung had set them in order to become
human, Ung married the woman himself. They bore a son, Tan’gun,
who established Ko Chosŏn, ‘Old Chosŏn’ (Ch. Gu Zhaoxian), and
its capital at Asadal (‘Holy City’). When Tan’gun had ruled for ,
years, the Chinese king Wu, founder of the Zhou dynasty, enfeoffed
a man called Kija (Ch. Qizi) as the first king of Chosŏn. Thereupon
Tan’gun withdrew and became a mountain god. (So for those who still
believe this story the implication is that their own progenitors were
descended from a she-bear. Fossilized flora and fauna from Korean
palaeolithic sites do certainly include bones of bear among those of
many other wild animals.) We shall never know how old the Tan’gun
tradition already was in Iryŏn’s day, but his was the first literary mention
of a hare that has run and run to the present, and shows no sign yet of
being stopped. Tan’gun studies are still popular in nationalistic Korean
circles, especially in the , though others rubbish their validity.
The second suggestion of incipient nationalism came in the eigh-
teenth century, when Korean scholars of the sirhak (‘Realistic Learning’)
conviction, shaken by the Japanese and Manchu invasions and the fall
of China’s Ming dynasty, began to reassess their country’s needs as
objectively as they knew how. In the process they re-examined Chinese
and Korean historical records and came up with two better authenticated
alternatives to Tan’gun as founders of their kingdom, the aforesaid
Kija, and Wiman (Ch. Wei Man). Both were apparently of Chinese
origin and had founded Chinese-style statelets to set the peninsula on
its historical path. Kija was said to have been an honourable relative,
perhaps a nephew, of the decadent last Shang king, who had fled to the
north-east at the time of the Zhou conquest in ± . What was
believed to be his tomb was discovered near P’yŏngyang (but is now
thought to date from no earlier than the twelfth century ). Wiman
was identified as a military commander in the north-east Chinese state
of Yan who deserted early in the second century  to the P’yŏngyang
area, establishing his capital at Wanggŏmsŏng. Neither story can be
corroborated archaeologically, but what matters is that Chinese literati
– and thus later Korean historians – clearly linked the statelet of
Zhaoxian with early events in the shaping of their own country. Sirhak
researchers were in fact endorsing the claim established by Yi Sŏnggye

                
in  to his dynasty’s legitimacy through lineal descent from Chinese
origins. In Confucian terms this kind of authentification was a priority,
and Kija was set to become the most important political symbol of the
Chosŏn dynasty. He was credited not only with stimulating economic
progress but also with a wide range of cultural innovation representing
all that China most respected, covering writing, poetry, divination, rites
and music. As for Wiman, the sirhak scholar Yi Ik (–), who
was deeply interested in scientific historiography, accused him of being
an alien, but some modern Korean historians have turned him into an
ethnic north-easterner, a Dongyi; made him an erstwhile Ko Chosŏn
bureaucrat; and so lifted the stigma of being a foreign usurper from his
shoulders: he too has been authenticated into the origins of modern
Korea. Their Confucian upbringing meant that educated Koreans
accepted the pro-Chinese bias of their forebears uncritically, and even
sirhak advocates were unable to break wholly free of this inclination.
But whereas the Sinicized literati had previously spurned the oral tra-
ditions and native skills of ordinary people, converts to sirhak now
began to look at them afresh, and to bring fresh qualities with unique
Korean features to their art, literature and music.
In all three countries of East Asia written records are profuse:
those from China date from the first millennium ; the earliest Korean
sources come from the Unified Silla period ( –), and the
Japanese from the eighth century . They comprise government
records and unofficial critiques, the collected writings of scholars,
diaries, travellers’ tales, eyewitness accounts and documentary mono-
graphs, biographies and hagiography, fact and fiction, songs, prose and
poetry. They range from ephemeral jottings to multi-volume encyclo-
pedias. They cover history, geography, economics, philosophy and reli-
gion, the arts and aesthetics. Because communication across the region
was quite easy, people from all three countries had plenty to say about
each other. Comparison of their writings should, one might think,
make it fairly easy for modern scholars to find answers to their ques-
tions. But of course, the reverse is true. So much writing includes a
comparable amount of prejudice and imagination on the part of the
races and individuals who produced them. And even though today’s
scholars may apply scientific research to confirm or refute literary
records, and archaeologists are frequently unearthing fresh evidence,
the suspicion of politically motivated partiality, whether Chinese,
Korean or Japanese, still hangs over the interpretation of history. The
‘horse-rider theory’, for example, that the Japanese Yamato kingdom
was founded by Eurasian steppe horsemen who crossed the straits
between   and  is no longer accepted. But in  Wontack

 
Hong claimed that Yamato was certainly established by mounted cav-
alry, namely Paekche warriors descended from Puyo tribespeople: it
was an ironic, and unproven, counter to earlier Japanese attempts to
justify colonial dominion on the grounds of shared ethnicity.
The prehistory of the peninsula and of what we know today as
Manchuria still holds many an undisclosed secret. Centuries of fighting
and industrial development have destroyed archaeological and historical
remains; that said, excavations have so far failed to reveal any evidence
of cultural or political development corresponding to the supposed dis-
crete states of Tan’gun, Kija or Wiman. It would mean a lot to Koreans
to be able to blow away the haze that hangs over their origins and
establish the true story of early state formation on the peninsula,
especially if that were to confirm a measure of ancient independence
in relation to China and to lay to rest any lingering doubts about a
Japanese ethnic relationship. But, in the words of Hyung Il Pai,

the original Korean race . . . cannot be extrapolated from the

archaeological record using concepts of race and national iden-
tity formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
. . . [T]he pursuit of nationalistic causes has overshadowed the
more important goal of developing a coherent methodology for
interpreting the prehistory of the Korean peninsula.

The Chinese, Koreans and Japanese long ago settled into a tolerable
triangular relationship, each developing strong pride in their own
characteristics and traditions. Recurrent migrations led to ethnic and
cultural mixing, which nevertheless failed to blur the edges of their
respective nationalist spirits. Like most neighbours they had their
occasional differences, some of them serious, but on the whole the
three states traced a pattern of coexistence that survived until the mid-
nineteenth century. Then, as outsiders arrived from Europe and
America with new ideas and recommendations for modernization, new
interpretations of nationalism also developed, and the traditional order
in East Asia began to change. Whether nationalism is, in the words of
James Palais, either ‘a blessing [or] a curse’ usually depends on the
point of view of the commentator. Its worldwide evolution after the
nineteenth century came in response to imperialism and colonialism,
but even within a single country it has assumed varied, sometimes
complex, forms, and these have been neither unchanging in nature nor
constant in strength. Three kinds of nationalism have stirred Koreans
since the late nineteenth century, reflecting and restoring a people’s
damaged pride.

                
 Political nationalism
The publication on  April  of the first newspaper to be written
entirely in the Korean han’gŭl alphabet, Tongnip Sinmun (‘The
Independent News’), was part of the nationalistic response to the
Japanese-inspired Kabo reforms, and one of the positive outcomes of
the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement (Aeguk Kyemŏng Undong). In
July that year the Independence Club was founded and took the lead in
organizing demonstrations against the reforms. As tension rose, such
signs of Korean chauvinism were quickly suppressed, but the passage
of time failed to quench the spirit behind them, and feelings of antipa-
thy towards foreign-imposed institutional change, however needful
from a modernizing point of view, fuelled racial hostility up to and
beyond the Japanese Annexation in . The public declaration of
Korean independence on  March  made a statement that would
not be forgotten and which the occupying regime could never ignore.
After Liberation in  anti-foreignism turned against America
and the , but the Korean War and the Armistice in  brought a
fresh focus for political nationalism. The number one rival now became
the regime across the , each side claiming the right to rule the
whole peninsula. Legitimacy became the first objective of political
nationalism as both North and South found that they were dependent
on foreign support, and anti-foreignism was relegated to second place.
The  could not afford to offend either the  or the  and trod
a careful line in foreign policy, while its regimented and manipulated
people turned out on regular occasions to voice their unanimous and
wholehearted love and support for their ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il Sung.
In the South, gratitude for continuing  military and economic pro-
tection was tempered by popular resentment at America’s persistent
record of backing autocratic and oppressive regimes in Seoul. For their
part, as the  strove to recover from the past and look to the future,
successive presidents from Park Chung Hee to Kim Daejung priori-
tized economic targets as proof of their nationalist credentials.
While the hoped-for reunification remained afar off, scholars in
both North and South began to re-examine history to see how it could
help their particular regime’s bid for pan-Korean legitimacy. Political
and social theorists had traditionally believed that the key to earlier
misfortunes and current policy was to be found by examining the past
and seeing where their predecessors had gone wrong. In the s, as a
result of their leaders’ reliance on the Soviet Union, China and the
United States, neither regime’s historians could occupy the moral high
ground by accusing the other of returning to traditional great-power

 
sycophancy and surrendering recently won independence. Instead,
both sides turned back to ancient history to try and prove that it was
they who had inherited the right to rule. Foundation myths came back
into fashion: whilst both sides gave official approbation to Tan’gun, the
 could lay better claim to his ancestry by virtue of his association
with Mount Paektu, where it said it had discovered his tomb, while the
 played up its supposed descent from Wiman.

Minjung nationalism
Koreans traditionally expected life to be a battle, against either oppres-
sion from their superiors or the effects of natural disasters. Even so, the
hardships and exploitation they suffered after  were exceptional,
and, to make matters worse, the rest of the world seemed impervious
to their cries for help. So the sudden Japanese capitulation on  August
 was greeted with delight and optimism. But hopes of sovereignty
restored were cruelly dashed, and the post-Liberation separation of
North from South even prompted comparison with the divisions of the
Three Kingdoms or Koryŏ period. Politically, the two new republics
began by instituting systems that were not too dissimilar, in that they
each showed an instinctive inclination towards the imperial Chinese
system of military-backed autocracy paying lip service to satisfying
popular needs. People in the  soon saw through this. As a succes-
sion of militaristic regimes, beginning with that of Syngman Rhee in
, showed scant regard for the interests of ordinary Koreans, a
groundswell of resentment began to voice the mood that had been
growing for half a century. In time this would be known as minjung
(‘populist’) nationalism. Its peak of frustration is identified with the
army’s infamous and bloody gunning down of demonstrators in
Kwangju in , but in truth both the nature of that protest and the
level of the authorities’ response give a misleading impression of min-
jung nationalism. Instead, as a gathering rumble of discontent at the
old order of aristocratic elitism (in the late Chosŏn), the cruelty of alien
conquerors (the Japanese colonial era) and the corrupt government of
military dictatorship (the early ), it appeared in a variety of social,
religious, literary and artistic forms. Sometimes violent, yet never icon-
oclastic, it showed that the Korean people, like the Chinese during the
Civil War of –, were at last prepared to stand up.
The dividing line between political and minjung nationalism looks
thin. Both expressed frustration at political repression; both involved
demonstrations. But whereas those who led the way with the former
tended to be members of identifiable groups – Chosŏn literati, students,

                
socialist activists, converts to communism – capable of defining their
targets in specific terms, the point about minjung nationalism was that
it involved all kinds of people, many of whom would not have under-
stood or used political arguments but who knew that their time was
coming. Challenging the passive Confucian viewpoint that history is
made and led by the rulers, members of all classes united to affirm
more and more what the historian Sohn Pow-key of Yŏnsei University
had written in , that ‘the people played the major role in historical
development’. Fresh attention was paid to the recent history of pop-
ular movements, especially the Tonghak Rebellion and the partisan
militia known as ŭibyŏng (‘justice fighters’). Politically, such views hinted
at an interest in democracy, something of which neither Korea nor its
traditional mentor China had had any experience, and which the military
dictators resisted with every means at their command.

Cultural nationalism
The Japanese moved quickly against political opposition after ,
but were less concerned by signs of remanent Korean nationalism in
cultural form. They encouraged art and archaeology – both because
they now said it was part of their own heritage and because cultural
activities provided opportunities for collaboration that some Koreans
were prepared to accept – endeavouring all the while to weigh the
delicate balance between those activities that might stimulate Korean
nostalgia for a vanished past against those that would promote feelings
of ethnic association with Japan. At the same time, they saw artistic
activity under their own control as an anodyne way of channelling the
younger generation’s emotions. Some Koreans were fooled, but many
more were not, and subtle ways were found for painting, music and
literature to sustain the sense of Korean difference.
After  Korean historians hurried to publish books correcting
what they saw as the distortion of history due to traditional Chinese-
style scholarly attitudes and Japanese take-over attempts. ‘It is said that
Korean histories should outgrow dynastic-centered description of his-
tory, correct historical facts that were distorted by government-patron-
ized scholars during the Japanese colonial rule, and be written from an
objective point of view. I entirely agree with this’, wrote Han Woo-
keun. Objectivity, of course, is monotonously impossible for historians
to attain. The authors of one of the new texts, Sohn, Kim and Hong,
desiring to ‘present an easy-to-read and interpretative Korean history’
and hoping that ‘the reader will find the true picture of Korean history
in this book’, began by lamenting their partitioned country. ‘The need

 
for the Korean people to lift such an unhappy division through the
consolidation of national power’, they wrote, ‘is paramount. For this
national goal we, the Korean people, have continuously attempted to
build up our own power. These self-motivated efforts, throughout
Korean history, have always been successful.’ The reader of the present
book must judge just how well supported this claim is.

As I visited South Korea through the s and ’s I encountered all
three forms of Korean nationalism. I breathed the tear gas fired against
students demonstrating over what they saw as Park Chung Hee’s pro-
Japanese policies. I witnessed the anti-Soviet outrage when Russian jets
shot down  Flight  in September . I listened to peasants’
objections to aspects of the Saemaŭl Undong (‘New Community
Movement’), and to townspeople’s resentment at the continued use of
curfew. Before it opened in , I toured the Suwŏn Folk Village, a
didactic reconstruction of Chosŏn-dynasty society that sanitized the
past and remains popular to the present day. Most of all, it was music
that brought home to me the unique richness of the Korean cultural
heritage, although, to my surprise, public appreciation of it was more
equivocal. I studied kayagŭm (zither) and p’iri (oboe) at the National
Classical Music Institute and began to research into musical history,
activities that most Koreans regarded as abstruse and curious. I was
unable to read modern Korean, and I could manage only because tra-
ditional musical scores and primary historical sources were written
wholly in Chinese characters (hancha), and even modern academic
books still partly so, despite Park Chung Hee’s endorsement of han’gŭl.
The government periodically issued revised lists of hancha that were
officially acceptable for everyday use. Most Koreans’ musical taste
preferred Western pop or classics. The opening of the grand Sejong
Cultural Center in  was accompanied by a major arts festival. The
Main Hall boasted a -rank, six-manual pipe organ, with , pipes
arranged in the shape of Korean kŏmun’go zithers hanging from the
wall, and seating for audiences of ,. The mayor of Seoul, Koo Ja
Choon, spoke of his hope that its citizens would ‘develop a deeper and
more meaningful appreciation of and concern for the preservation of
our traditional arts’. Yet throughout the whole seventeen-week festival
only one performance of traditional Korean music was given in the
Main Hall. There were, it is true, a few evenings of music and dance
newly composed by Koreans, but the overwhelming majority of events
were of Western music by Western performers. They were well attended
and warmly applauded. Traditional Korean music was given in the Small
Hall, with a seating capacity of just over . One concert consisted of

                
a brilliant performance by a virtuoso taegŭm (flute) player, who sat on
the floor at the edge of the stage. It was quite short and there was no
interval. When it was over he got up, made a slight bow to the sparse
audience, which responded with a brief handclap, and walked off. Of
course, this was an alien environment for a musical performance of this
kind and a lengthy ovation would have been out of keeping with
Korean tradition, but the fortunes of Korea’s own musical glory did
seem to be lagging. Post-war writers of poetry and stories had not been
slow to extol the Korean heritage. Nor had painters, looking for ways
of proclaiming their independence from traditional Chinese subjects
and forms while at the same time trying to avoid paths that would lead
them too close to Western modernism. Yet most musicians, with such a
unique resource of national culture at their command, had apparently
succumbed to Beethoven and Beatlemania.
Times have changed, and in the past twenty years the Korean tra-
ditional cultural situation has been transformed. Nowadays nobody uses
Chinese characters, except for writing shop signs, book titles or entries
in calligraphy competitions. Any definition of Korean national pride
would be bound to emphasize the unique han’gŭl alphabet. It is com-
monplace for children to learn Korean instruments as well as the piano,
violin, trumpet, etc; and by working with Western colleagues traditional
musicians have made international reputations as both performers and
composers. Confident now in the strength and sophistication of their
own musical heritage, they have struck out beyond preservation and
restoration, the primary aims in the s, and seen it develop. Perhaps
they took heed of a comment made at the Durham Oriental Music
Festival in . Chinese and Koreans had been invited to give concerts
of their traditional music. Audiences found pieces in the  pro-
gramme to be unimaginatively Westernized, but at least comprehensible,
whereas the Korean performances fell strangely on the ear. The group
from Beijing, who for ideological reasons in  were unable to express
any appreciation for what they called gudai yinyue (‘ancient music’),
convened a seminar to discuss what was meant by ‘traditional’ music.
Tradition, they said, must be an evolving process; addressing the
Koreans, they asked: ‘Why are you so backward?’ Perhaps some of the
Koreans took it to heart. Backward is not an adjective that anyone
would use nowadays in a definition of South Korean culture.
The twenty-first century has witnessed continuing exhibitions of
nationalism, defending what Koreans see as their rights against both
Chinese and Japanese remanent imperialism. Chapter One describes
the rise of Koguryŏ as one of the first kingdoms in what is now
Manchuria and North Korea. In  a fierce argument was stirred up

 
when China applied to have archaeological sites at Ji’an, on its side of
the border, recognized by  as a World Heritage Site. South
Korea mounted an intense campaign against what it interpreted as a
move to claim Koguryŏ as part of ancient China. Since at that time nei-
ther China nor Korea existed in their modern geopolitical senses, the
dispute proved nothing other than the strength of today’s sense of
Korean nationhood, and it was academics rather than ordinary citizens
who were most aroused by it. Two years later the protests were more
widespread when Tokyo reiterated its ownership of the small Tokto or
Takeshima islands. The year  had been designated Korea–Japan
Friendship Year, more in hope than celebration, but possession of these
islands had long been disputed, and the year was less than three months
old when anti-Japanese demonstrations erupted on the streets of Seoul.
Nationalism haunts many an old battlefield.

                
 I

The Creation of
State Identity
  

From Earliest Times to  :

Cultural Patterns in Flux
This chapter summarizes the evolution of the earliest social and
political units on the Korean peninsula, and the appearance and
growth of the three kingdoms that are eponymous with the first
historical period in Korean history. It outlines the early interaction
between the Chinese mainland and the Korean peninsula, and
explains the pride that modern Koreans feel in the cultural aspects
of this early age.

About , years ago homo erectus took possession of a cave at

Hukwuri, near P’yŏngyang in northern Korea. Further south, his rela-
tives set up homesteads at Kŭmgul on the Namhan river, and at
Sŏkchang-ni near the Kŭm river in South Ch’ungch’ŏng province. In
due course these creatures died out or moved on, leaving behind them
stone tools, hand-axes and the bones of the fauna on which they
preyed, including elephant, tiger, bear, rhinoceros, boar, monkey,
bison, deer and horse. Later, homo sapiens sapiens also left remains in
both northern and southern Korea. Among those that have been
ascribed to the middle palaeolithic (,‒, ) is a site at
Suyanggae, in North Ch’ungch’ŏng, which yielded evidence of work-
shops with anvils and hammer stones. An upper (late) palaeolithic site
carbon-dated to , , also at Sŏkchang-ni, includes a dwelling for
up to ten people, part of a hunting community that used axes, knives
and scrapers.
Neolithic sites are more plentiful, and are again distributed from
top to bottom of the peninsula. Clusters of settlements have been
found along the coast and in river valleys of the north-east (Yalu),
north-west (Tumen), west (Ch’ŏngch’ŏn) and south (Nakdong). The
earliest to be -authenticated are on the east coast at Osanni,
Kangwŏn, and suggest that northern and eastern Korea may have been
settled by tribes from southern Siberia from about   onwards.
Remains from Amsa-ri, near Seoul, date from around   and
show signs of influence from the Liaoning direction, where the


Hongshan culture of –  and the Xiajiadian, carbon-dated to
– , stretched along the Bohai corridor and may have con-
tributed to the development of Korean settlements. Neolithic villages
were grouped in small clusters and practised mixed hunting, gathering
and fishing economies. Mussels, clams and oysters formed a staple part
of people’s diet, and bones and artefacts were well preserved under-
neath the shells that they threw away. Nowadays their rubbish dumps
bear the rather grand name of shell mounds and are valuable sources of
information for archaeologists. Villagers lived in semi-subterranean
dwellings with a central hearth. At Osanni and other north-eastern
locations, and then down the west coast as well, they learned to make
thin, flat-bottomed pottery vessels, decorating them at first with
incised patterns and with lines pinched into relief. From about  ,
at sites between the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn and Han rivers, they began to pro-
duce conical containers and to put geometric patterns on their wares
with a toothed scraper (chŭlmun, ‘comb pattern’). Comb patterns
spread to other parts of Korea and continued to adorn ceramic wares
until the Bronze Age, but around the beginning of the second millen-
nium  a new style of hard-fired, undecorated (mumun) pottery
appeared, associated with upland locations away from the coast and not
unlike that found in some parts of Heilongjiang province in China.
Xiajiadian artefacts included stone and pottery pieces similar to those
of the Korean mumun phase (though Korean sites have not revealed the
pottery tripods that were common in Chinese neolithic assemblages).
Mumun came from farming communities that cultivated rice and used
semi-lunar knives to reap cereal crops, and the fact that they made pol-
ished stone swords and stone arrowheads might mean that they had to
defend themselves against human enemies as well as wild animals.
Some archaeologists believe that they had also begun to domesticate
pigs. The origins of rice cultivation on the peninsula seem to coincide
with the beginnings of upper Xiajiadian culture, and traces from
Hunamni, Kyŏnggi province, have been scientifically dated to  .
(Claims presented in  that burnt rice grains from Sorori, North
Ch’ungch’ŏng province, had been dated to ,–,  are still
disputed.) Communications were easy around the littoral, and if sailors
were unhappy about sailing direct from the Shanghai delta or the
Shandong peninsula they could hug the coast around the bay with
relative ease. It may have been by one of these routes that rice first
reached Korea.
Death rituals already assumed a degree of formality in neolithic
communities. They buried the deceased in pits, jars or stone cist tombs,
and from about   onwards also began to lay a big single stone,

                       
or dolmen, horizontally over the tomb. Some nearby cultures in
Manchuria and Siberia did the same, but there are said to be more than
, dolmens in Korea, the most in any country in the world, and
such weight of numbers argues that the practice originated there.
Dolmen burials come in different styles, some of them evidently
regional. Many stones are found singly, others in groups or in lines, and
some are linked by a pavement. The heaviest weigh as much as 
tonnes, and some have mysterious egg-shaped depressions on top that
have yet to be satisfactorily explained. To ease the passage of the body
into its next life personal effects were buried with it, including pottery,
bronze daggers, kogok curved bead jewellery and curious spoon-shaped
implements sometimes decorated with a carved human face. These are
so far among the first examples of Korean figurative representation,
though chŭlmun sites have yielded a small number of primitive efforts
at shaping human figures from clay and faces from shell, which have
been put forward as possible signs of fertility rites. A bone flute in
P’yŏngyang National Museum is dated to c.   and may have
come from a mumun dolmen tomb. Precious grave goods like these sug-
gest the appearance of social stratification.
Generally, dolmens are associated with the transition from the late
neolithic into the Bronze Age. (North Korean archaeologists, who have
been suspected of allowing adherence to political rather than academic
considerations to guide their judgement on the antiquity of Korean
civilization, believe that some of their ‘pavement sites’ date back as far
as  .) Bronze weapons, arrowheads, shields and mirrors went
into dolmen tombs. They were presumably valuable possessions, and
may have been acquired through trade. The Bronze Age came rather
late to Korea. The first remains date from around the beginning of the
eighth century  and seem to be linked with Upper Xiajiadian culture.
Later, second-century  stone moulds from the Yŏngsan river valley
in the far south-west suggest, but do not prove, the possibility of
Chinese influence from the direction of the Yangzi delta. Exactly when
Koreans first began to make bronzes for themselves is unclear, but it
was some time before the fourth century . Once they had started,
they were not slow to learn and develop their own styles. In Shang
China, the possession of bronze was a symbol of royal power, and it
may have had a special connotation in Korea too, for bronzes are not
found in village settlements. Korean creations included a distinctive
version of the Manchurian mandolin dagger (sehyŏng tonggŏm), featur-
ing a blade with a shaped waist; a halberd more slender than contem-
porary Chinese examples; and mirrors with two carrying loops instead
of the usual Chinese one, decorated with geometric patterns on the

      

back. Mouldings on Chinese mirrors incorporated a definite cosmic
element not found on Korean mirrors, and were apparently made in
clay rather than stone moulds.
Korean bronze casters made a unique eight-armed rattle of small
bells. Today it is part of the shaman’s ritualistic paraphernalia, and this
may have been its original function. Geometric patterns and animal
motifs found in rock art from south-east Korean locations, especially at
Pan’gudae near Kyŏngju, have been interpreted – not without arousing
some scepticism – as shamanistic designs with Siberian overtones. The
designs themselves cannot be dated precisely, and shamanism was so
widespread, in China as well as Siberia, that no one can say when it
entered Korea and from where. The Guanzi, a Chinese miscellany of
materials probably compiled by Liu Xiang (– ), says that it was
powerful in Yan, the Zhou dynasty statelet that stretched around the
Bohai coastal plains from somewhere north of the Shandong peninsula
to the far side of the Liaodong peninsula.
Yan was the most northerly of the late Zhou inter-state federation,
and beyond it moved the tribes that the Chinese disparagingly called the
Dongyi (‘eastern barbarians’). The Chinese built walls to try to mini-
mize contact with them, but these were no barrier to either raiding
armies or the peaceful exchange of trade. The Xiongnu, for example,
were feared and despised by the Chinese, yet archaeological finds in
Inner Mongolia show that they had learned much from their contacts
with the northern statelets and were far from unsophisticated. Chinese
authors probably used the conglomerate term Dongyi loosely to include
some or all of the tribal confederations of horse-raising nomads of
Inner Mongolia, the Xianbei and Wuhuan, members of the Tungusic
Ye and Mo (Kor. Maek) tribes from along the Yalu river, and the Puyŏ
tribal unit of the Sungari river. The Ye and Mo may have migrated
down to the Yalu basin from their homelands above the Sungari river
some time after the eighth century . In  the Japanese anthropol-
ogist Siratori Kurakichi linked them together as the Yemaek and recog-
nized them as the ancestors of the historical Korean kingdoms of
Koguryŏ and Paekche. Others saw them as founders of a statelet around
the northern and eastern flanks of Yan that bore the name Zhaoxian
(Kor. Chosŏn, ‘Morning [or Early] Freshness’). Exactly how and when
that statelet came into being is unclear, but in the twentieth century it
became linked to the earliest Korean foundation myths. Some Korean
historians identified its predecessors with the people of Ko Chosŏn
(‘Old Chosŏn’), said to have been founded by Tan’gun. The possibility
thus arose that the ancestors of their own race were to be found among
the Dongyi.

                       
 Probable though it seems that the ancestors of today’s Koreans
arrived on the peninsula via Manchuria, and that a statelet known as
Zhaoxian/ Chosŏn did exist somewhere in or beyond the Liaoning
region controlled by Yan, these stories do not shed any definite light on
the foundation of the first proto-Korean state or states. The earliest
literary records are too scrappy and were too subject to later manipu-
lation for a convincing understanding of ancient history. Twentieth-
century Japanese scholarship debunked the Tan’gun myth on the
basis of its late origins, but nationalist Korean historians fought back.
Among them Sin Ch’aeho (–), intent on proving Korea’s
ethnic origins independent of either China or Japan, identified
shamanistic and topographical elements in the story and determined
that Tan’gun’s empire had stretched as far north as the Amur river and
south to Liaodong and Korea. Another great Korean nationalist, Ch’oe
Namsŏn (–), not only argued in favour of the myth but even
went so far as to claim that it showed the origins of a cultural sphere
extending from Japan in the east as far as Asia Minor in the west. A
more moderate but equally unsubstantiated interpretation came from
Yi Kibaek, who proposed Tan’gun as the founder of a Dongyi cultural
sphere. Thus, what had started life as a legend proved under conditions
of colonial occupation to be so attractive a palliative that it began to
acquire a veneer of historical respectability. That process has since
been taken to its limits by historians in the , anxious to prove not
only that their regime has inherited a ruling mantle of unimpeachable
antiquity, but also that their political philosophy of juche (‘self-reliance’)
is equally well founded. Under their patronage Tan’gun has been
turned into the unquestioned historical progenitor of the Korean
people and creator of the Korean state. The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il
is said, quite incorrectly, to have been born on Paektu-san (‘White-
headed Mountain’). Koreans everywhere recognize this ‘holy moun-
tain’ as a national symbol, and in the context of rival political claims to
leadership of a reunified country the implications of a new ‘semi-
divine’ birth on its slopes would be obvious. If North Koreans could
travel freely within their own country, or if North Korea figured promi-
nently on the international tourist itinerary, it would without doubt
prove to be the number-one attraction in the country. Perhaps the
groundwork for tourism was being laid when, in ,  archaeol-
ogists announced that bones found in a tomb at Kangdong-ŭp,
Kangdong-myŏn, had been electronically tested and dated to  .
They were hailed as the remains of Tan’gun and his queen.

      

    
As the second century  dawned, the inhabitants of the region we
know as Manchuria were a mixed bunch. Yan had erected two lengths
of wall, the more easterly of which stretched across the Yalu river, to
defend itself from the Dongyi. When Yan fell to Qin in the s ,
these were incorporated into the First Emperor’s Great Wall of China
and formed part of the new nation’s north-eastern boundary. For the
next century or more, imperial China showed little interest in political
or military activity beyond it. To Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty
in  , the questions of how far Chosŏn stretched, how firm its
political authority was, and whether its relations with the troublesome
Xiongnu tribes made it a potential ally or enemy of China were all mat-
ters as uncertain as they mostly still are to modern historians. The year
after his death in  , a new capital was founded at Wanggŏmsŏng,
near modern P’yŏngyang, by Wei Man (Kor. Wiman). In modern terms
Wiman Chosŏn, as we call the state he ruled, was neither Chinese nor
Korean. Its population came from both west and east (and very probably
north, too), and saw ample opportunities to profit from trade in both
directions. For a long time Han enjoyed peaceful relations with Wiman
Chosŏn and with tribes beyond it in southern Korea. Until, in  ,
Wiman’s grandson King Ugŏ killed an envoy from Emperor Wudi and
threatened to interrupt communication between southern Korea and
the Han court. Then, the Martial Emperor’s response was unequivocal.
Han armies swept north across Manchuria into northern Korea,
destroyed Wanggŏmsŏng, and in   set up four commanderies. This
turned out to be a defining date in north-east Asian history. Of the four,
Lelang (Kor. Nangnang), centred on the restored site of Wanggŏmsŏng
in the Taedong valley, and Xuantu (Kor. Hyŏndo), filling erstwhile
Yemaek lands north of the Yalu, were the most important; in   they
absorbed Zhenfan (Kor. Chinbŏn) and Lintun (Kor. Imdun), extend-
ing south from Lelang to the Han river valley and east to the coast
respectively. Lelang flourished under the command of the Chinese
Gongsun clan, and for a long time lived in comparative peace. Its
fortress, T’osŏngni, on the southern bank of the river, was a source of
Chinese economic and cultural influence across the peninsula and
remained an impregnable symbol of Chinese regional authority for
more than  years. By contrast, Xuantu came under increasing pres-
sure from the central Manchurian tribal confederation of Koguryŏ, and
in   had to be relocated further westwards.
Later myth claimed that Koguryŏ had been founded by a skilful
archer and horseman, born from a miraculous egg near Bear Mountain

                       
on the Yalu river about  . His name was Chumong, and he also
became known as King Tongmyŏng. (To demonstrate that ‘North
Korean’ Koguryŏ was older than ‘South Korean’ Silla, Kim Il Sung
had  historians push the date of its foundation back to  .
On his orders, archaeologists discovered Tongmyŏng’s tomb near
P’yŏngyang in , and a mausoleum was built there.) The actual ori-
gins of Koguryŏ are obscure. Its inhabitants were probably descended
from people based further to the north, perhaps in the Songhua river
heartland of Puyŏ or in the lands of the Yemaek. Their first capital on
the Yalu was at Hwandosŏng, and from there they already posed a
threat to Lelang. The stage was set in fact for the great love–hate rela-
tionship that would dominate the Sino-Korean drama for more than
two millennia. In the first century  the Koguryŏ leader assumed the
title of king (wang), an honour previously bestowed by the Han
emperors on their own designated regional representatives. That notwith-
standing, the Chinese had no reason to anticipate any impending
challenge to the success of Lelang. They were wrong.
Han officials sent to work in Lelang were expected to collect trib-
ute for shipment back to Chang’an, raise taxes and organize corvée
labour. They were helped by Chinese families who had lived in Wiman
Chosŏn for generations and by a native elite that seems to have been
formed before the Chinese arrival. They rewarded collaborators with
titles, seals and luxury goods including gold, silver and silks.
Characters inscribed on some of their seals suggest that these people
were able to use the Chinese script. Wealthy local families lived, as they
would later be buried, in great style. They wore Chinese-style
bracelets, earrings of silver and glass, bronze belt-hooks and tortoise-
shell hairpins. They ate off lacquered dishes and drank from cups of
wheel-made, hard-fired grey pottery, more advanced than products
from native areas. Into the grave with them went bronzes, jades, lac-
querware, chariot fittings, tools and weapons that included the highly
valued Chinese crossbow. So too did Chinese coins, collected as status
symbols rather than currency, for trade was conducted by barter. It was
probably knife-coinage from Yan that first introduced the Koreans to
iron in the third century . Its revolutionary effects were not confined
to social-status marking. The appearance of iron ore in southern Korea
alerted both Chinese and Japanese to the region’s economic possibili-
ties, and the production of iron harness, weaponry and armour began
to turn peninsular armies into formidable forces.
Early in the third century  it became clear that the days of the
Han were numbered in China, and Liaodong came under increasing
attack from Koguryŏ. A counter-campaign mounted by the Gongsun

      

leadership around   forced Koguryŏ to relocate its capital across
the Yalu to Kungnaesŏng, but all the Chinese commanderies in Korea
lay north of the Han river and expatriate officials on the peninsula must
have felt exposed. In  Cao Pi formed a new imperial administration
in Luoyang, took the dynastic title Wei and removed the Gongsun
overlords from Lelang. When he mounted a successful attack on
Koguryŏ in , Chinese authority over Manchuria and the northern
half of the peninsula seemed secure again. Native and Chinese
refugees alike fled south of the Han river into a region that many of
them already knew from trade and diplomatic contacts. Once this had
been the polity of Chin. Our knowledge of its history or territorial
extent is limited, but during the third century  it was superseded by
three tribal confederations, Mahan in the south-west, Pyŏnhan in the
central south and Chinhan in the south-east (the so-called Samhan,
‘Three Han’). Their economic power rested primarily on mixed agri-
culture, including dry cereals, rice and silkworms, and their ability to
supply iron. All three paid tribute to Lelang, and their leaders enjoyed
Chinese luxury goods. Evidence suggests that these southerners prac-
tised shamanic religion, including divination with bones. According to
the Chinese history San guo zhi (Wei zhi), they had no horse-riding
skills: if so, it did not deter them from mounting occasional attacks on
Lelang. Perhaps they sensed a future in ships rather than horses, for
their iron was already being traded around the southern coasts. On the
other hand, the Wei zhi was probably wrong. When Paekche, Mahan’s
successor, donated horses to the Yamato court in  , it already
shared with its neighbours in Koguryŏ a reputation for mounted archery.
Across the straits the proto-Japanese civilization called Wo (Jap.
Wa) by Chinese writers was on the brink of transition from the Yayoi
( ‒ ) to the Kofun ( –) period. While its consoli-
dation into a centralized state was still far off, the first kingdom of
Yamato was taking shape at the end of the fourth century . Textual
references tell of ‘Wa’ envoys to both Korea and China, and even if
some of these were no more than enterprising adventurers or even
coastal merchants blown off course, it was the genesis of a diplomatic
triangle that would dominate the region for centuries to come. Japanese
ships were as yet unable to sail directly across the sea to the Chinese
coast, and Koreans profited from Yamato diplomats stopping off on
Korean soil on their way to the Middle Kingdom. Rulers in northern
and southern Korea quickly appreciated the advantages of exchanging
formal missions with both neighbouring countries. For the time being,
however, their eyes were fixed more on the north than the south. The
remaining years of Chinese dominion on the peninsula were numbered.

                       
Far from being cowed by the Wei challenge in  , Koguryŏ was
back with an offensive against Lelang in . At the same time another
commandery, Daifang, which had been carved out of Lelang’s south-
ern counties in  , also came under threat from the newly rising
kingdom of Paekche. An assault on Lelang in  finally tipped the
scale, and by  both commanderies had capitulated.

   

The Korean peninsula was now entering a crucial period. Hardened by
harsh climate and mountainous terrain, Koguryŏ’s uncompromising
approach to military and diplomatic activities confirmed it as the
strongest power in the region. In   King Changsu moved its cap-
ital southwards from Kungnaesŏng to a site near modern P’yŏngyang.
There it confronted Paekche, which, having consolidated its position
within the territory of Mahan, had, like a cuckoo in the nest, over-
thrown it in  . Down in the south-east, Saro, one of twelve
Chinhan tribal units, emerged as the front-runner that would eventu-
ally form the kingdom of Silla. And in the far south, tribes that had
formerly belonged within the confederation of Pyŏnhan now took
shape as Kaya. Two of its territories acquired special prominence. They
were Tae (‘Great’) Kaya around modern Koryŏng and Pon (‘Original’)
Kaya along the lower Nakdong river (modern Kimhae).
The process of state formation was not yet complete and competi-
tion between the rising powers was fierce. There was no concept of
fixed territorial boundaries and the range of the states’ dominion was
fluid. Koguryŏ and Paekche each moved their capital cities twice; Silla
was unusual in the ancient East Asian world in that it preserved its seat
of government in the same place for perhaps as long as seven centuries,
calling it Saro in the proto-Three Kingdoms period and Kyŏngju from
  onwards. Pragmatism and self-interest ruled, and warfare was
frequent as alliances were made and broken with apparent disdain.
Peasants struggling to farm the valleys through which armies marched
and counter-marched, or local officials of towns called on to switch alle-
giance to their latest overlords, must sometimes have felt utter bewilder-
ment, and may neither have known nor cared to which kingdom they
belonged. Merchants up and down the peninsula struggled to keep their
businesses going. To legitimize and strengthen their positions, tribal
leaders propagated claims of supernatural elements in the foundation of
their states, and claimed shamanistic powers for themselves to ward off
natural disasters and boost harvests. Political ideas across the peninsula
were confused, but were starting to be driven by the search for ultimate

      

unification and stability. In Silla, political decisions were sanctioned in
the course of rites honouring the dynastic founder.
Meanwhile China too was fractured, as a succession of non-
Chinese regimes ruled the north and five Chinese dynasties the south.
The capitals of those in the north were located at Datong, Luoyang,
Ye and Chang’an, while all five southern courts ruled from Nanjing.
Envoys journeyed between the two Chinas, the three Korean king-
doms, Kaya and Japan in search of aid and trade. Koguryŏ was the
kingdom in most frequent contact with a Chinese court, generally – as
its geographical situation dictated – the northern one. It matched per-
sistent diplomacy with military confrontation, and was used to suffer-
ing heavy casualties. Paekche launched the second-highest total of
missions, mainly by the dangerous sea route to Nanjing. Silla, being the
most remote, dispatched the fewest. The reunification of the Middle
Kingdom by Sui in   and the revival of active Chinese involve-
ment in the Three Kingdoms’ rivalry led to a noticeable increase in the
overall frequency of missions: Paekche, for example, which according
to an aggregate of those listed in Korean and Chinese sources sent 
missions during the period  –, did so most often from the
early sixth century , and annually from  onwards. No single text
provides a complete record of diplomatic encounters, and often it is
only those rated as unusually important that get a mention. The sen-
tences referring to them are terse to the point of off-handedness, and
sometimes pose more questions than they answer. We are not always
told whether envoys went with specific purposes or what they took as
gifts, though items of gold- and silverware were prominent among
them, and Paekche seems to have sent plenty of ‘shining armour’. The
Chinese treated them all as tribute-bearing missions, even if requests
for military aid should really be seen in a different light from the ritual
offering of congratulations on the accession of a new emperor or the
announcement of a new king.
A record of embassies underlines the bureaucratic imperative for
undertaking the risky journey from one country to another. As the
Chinese invested vassal rulers and their hangers-on with grand-sound-
ing titles, robes and seals, so in turn the Korean courts began to adopt
Chinese rites and ceremonies, and to follow the official dress code of
the Chinese courts. The Koguryŏ and Paekche courts officially accepted
Confucianism in the fourth century , and among the Chinese texts
studied by their scholars the vade mecum of Chinese etiquette, Liji
(Kor. Yegi, ‘Record of Rites’), was prominent. Koguryŏ opened a
Confucian Academy in  ; three styles of Chinese calligraphy were
copied (Ch. kaishu / Kor. hyesŏ, regular script; lishu / yesŏ, clerical

                       
script; and xingshu / haengsŏ, running script); and scholars needed live
contacts with Chinese colleagues in order to keep their ideas fresh. The
benefit would be felt in the efficiency of a government’s man-manage-
ment system, and by impressing Chinese ambassadors if and when
they should arrive.
It was not only students of Confucianism who needed to charge
their batteries from Chinese sources of inspiration. The newly estab-
lished and growing Buddhist communities in all three kingdoms had to
maintain pastoral and study links with their parent bodies, the holy
mountain regions in northern and southern China. The monk Sundo
is said to have introduced the new religion to P’yŏngyang in  
while presenting a request from the Eastern Jin court for an alliance
against the Murong Xianbei state (called Former Yan) in Manchuria; a
Serindian monk, Malananda, brought it to Paekche’s Hansŏng (mod-
ern Seoul) in  ; and Kyŏngju, which must already have heard of
Buddhism from its two neighbours but where it had to overcome the
strongest opposition from shamanic interest groups, accepted it in
  after the monk Ich’adon had dramatically sacrificed his life. The
courts were well used to the idea of bolstering secular rule with an aura
of spiritual authority, and Buddhism, so they were led to believe, could
perform miracles to defend the state. Commoners responded to royal
edicts encouraging them to accept the new religion, adding it to their
customary shamanistic practices. The Korean courts understood too
that patronizing Buddhism would impress on the Chinese leaders that
they shared their ideas and appreciated their aesthetic taste. Now, as
monasteries, pagodas and Buddhist statuary sprang up around the
three Korean capitals, craftsmen joined scholars in moving around
between the states. In  , when King Sŏng of Paekche asked the
Nanjing court for Buddhist texts and teachers of the Shijing (‘Book of
Odes’), he also requested artisans, perhaps to help build and decorate
his new palace in Sabi. Twelve years later, it was Paekche architects
who supervised work on Silla’s great Hwangnyŏng (‘Yellow Dragon’)
temple.
Korean scholars and artisans were welcome in Wa. Professional
scribes introduced Chinese characters there in   and probably
monopolized their use for some time after that. King Sŏng of Paekche
is credited with introducing Buddhism into Japan, via either a mission
sent in   or another in  that presented the Yamato court with
gifts of gold and copper Buddhist images, ritual objects and sutras. The
Koguryŏ monk Hyeja crossed the sea in  to work as tutor to Prince
Shōtoku. Craftsmen who emigrated in  to build Asukadera, Japan’s
oldest temple, also introduced the art of tile-making. Shortly after-

      

wards the monk Kwallŭk earned a reputation in Nara as a teacher of
the calendar and geomancy (p’ungsu). An early seventh-century
Buddhist triad at Hōryū-ji is inscribed with a name similar to that of
the craftsman who made two of the silver bracelets found in King
Muryŏng’s tomb, though whether it was made in Paekche or Japan is
impossible to tell. The first Paekche seamstress had been sent to
Yamato in  , just after a considerable influx of migrants, and
Chūgū-ji preserves a piece of embroidery finished in  by local
needlewomen under the supervision of Paekche teachers. The resident
Korean community in Japan included many examples of occupational
groupings, and the number of asylum-seekers rose when Paekche final-
ly succumbed to Silla and Tang forces in .
Ancient history the world over is enlivened by larger-than-life
heroes and villains. As states and empires were formed, it was only
natural that men (and sometimes women) of character, ambition and
organizing ability should seize their opportunities and make names for
themselves. Feared and respected in their lifetime, they would be
immortalized by biographers and hagiographers for their achievements
and the standards they set. Nowhere was this truer than in China and
Korea, where Confucianism held up exemplars for emulation and
anti-heroes as warning lessons. None of the three kingdoms is lacking
in heroic figures. For the most part they comprise the kings under
whom they took shape, developed and flourished. Three stand out:
Kwanggaet’o of Koguryŏ, Muryŏng of Paekche and Pŏphŭng of Silla.
Kwanggaet’o (r.  –) extended Koguryŏ’s territory until it cov-
ered nearly two-thirds of the peninsula and most of Manchuria as far
as the Sungari river. He looked southwards too, sending troops to assist
Silla to repel a Yamato fleet attacking the coast in league with Paekche
in  . When he died, his son Changsu had a memorial stele erect-
ed next to his tomb at Kungnaesŏng. It measured . metres and
weighed  tonnes, and on it , Chinese characters carved in yesŏ
script related the legend of Chumong and gave an account of the great
king’s exploits. Despite its size, the stone was lost for many centuries.
When it was rediscovered in the early s, a rubbing taken by a
Japanese soldier was used as evidence to support the idea that Yamato
had once colonized southern Korea. Examination of the stone today
shows that the reference to Kwanggaet’o’s victory in   is indeci-
pherable: some Koreans believe that it was deliberately defaced, perhaps
during the colonial period.
By the third quarter of the fifth century Koguryŏ power was irre-
sistible, and after vain appeals to Northern Wei China for help, King
Kaero of Paekche (r.  –) was forced to abandon his capital at

                       
Hansŏng. Before killing himself on the banks of the Han river, he man-
aged to evacuate his court southwards to Ungjin (modern Kongju). It
was there that his second son Sama came to the throne in   and
was buried in . His posthumous title is Muryŏng (‘Military Peace’),
and the Samguk sagi depicts him as a handsome and imposing man. He
was one of the first architects of a Paekche revival, securing his northern
border with a series of fortresses, creating an irrigation system and
forming an alliance with the court in Nanjing that led to the dedication
of a new temple in Ungjin to the Liang emperor Wudi. According to
some accounts, Muryŏng had served as a Paekche feudal ruler of Wa,
a tamno king. Others even claim that he was born on Kyūshū to the
sister-in-law of an earlier tamno king. The luxurious contents sur-
rounding him in his tomb certainly confirm a taste for both Japanese
and Chinese style.
Throughout Muryŏng’s reign, Paekche lived in peace with its east-
ern neighbour Silla. There, the major innovations of his contemporary
ruler Pŏphŭng (r.  –) included an administrative code of 
which introduced the kolp’um (‘bone-rank’) system of political and
social stratification, strengthened the central authority of the state and
adopted Chinese court dress. He promoted irrigation schemes in con-
junction with powerful landowners, and formally recognized Buddhism
in . Hitherto shamanism had been predominant in Silla, but as a sys-
tem it lacked a holistic structure and its rites and claims differed even
from village to village. Buddhism’s advocates had probably impressed
on Pŏphŭng how much progress Koguryŏ and Paekche had made since
they adopted the new religion, and argued that it could help to cement
society at a time of potentially unsettling upheaval. Exactly what that
society made of the consequent ban on the killing of animals ( ) is
a matter for conjecture. Pŏphŭng himself, however, was evidently a sin-
cere convert to the faith, for at the end of his reign he withdrew to a
monastery (and his wife to a nunnery). As a pivotal date in the inter-
relationship of history and culture it would be hard to over-exaggerate
the significance of . It coincides with the beginning of Silla’s
emphatic rise to political supremacy over Kaya, Paekche and Koguryŏ,
its identification as the tributary state that Chinese courts had eventually
to treat with most respect, and its cultural transformation in less than
two centuries from back-marker to front-runner on the peninsula.
The pacifism we think of today as a characteristic of Buddhism
is all very well, but could it have served these kings of ancient history
as well as their great armies and generals did? When , of Sui
Yangdi’s soldiers poured over the Yalu and Salsu (Ch’ŏngch’ŏn) rivers
in , bent on retribution for the disaster two years earlier when only

      

a fraction of an even bigger army destroyed by Ŭlchi Mondŏk managed
to struggle home through the mud, the defence of the Koguryŏ capital
relied on the same general. The Samguk sagi says, as we might expect,
that he was ‘self-possessed, brave and resourceful’. (The second-high-
est military award for bravery in South Korea today is the Ŭlchi medal.)
It also makes a point of commending his ability to write, the inference
being that he had more than basic literacy. As P’yŏngyang was
besieged, Ŭlchi composed a poem of supposed surrender, which he
sent to the commanders of the weary Chinese armies. It read:

Your divine plans have plumbed the heavens;

Your subtle reckoning has spanned the earth.
You win every battle, your military merit is great.
Why then not be content and stop the war?

Fearing a trap, the Chinese rejected the offer, but when it was repeat-
ed, their exhaustion got the better of them and they withdrew in a hol-
low square. This was the chance Ŭlchi had been hoping for. His own
soldiers rushed out and chased the Chinese right back to their own
frontier town in Liaodong, a distance of some  miles, in less than 
hours. According to the Samguk sagi, only , reached home safely.
Ŭlchi Mondŏk’s renown is rivalled only by that of Silla’s outstanding
general, Kim Yusin, whom we shall meet in chapter Two.
The laconic nature of textual references to these trans-regional
exchanges does little to suggest the human stories lying behind them.
We can only guess, for example, what it felt like for the girls periodically
sent as brides to foreign courts, for the crown prince of Paekche when
he was dispatched to the Yamato court as a hostage in  , or for a
Silla prince who experienced the same fate in . What emotions
might these two have felt when they were sent home after eight and six-
teen years respectively in Japan? We may only wonder whether the
eighteen Koguryŏ musicians, kept to play at the Sui emperor Yangdi’s
court in Chang’an, were victimized after Ŭlchi’s victories. And what
mental turmoil might thousands of Chinese prisoners of war have felt
before they rejected the chance of repatriation from Koguryŏ in ?
Was the roving Silla ambassador Kim Ch’unch’u (d. ) immune to
nerves as he criss-crossed a region tense with war, visiting Koguryŏ,
Yamato and Tang China? Held hostage in Koguryŏ after failing to per-
suade its military dictator Yŏn Kaesomun to switch allegiance from
Paekche, he had to be rescued by a military task force. In  he was off
again, this time in search of help from China, whose own attack on
Koguryŏ had been repulsed at Anshi, in Liaodong, three years previ-

                       
ously. Up till then Emperor Taizong had evidently tried to treat the
Three Kingdoms with a degree of even-handedness, and had even
shown that he had a human side. We catch a glimpse of it in  when
he returned two beautiful female musicians sent by Silla as tribute, say-
ing that ‘the pleasures of music and sex cannot be compared with the
love of virtue’. In  he had ceremonially mourned the death of the
Paekche king Mu. After Anshi he spared , Koguryŏ prisoners of
war and even sent them presents as a mark of respect for their brave
defence of their city, though thousands more were marched back to
slavery in Chang’an, where their uncompromising reception showed
that the emperor was no wimp. To be on the safe side, Koguryŏ sent
him two beautiful women in gratitude for sparing so many captives.
Taizong sent them home too, sympathizing with their grief at being
separated from their families. Ch’unch’u may well have wondered what
to expect from his risky venture, and hoped that the benevolent side of
the Son of Heaven’s character would prevail. In the event his journey
turned out to be pointless, for Taizong was dying. But the Kim fami-
ly’s involvement with China did not end there. Ch’unch’u’s son Kim
Inmun, a noted calligrapher, was sent to Chang’an in  to serve in the
imperial bodyguard, and later became assistant commander of the large
Chinese force that campaigned against Paekche. Ch’unch’u himself
saw off two rivals to become King Muyŏl on the death of Queen
Chindŏk in . When he too died in , Emperor Gaozong sent an
envoy to Kyŏngju with imperial condolences. Seven years later, when
Tang assisted Silla again in the final destruction of Koguryŏ, the relief
in China must have been profound.

 
Craftsmen across the peninsula all used the same materials – clay and
stone, silver and gold, bronze and iron, jade and ivory, wood and lac-
quer. But regionalism was strong, and as they developed their own
tastes and skills, their work exhibited different characteristics. In
Koguryŏ the style of art reflected the outlook of a border people tough-
ened by a harsh climate, rough terrain and frequent border clashes.
That of Paekche was imbued with a gentler nature, perhaps a reflection
of its creators’ sincere Buddhist convictions. Until its somewhat dra-
matic conversion to Chinese ways in the sixth century , Silla, the
kingdom most remote from outside influence, showed the least sign of
artistic sophistication, though treasures in the National Museum of
Korea at Kyŏngju show that it was collecting high-quality goods from
abroad. Among them are a superb Scythian dagger sheath of intricately

      

worked gold and red agate from the vicinity of the tomb of King
Michu (r.  –), and a beautiful phoenix-shaped Chinese glass
vessel found in the fifth–sixth-century  Hwangnam tomb.
The influence of Han culture, so widely admired and imitated dur-
ing the commanderies period, did not disappear promptly with the
colonists in  –. Some Chinese residents, anyway, lived on in
Koguryŏ, and the adoption of Confucianism and Buddhism presented
the Three Kingdoms with intellectual and cultural imperatives for keep-
ing direct lines of contact with China open. But both philosophies also
provided a stimulus to independent cultural progress. The Korean stone
stupa, for example, a structure placed within the grounds of a temple to
hold holy relics (sarira), texts or offerings, evolved from the substantially
larger Chinese pagoda of wood or brick, which was a building rather
than a monument. The Korean model usually had just three or five
shallow, tapering storeys, though one at Mirŭk-sa, near the Paekche
capital at Sabi, had seven or nine granite storeys when it was built
around  .
Many of the surviving examples of early arts and crafts come from
tombs. Excavation of these began during the Japanese colonial period,
and even though few had been unmolested, they still preserved a
capacity to amaze. The most elaborate were those of the ruling classes
in and around Lelang. At first they comprised subterranean wooden
chambers, until in the third century  brick or stone tombs containing
one, two or three chambers became fashionable. These were built above
ground and covered with protective earth mounds. Some , cover
the river delta to the south-east of P’yŏngyang, and future grave robbers
were doubtless grateful for these giant molehills. Inside, domed ceilings
and walls and floors were lined with decorated bricks. The coffins of
rich occupants might be encased within an outer casket, extravagantly
and colourfully decorated. More than one member of a family might
occupy the same tomb, and the burial goods they took with them into
the next life were usually piled in a side chamber. In the Tomb of the
Painted Basket, a double-chambered burial from circa  , lay the
three coffins of a man, a woman and a child. The man had a dagger at
his side and leather shoes on his feet. Three rolls of yellow silk were
found, apparently those referred to in the inscription on a wooden tablet
indicating that he was a high Lelang official. A low curved-leg table
of partly lacquered wood was large enough to host a banquet, and
other burial goods included gold, silver and tortoiseshell jewellery,
and statuettes of horses, chariots and human figures. The eponymous
basket was of lacquered wickerwork with brightly painted figures on
the sides, and a wall painting showed a number of horse-riders.

                       
 Approximately , Koguryŏ tombs are known. While the elite
emulated Chinese fashion, furnishing them with gold and silver objects,
jewellery, jade, lacquered goods, ironware, bronze ritual vessels, coins,
silks and wooden figurines, and decorating them with tiles, bricks and
paintings, ordinary people would expect to finish their days in an earth-
pit grave, perhaps unblessed even by the protection of a wooden coffin.
They did, however, try to afford better for village leaders, whose status
entitled them to be buried with the traditional Korean bronze dagger
and who sometimes aspired to take imitation, or even authentic, Chinese
goods with them.
A local habit in Paekche was to use jar coffins (two urns laid head
to head at the rim) for the interment of young persons or the second-
ary burial of cremated bones. Typical grey earthenware examples have
been found at Yŏngam, in the far south-west. As in contemporary
Japan, some ‘double-urn’ burials took place in cemeteries, and were
covered by earth mounds shaped like keyholes. Without doubt the most
famous Paekche tomb, and the most revealing single example of the
value that Paekche placed on its overseas contacts, is that of King
Muryŏng. Its rectangular vaulted chamber, lined with decorated bricks
and entered through an arched access protected by a stone animal, had
lain undisturbed from his burial in the eighth moon, , until it was
excavated in . A stone inscription recorded the king’s entombment
at the end of the -month mourning period, and that of his queen
four years later. It called him the ‘Great General and Pacifier of the East’,
and among the treasure-trove of goods surrounding the lacquered
coffins were royal regalia of native style, as well as valuable items
imported from China.
On the far side of the peninsula, Silla buried the dead in single or
double wooden coffins surmounted with piles of earth, so that the
distinctive mounds arising from the fields around Kyŏngju looked no
different from those seen outside P’yŏngyang. Then came wooden
chambers, and from around   – in a distinctive custom that some
archaeologists have linked with the Siberian region – royalty were also
protected inside the mounds by stones. The wooden chamber was
faced with stones and further encased within piles of boulders before
the enveloping earth was heaped over it. This, and the absence until the
mid-sixth century of an entrance tunnel, helped to deter robbers, even
if the weight of rock was liable to cause eventual implosion on top of
the coffin. Stone chambers were introduced only in the late Silla period.
Their excavation, beginning in the s, revealed some of Korea’s
greatest historical treasures and earned them their modern sobriquets,
including Gold Crown Tomb, Silver Bell Tomb, Decorated Shoes

      

Tomb and Heavenly Horse Tomb (so-called after the painting of a gal-
loping horse on a birch-bark saddle-flap). A gourd-shaped double
mound from the mid-fourth to mid-fifth century  may be the first
example of a Silla royal tomb. Officially known as Hwangnam No. 
North and South, the names of its occupants are unknown and it is
commonly called the Husband and Wife Tomb. The northern mound,
over the queen’s burial chamber, is higher ( m /  ft) than its neigh-
bour ( m /  ft), perhaps indicating that she was the senior partner.
Her tomb contained a gold crown, that of her consort a gilt-bronze
crown. Gold belts, sword pommels and items of jewellery are the
earliest known examples of Silla goldwork. Among other objects in the
chests of burial goods were rare examples of Chinese pottery, Sassanian
silver and Roman glass. A pit inside the king’s mound was filled with
iron weapons. In accordance with shamanistic ritual a horse, wearing a
full set of harness and stirrups, had been sacrificed near the top of each
mound to assist the royal partners to rise into their next life. Dramatic,
colourful and noisy, the funerary rites must have been tinged with
suffering too, for alongside the king’s coffin lay the skeleton of a
fifteen-year-old girl. Until King Chijŭng banned human sacrifice in 
, Silla royalty, like their neighbours in Kaya and Wa, took living
aides with them into the next life.

Painting
Murals found in the tombs of all three kingdoms provide virtually the
only extant examples of early Korean painting. The majority, and the
most detailed, come from Koguryŏ and include portraits, scenes of
social activity and religious symbols. Much later, Korea would be able to
claim genre painting as one of its most distinctive forms, and the
Koguryŏ murals give a foretaste of this. More than  are concentrated
around P’yŏngyang. The entertainments illustrated in Dong Shou’s
fourth-century  tomb (Picture Essay ) – music, dance and wrestling
– are encountered again in Changch’ŏn-ri No.  tomb at Kungnaesŏng,
where an elegant lady is pictured with a zither, and in the Tomb of the
Wrestlers and Tomb of the Dancers of the fifth to sixth century . The
red phoenix, blue dragon, white tiger and green-black entwined tortoise
and snake – the sa sin mythical guardians of the four cardinal directions
in Chinese and Korean folk religion – fly around the ceilings of many
early tombs, but by   come down to occupy whole walls. In the
sixth century  Buddhist deities also offer their protection.
Investigation of painted tombs is far from complete. Archae-
ologists of the  announced two major discoveries in . One, at

                       
Saenal-ri, South Hwanghae province, was from the Lelang period. Its
brick walls were covered with geometric patterns and remnants of the
four mythic animals. The other, a .-metre-long suite in typical
Koguryŏ style at Songjuk-ri, Yŏntan county, they dated to the early
fifth century . It comprised an entrance passage, reception chamber,
connecting passage and coffin chamber. The floor had been covered
with mud and spread with charcoal before being whitewashed. The
walls were of trimmed limestone, neatly whitewashed, and painted with
murals showing a procession, a hunt, soldiers and domestic scenes.
Huge red pillars were painted in the corners of the chambers to create
the impression of a dwelling house.

Music and poetry

To the definers of contemporary fashion – the Chinese – the arts that
mattered most were the skills of the brush, especially poetry, and the
moving but fleeting notes of music. Koreans who could read and write
were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese sense of aesthetic priorities
and used Chinese characters. Not surprisingly, the earliest claim in rela-
tion to a Korean poetic tradition is associated with royalty. As far back
as   King Yuri of Koguryŏ is reputed to have composed the Song
of Yellow Birds, a legendary ditty whose origins are actually unknown:

Yellow birds play around,

Male and female together.
How painful that I’m alone.
Whom do I return home with?

Another piece of supposedly royal poetry was by the Silla queen

Chindŏk (r.  –), who according to the Samguk sagi embroi-
dered it herself and sent it to the new Tang emperor Gaozong in  .
His father, Taizong, had sent her a gift of books on her own accession.
The poem began flatteringly (and quite untruthfully):

When great Tang began its glorious work,

And the plans of the eminent emperor prospered,
Fighting stopped and men donned robes of peace,
Civil rule resumed the heritage of earlier kings.

What kind of verse was enjoyed by ordinary people is unknown,

but it would have been sung, and we know more about musical per-
formance than we do about literary creation. Music accompanied court

      

 Portrait of Dong Shou
In  a tomb was excavated near the mouth of the Taedong river.
Although it was in the vicinity of P’yŏngyang, an inscription showed
that it had been built later than the Chinese evacuation of Lelang and
before the establishment of the Koguryŏ capital there. In it were buried
Dong Shou (Kor. Tongsu), who had died in  , and his wife.
According to the tomb’s inscription, consisting of  characters in ink,
Dong had been a general in Yan (Liaodong) who had fled to Koguryŏ in
  and risen by  to administer territory in former Lelang and
Daifang. Historians are unsure whether he was one of the many Chinese
bureaucrats who stayed on after the fall of the commanderies, or
whether the inscription represents a piece of self-aggrandisement on
the part of a local parvenu. Supporting the latter argument is the fact
that the tomb is of Koguryŏ rather than contemporary Han style. Built
of stone slabs, it consists of a central chamber with a corbelled ceiling
supported on eighteen columns, an antechamber and two side rooms. It
was covered with an earth mound.
The most remarkable feature of Dong Shou’s tomb is its elaborate
painted murals. They remain the oldest known Korean examples of the
Chinese habit of decorating the walls with pictures of the deceased,
scenes from his life and the pastimes he enjoyed. In this case the ante-
chamber and side rooms are painted to represent Dong Shou’s house-
hold. Besides portraits of Dong, his wife and their attendants, the artist
has included corners of their household such as the kitchen, coach
house and stables. The master sits cross-legged under a lotus-topped
canopy, its curtains drawn up. He is wearing a Chinese-style silk robe,
with a bow at the bottom of a -neck, and an official hat, and holds a
feathery fan. The attendant on his right is holding a writing brush, and
the one on his left a scroll. His wife sits apart under a canopy of her own,
also waited on by servants, with her hands hidden inside her long wide
sleeves. Entertainment is provided by two groups of musicians, a dancer
and two wrestlers. The group accompanying the dancer is playing a
zither, a lute and a long vertical flute. Two of the musicians in the sec-
ond group are playing the long horn (kak), which, like the banners
borne by the men on either side of the doorway into a side room, do not
appear in Han representations of entertainment scenes. It is unclear
whether the wrestlers, who are some  metres away, form part of the
same picture: if so, we may wonder whether domestic entertainment in
fourth-century Korea had diverged away from the more relaxed, genteel
type of entertainment seen in Han pictures.
On one wall of the central chamber is painted a grand procession of
some  people. Dong rides in an ox-drawn carriage, flanked on either


Portrait of Dong Shou, wall-painting from Anak No.  tomb, P’yŏngyang,
Hwanghae province, c.  .

side by lines of armed foot-soldiers and horsemen. Although the tomb

was in a poor state of preservation when discovered, it is possible to
reconstruct details of the iron armour and plumed helmets worn by the
footmen and the lamellated coverings on the horses. Small military-style
bands march and ride to front and rear of the carriage. The ‘front band’
(Ch. qianbu, Kor. chŏnpu) consists of two drums and a bell, each carried
by two men on shoulder poles and played by a third. The four men of
the ‘rear band’ (Ch. houbu, Kor. hupu) ride line abreast. They play a
small inverted bell struck with a hammer (yo), a small horn (ka), pan
pipes (so) and a double-bodied drum. This is one of the best illustra-
tions anywhere of Han dynasty guchui (‘banging and blowing’) music.
Koreans on both sides of the  are immensely proud of the
Koguryŏ tomb murals. In Seoul, a full-size reproduction of Dong
Shou’s portrait occupied a prominent position inside the entrance to the
former National Museum premises in the Capitol Building (Picture
Essay ).


ceremonies and banqueting, merry-making, seasonal festivals, work in
the fields, prayer in the temples and marching to battle. (Tang armies
captured musicians from both Koguryŏ and Paekche in the early sev-
enth century .) By Queen Chindŏk’s time the Silla administration
had a dedicated music department (the Umsŏngsŏ), and it is likely that
the other two kingdoms did as well. Texts mention seventeen instru-
ments played in Koguryŏ. They included two kinds of zithers (Picture
Essay ), harps, lutes and flutes, one set of pan pipes, three sizes of
oboe, one mouth organ, three drums and a conch shell. Identification
of some of these instruments, and details of their appearance, can be
problematic. Most of them were also used in Chinese music and some
had originated further west across central Asia. One of the zithers may
have been the native kŏmun’go, said to have been modelled on a Chinese
guqin received by King Changsu (r.  –) from the Eastern Jin
court. Its strings were stretched over a series of fixed bridges and
played by striking with a short wooden plectrum.
We know of seven instruments used in Paekche, among which the
predominance of flutes and lutes suggests music milder in tone than
that of Koguryŏ. Five of them are seen on a beautiful gilt-bronze
incense burner found on Mount Pongnae in , depicting immortals
on a holy mountain. Musicians from both Paekche and Silla crossed the
sea to Japan. One was Mimaji of Paekche, who had learnt music, dance
and masked drama in south-east China, and who emigrated to Japan in
 . (In the s the Cambridge musicologist Lawrence Picken
found evidence in Japan enabling him to reconstruct the lilting tunes of
seventh-century China, which must also have been hummed and whis-
tled in Korea.)

Manual arts
As for the quality of the three kingdoms’ pottery, sculpture and metal-
work, we can make up our own minds on the basis of hard evidence.
Plenty of early pottery survives. Among the grave goods buried as status
indicators, at least one native earthenware pot of a rough, porous type
known as hwabunhyŏng was frequently included. According to Hyung-
il Pai, ‘How and why such a vessel became the only grave offering of
clearly native production placed among items of Han origin is a
difficult question . . . We can assume that it could easily have had a
ceremonial use or symbolic value . . . The popularity of these pots is
evident, since most Han Lelang burials have at least one hbh pot.’ Wajil,
grey, hard-fired earthenware dating from around the year dot, shows
signs of Chinese influence, and the use of ‘Kimhae’ stoneware, the

                       
precursor of porcelain, fired at temperatures higher than , º,
seems to have been associated with the introduction from southern
China of the long (‘dragon’) ascending kiln about the fifth century .
Pottery was made for utilitarian rather than artistic purposes, and plen-
tiful and varied though it was, it did not attract the research sponsor-
ship and production facilities that Chinese courts lavished on it. (In
King Muryŏng’s tomb the only ceramic vessels – a white ewer, a jar and
five lamps – came from Liang, and not one from Paekche itself.) Yet
utilitarian or not, artistry certainly helped shape many of the pieces
that went into the kilns. Potters in Kaya and Silla produced a stylishly
perforated kind of base of their own design. Some examples were free-
standing and were used as a rest for containers; some were integral to
lamps or wine pourers, and made in familiar shapes such as horses,
boats, carts, houses and straw sandals. Nowadays, individual works of
art from the Three Kingdoms period are treasured as a source of
national pride, and Korean authors hail them as ‘the most genuinely
indigenous of all Korean art forms’. Copies of the stone warrior seen
in Picture Essay  are on sale in many an antique shop in Seoul’s Insa-
dong, and although China has numerous ceramic horsemen, it has
nothing of such character.
When it comes to originality in metal craftsmanship, the crowns and
girdles found in the Three Kingdoms tombs rate as some of Korea’s
greatest national treasures, unrivalled in East Asia (Picture Essay ).
Bronze casters created superb gilt-bronze images of the Buddha, as well
as plentiful supplies of mirrors, daggers, harness jingles, and belt-
hooks. And ironsmiths, developing their techniques with furnace and
anvil, fashioned superb sets of armour and weaponry.

By the end of the Three Kingdoms period, skylines across the penin-
sula were dotted with thousands of dolmens and tomb mounds, while
fortresses, castles and city walls on the one hand, and temples, pagodas
and Buddhist statues on the other, contrasted the yang and the yin in
contemporary public architecture. Only a fraction remains visible
today: Hideyoshi’s invasion (–) and the Korean War (–)
bear much of the responsibility for that. Nevertheless, what time and
man seem to have obliterated, archaeology has begun to recover.
Tombs, as we have seen, have yielded their treasures. The remains of
the stone ramparts behind which Paekche and Silla sheltered their
courts and administration can be seen at Wiryesŏng in south-east Seoul
and Panwŏlsŏng near the centre of modern Kyŏngju. One of the chain
of fortresses built in   around the Paekche capital Hansŏng, at
Mount Isŏng, appears to have been taken over subsequently by Silla.

      

 Grey stoneware jar
Korea’s unofficial national instrument is the kayagŭm, a half-tube zither
with twelve strings of twisted silk. The player seen facing us on this jar
sits cross-legged on the floor and rests the right end of the instrument
on his knees. He plucks the strings with his right hand and depresses
them with the left, below the movable bridges over which they are
stretched. The version of the kayagŭm used in court music is distin-
guished by two ‘ram’s horns’ at the bottom end; the smaller, lighter one
seen in ensembles and solo performance was developed originally for
folk music.
Kayagŭm means ‘zither of Kaya’. According to the Samguk sagi, it
was invented by King Kasil of Kaya, who ordered his musician Urŭk to
compose twelve tunes for it, saying that ‘different countries have differ-
ent languages, so why should their music be the same?’ Kasil is other-
wise unheard of, perhaps because Kaya was soon swallowed up by Silla,
at whose court Urŭk sought sanctuary in  –. There King
Chinhŭng provided him with accommodation and sent him Chuji,
Kyego and Mandok as students. These three revised his twelve tunes
into five new versions for use at the Silla court. The name ‘zither of
Kaya’ stuck, and although the number of strings subsequently
increased, the instrument is still recognizably the same as it was some
, years ago. The shadowy Kasil gets the credit for inventing it, and
on stylistic grounds the jar illustrated here, decorated with figures (t’ou)
of whom one plays a zither, must date from around his time. But liter-
ary and artistic references, pottery figurines and the remains of a
zither itself, discovered in  in Kwangju and dated to ±  , prove
that zithers were already known in Korea. In Koguryŏ, Wang Sang’ak is
believed to have developed the Chinese zither into another typically
Korean version, the six-stringed kŏmun’go. So exactly where Kasil’s
inspiration came from, and why he should have tried to produce another
member of the zither family, remain unknown. Perhaps it was all a mat-
ter of Kaya pride. The fact that the zither seen here also has six strings
may indicate that Kasil copied the number of Wang Sang’ak’s strings, or
it may be simply that the potter did not know how many strings the
kayagŭm actually had. There is no doubt, however, that what we see is
a kayagŭm: the ram’s horns make that quite certain. Together with the
kŏmun’go, the five-stringed pip’a lute and three flutes, it quickly estab-
lished itself as part of a popular ensemble known as samhyŏ samjuk
(‘three strings and three flutes’).
A substantial repertoire of musical tunes existed. Silla alone is said
to have had  pieces for the kayagŭm, some of them Chinese. Music
was popularly believed to have magical, quasi-religious powers and the


Grey stoneware jar decorated with human and animal figures, late th to early
th century , Kyŏngju, height . cm.

roughly shaped human and animal figures applied around the neck of
this vessel suggest that it was used in fertility rites. Two figures are seen
having sexual intercourse, while the zither player is evidently a pregnant
woman. When King Chinhŭng sent Kŏch’ilbu to attack Koguryŏ circa
 , he ordered Urŭk and his student Imun to play music. We do not
know what sort of music it was. Perhaps it was part of a sacrificial per-
formance intended to stir up the spirits’ sympathy; perhaps it was some-
thing more meditative, to help the king take his mind off the possible
fate of his minister.


 Grey stone funerary vessel
The character of this figurine might incline one to think that the swift
skill admired by Han soldiers in the cavalry of the Mongolian and
Manchurian barbarians had been lost by the time this form of warfare
descended from the plains onto the Korean peninsula. Yet Koreans
prized the horse, even if it was unable to match the buffalo as a domes-
ticated animal in their mountainous and riverine terrain. The strutting
mounts on the wall of Dong Shou’s tomb seem to have learnt their stuff
from numerous Warring States and Han Chinese predecessors, and
Koguryŏ armies made good use of cavalry. The sight of mounted,
armoured warriors riding to war must have been depressingly familiar
to peasants trying to till their fields.
Tombs in Lelang and beyond contain gold, bronze and iron fittings
for horses and chariots. Quantities of iron armour for soldiers and their
mounts have been discovered in southern Korean tombs, especially in
the Kaya and Silla regions, and a fifth-century  glazed pottery figure
from Kimhae shows a Kaya warrior dressed for battle in armour and
helmet, carrying a shield and a spear. His horse is protected by a heavy
blanket scored to show that it was made of iron or leather plates.
Although no buried chariots themselves, or even miniature versions of
them such as those found in China, have yet been discovered in Korea,
the deceased were evidently assumed to need horse-drawn transporta-
tion in their next life. Remains of sacrificial horses are found in Silla
tombs. About the same time as the potter was shaping our mounted war-
rior, another artist was decorating two pairs of birch-bark saddle-flaps
to be put with four saddles into a royal tomb. The tomb, one of the best
known in Kyŏngju, is called Ch’ŏnma-ch’ong (‘Heavenly Horse Tomb’),
for he painted on them a horse, reminiscent of the famous Han dynasty
bronze ‘flying’ horse found in Gansu province. Experts have noted
Scythian-style decorative elements in this unique example of Silla
painting. If it did indeed inherit a centuries-old central Asian tradition
attributing supernatural powers to fleet-footed horses, it was a remark-
able survival. Bronze belt buckles adorned with a horse are found in
tombs all over Korea and in Kofun Japan. Some are finely shaped and
decorated, others more crude. According to Lisa Bailey, they too ‘reflect
the influence of the Scythian animal style, especially of the Ordos
region; they also convey a Chinese sense of plasticity’, and Koreans
obviously loved them too.
Silla laws specified what kind of saddles and trappings members of
different kolp’um (‘bone-rank’) classes might use: openwork metal dec-
oration on some saddle-plates followed a pattern used in fourth-century
 Liaoning. The equestrian figure seen here is one of a pair discovered


Grey stone funerary vessel in the shape of a mounted warrior, Gold Bell Tomb,
Kyŏngju, th–th century , . × . cm.

in  in the Gold Bell Tomb in Kyŏngju. The cup on its back and the
spout on its chest indicate that it was a pouring vessel used in some kind
of funerary rite, and the headgear of the rider and the stirrups – intro-
duced to Korea in the early fifth century, perhaps via the Xianbei confed-
eration – identify him as a warrior. Neither he nor his mount, however,
is dressed in battle armour.


 Funerary headwear of King Muryŏng
Kings of the three kingdoms and Kaya all wore gold crowns. We do not
know when or how often they did so: excavated examples are not robust,
and may have been made specially for their owners’ journey into the
next world. Those of Silla and Kaya consisted of a complete circular
headband, decorated with designs of punched dots and hung with gold
discs and comma-shaped jade kogok. Five uprights were fastened to the
inside of the headband on the Silla crowns, rising like stylized trees or
antlers above the wearer’s head. More discs – found also on similar
crowns from first-century  Bactria and third- to fifth-century  east-
ern Mongolia – and kogok dangled from the side branches. Like the
headband, the ‘trees’ were cut from sheet gold. They were particularly
elaborate on the Silla crowns, branching out and carrying further gold
and jade adornments, and likenesses have been found with shamanic
headdresses from earlier Scytho-Siberia. This suggests that the Silla
king, bearing supreme religious as well as political power, took part in
shamanic ceremonies. The decoration on Kaya crowns was less elaborate,
and in Koguryŏ and Paekche artistic inspiration came from China rather
than Siberia. Here royalty wore silk caps, onto which were fastened
openwork gold ornaments.
The opening of King Muryŏng’s tomb at Kongju in  provided
unparalleled evidence about elite artistic taste in Paekche. The -year-
old king and his queen, aged about , had been laid to rest surrounded
by hundreds of precious objects that showed the importance attached to
Paekche’s contacts with southern China and Yamato Japan. The design
of the tomb was contemporary Chinese, the main chamber being entered
through a tunnel in a south-facing hillside, lit by green glazed lamps
placed in wall niches. Signs of the hold that Buddhism had taken on the
kingdom were everywhere. The walls were covered with moulded bricks
bearing lotus patterns. Ornaments on the couple’s crowns – the king’s a
flaming lotus and the queen’s a lotus surmounted by a palm leaf – are
further allusions to the faith. A silver and gold wine cup with a stand and
cover is richly decorated with lotus in a landscape setting. The royal
heads rested on lacquered wooden pillows between pairs of wooden
phoenixes, the queen’s pillow elaborately painted with animals and lotus
flowers. A string of Liang-dynasty Chinese coins was placed on her epi-
taph stone as payment to the earth spirits for the purchase of the land,
and the sole pottery vessels were Chinese. Among other treasures in the
tomb were silver plates, which evidently covered the two ends of a zither,
and bronze chopsticks, some of the earliest known in Korea.
The architectural style of Muryŏng’s tomb spread from Paekche to
the Japanese islands. Many of its treasures, including the crowns them-


Gold decoration from the funerary headwear of King Muryŏng, th to early
th century , Kongju, . ×  cm.

selves, the spiked gilt-bronze shoes and some of the jewellery, are
matched by similar pieces found in southern Japan, especially in the
richly furnished Fujinoki tomb of the late sixth century  in Nara,
where a mirror bears exactly the same inscription as one in Muryŏng’s
tomb. Most, if not all, gilt-bronze crowns found in Japan are said to have
been made in Korea.


Here, archaeologists found an inkstone, an iron plough, numerous clay
and iron figurines of horses, and an inscribed wooden tablet from the
sixth century referring to an attack by Koguryŏ forces. Back to light,
too, have come the foundations of the city walls at Kungnaesŏng, fine
buildings from the next Koguryŏ capital at P’yŏngyang and the long
perimeter wall of a new conurbation begun nearby on Mount Taesŏng
in , punctuated by  gates.
No walls or gates told the traveller that he had passed from one
state into another, but inscribed monuments were set up with an eye on
territorial claims and historical approbation alike. Four inscribed
stones marked the tours of inspection that the Silla king Chinhŭng
made to the northern, southern and western regions of his country
between  and . On the last of these, erected at Maun Pass, the
king stated: ‘I have inspected the territory under my jurisdiction and
inquired into popular feelings. I intend to encourage by rewards the
loyal and the trustworthy, the sincere and the talented, those who
apprehend danger and those who fight with valour and serve with loy-
alty.’ It was a pronouncement worthy of the Son of Heaven himself,
demonstrating the sense of responsibility that would help Silla royalty
to triumph in the momentous challenges of the next century.
Iron Age Korea was now playing a part on a wider international
stage. The three kingdoms all recognized China’s role as hegemon of
the East Asian region, but they themselves were taken seriously at
Chinese courts and in Japan. All these states were jockeying for posi-
tion, and although the Sui and Tang restoration of unity strengthened
the hand of the Middle Kingdom, Korea and Japan were now more than
bit players. If, in cultural terms, the continuing Chinese influence proved
to be a major catalyst for change and development, and

if the acceptance of certain agreed-on common standards for

elite East Asian higher civilization did tend to promote a degree
of cultural convergence throughout the region, this may have
acted as little more than a modest counterbalance to an oppos-
ing natural process of seemingly inexorable diversification . . .
The resulting fusion generated several distinctively and glori-
ously new civilizations [Charles Holcombe].

                       
  

Unified Silla,  ‒:

The Building of Confidence
At a time when Anglo-Saxon England was divided into the king-
doms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, Silla’s victories over
Kaya, Paekche and Koguryŏ established the first period of unified
rule across the Korean peninsula. This chapter introduces the
civilization of Unified Silla. It emphasizes that although Chinese
political influence was strong across the East Asian region, Korea
played a crucial part in managing communications around the
Yellow Sea, and in transmitting culture from the mainland to the
Japanese islands.

‘  ’

According to today’s popular image in Korea, it is a military figure
rather than King Munmu (r. –) who symbolizes the country’s
new-found unification and independence. The equestrian statue of
Kim Yusin (–) that guards his tomb in Kyŏngju – a modern
reinforcement for its ancient spiritual protection (Picture Essay ) – has
an emotional impact on many of those Koreans who see it. No matter
to them that Silla had needed Tang help to overcome Paekche and
Koguryŏ, or that resistance from both kingdoms persisted for several
years and made unification precarious. No matter that the inhabitants
of Koguryŏ north of the Taedong refused to accept Silla rule and
established a rival kingdom. His indeed was the military glory and it
was well deserved. Kim Yusin was an aristocrat, the son of a prince of
Pon Kaya. He must have been well educated, for he was a member of
the elite group of Silla youth known as hwarang. Why and when this
organization came into being is uncertain. By the time Yusin joined it
in his mid-teens, it was probably devoted to educational, cultural and
moral training, and reflected both Buddhist and Confucian ideals.
Serious though its patriotic aims and objectives may have been, its
activities seem to have been far from dull: members went on visits to
holy mountains, learned martial arts and music, painted their faces and
wore bejewelled shoes. Whether or not hwarang received military train-
ing, as was once thought, and whether or not Yusin received divine


 Soapstone relief of a boar
In agricultural societies such as Korea’s, heavily dependent on the
weather and accustomed to flooding, drought and other natural disas-
ters, the study and interpretation of the heavens was essential. So was
reliance on spirits to guide and guard the virtuous. Astronomy and
astrology were indistinguishable. Han China associated twelve animals
with the divisions of the sky covered by the planet Jupiter in its twelve-
year circuit around the sun, and with the so-called earthly branches that
combined with ten celestial stems to form a sexagenary timing and dat-
ing system. The animals – six wild and six domesticated – were the rat,
ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, cock, dog and boar.
Each was believed to exert some influence over events during the period
of its ascendancy, whether two-hourly periods of the day, monthly por-
tions of the year or five annual occurrences through the -year cycle.
They were also associated with a direction. The first animal in the
sequence, the rat, commanded the north; the last, the pig, the north-
north-west. By Sui and Tang times the creatures were widely used for
decorating bronze mirrors, memorial tablets and tomb sculptures.
Unified Silla decorated and protected the tombs of royalty and other
important figures with carved stone figures of the zodiac animals, placing
them around the retaining wall of an earthen tumulus and facing the
direction they each represented. Such figures assumed greater promi-
nence in Korea than in China, and good examples survive in the
Kyŏngju area. Zodiac animals were finely sculpted, usually in relief or
less commonly in the round. Their heads are set on human bodies and
legs; they are clothed and carry weapons to defend the tomb. A set of
the three-dimensional figures, approximately . metres high, sur-
rounded the tomb of King Sŏngdŏk. Befitting someone of his repute,
General Kim Yusin’s tomb was guarded not only by the twelve animals,
all wearing civilian clothing, but also by three smaller plaques showing
the horse, boar and rat dressed in the armour of the sa ch’ŏnwang, the
four guardian kings often seen protecting the entrance to Buddhist
temples. These figures had been finely sculpted in soapstone and are
exceptionally well preserved. The fourth has been lost.


Soapstone relief of a boar from the tomb of Kim Yusin, late th century,
Kyŏngju, height . cm.


assistance, as the early Koreans themselves believed, he turned out to
be a brilliant commander. It was he who, at the age of  and nearing
the end of a distinguished career, led the Silla army in a two-pronged
land and sea assault with Chinese troops, which shattered Paekche in
. The following winter he took relief supplies of , tons of grain
to a Tang army vainly besieging P’yŏngyang. Then, when the Chinese
gave up and retreated home, his suffering soldiers had to fight their
own way back through the snow to Silla. Yusin was too old and too
ill to take part in the final campaign against Koguryŏ, but even left
at home, said King Munmu, he had the psychological effect of a
strong wall.
Tang assisted again when Koguryŏ was eventually crushed in ,
but sentiment came second to Kyŏngju’s new sense of national integri-
ty, and in  the Chinese found their own armies being driven out, at
least as far as Liaodong. A strong warning was being sent out about
Korean independence in the wake of the country’s newly won unifica-
tion. Kings Muyŏl (r. ‒) and Munmu came from the Kim clan, as
had the last twelve monarchs of pre-unification Silla and as would all
but three of the  monarchs of the Unified Silla dynasty. Much of the
credit for this remarkable continuity that served Korea so well should
go to King Pŏphŭng, whose kolp’um system of social and political
stratification had put a sort of ring fence round his clan’s authority.
By his decree in , kings of Silla were to be drawn from the top-
most category known as sŏnggŏl (‘sacred bone’), and from Naemul (
–) onwards that had meant kings with the Kim surname. Strict
lineal descent was broken in the first half of the seventh century and
thereafter sŏnggŏl status withered away, but royal members of the Kim
clan from the second category, chin’gŏl (‘true bone’), managed to hold
on to the succession, and even allowed the royal Kims of Kaya to
integrate with them after . Third rank in society belonged to the
tup’um (‘head rank’), the aristocracy from which members of the gov-
ernment and military officers were drawn. Kolp’um rules were being
flouted by the ninth century, but much later, in Chosŏn times, the
reminder that class distinction had mattered in antiquity made the
gentry’s adoption of Neo-Confucianism – characterized by social hier-
archy and male domination – all the easier.
Actually, even in the Unified Silla, the assumption that social
inequalities were inevitable and proper did not guarantee that everyone
was happy about them. The peasantry, living in small farming commu-
nities under village headmen, had to surrender a proportion of their
produce in tax and were liable for labour duties. To them, anyone with
any authority belonged to a world apart, and was treated with a mixture

                       
of fear, awe and, frequently, loathing. What they could not be expected
to appreciate was that even for those within kol’pum ranks, privilege
was far from synonymous with security. When the royal clan eventual-
ly lost its ‘sacred’ tag it became simply primus inter pares and could be
challenged by other noble clans. The scope for political rivalry and
intrigue was almost unlimited, from inside the Kim clan just as much
as from outside. Two monarchs took particularly decisive action to
strengthen their position. In  Queen Chindŏk abolished the old
Hwabaek Council of Nobles, headed by its president, the Sangdaedŭng,
and replaced it with the Chipsabu Chancellery under a chief minister,
the Chungsi; and thirty years later King Sinmun (r. –) purged his
opponents and stamped his own authoritarian mark on the administra-
tion. In place of the previous army of six bu divisions, which may have
been associated with the aristocratic power bases of old Saro society in
the valleys around Kyŏngju, he created a non-conscript army. Efforts
to curb the power of the aristocracy met with only partial success,
however, and throughout the rest of Korean history relations between
monarchs (or presidents) and their officials would continue to be
tension-filled.
However preoccupied with domestic issues they might be as they
set course across uncharted political and social waters, the early kings
of Unified Silla could not but take into account the likely attitudes
and responses of the Son of Heaven to their policies. At first they
had good reason for apprehension. They had broken a solemn oath,
sworn by representatives of Silla, Paekche, Koguryŏ, Tamna (modern
Cheju island) and Japan with Emperor Gaozong himself on China’s
holy Mount Tai in , to keep the peace on the peninsula. They
had resisted the emperor’s efforts to restore a Chinese commandery
system in Korea and install King Munmu as ‘governor-general of
Kyerim’, and in  had fought off Tang forces intent on replacing
him with his brother, Kim Inmun. And when the garrison of ,
Chinese troops installed in P’yŏngyang was expelled that same year,
it was plain that Gaozong’s plan had flopped. It was touch and go,
but the emperor’s decision not to launch a fresh invasion of Korea in
 narrowly avoided the unedifying spectacle of a pro-Buddhist Son
of Heaven going to war against a vassal state itself in the grip of
Buddhist fever.
Inexperienced at handling political unity, let alone the pressures of
becoming an independent Premier League state, the rulers of Unified
Silla had not only to create a modus vivendi with the Middle Kingdom
and the Japanese court at Nara, but also learn to cope with a rival in
Manchuria. This was Parhae, the creation of an erstwhile Koguryŏ

           ,      ‒    
general, Tae Ch’oyŏng, who after serving in the Tang army at Chengde
(Jehol) had fled north-eastwards. There, in modern Jilin province, he
rallied around him an alliance of tribal peoples, including Malgal,
Yemaek and many of the inhabitants of former Koguryŏ territory
north of the Taedong river. He took the title King Ko (r. –)
and established his capital at Sanggyŏng (‘Superior Capital’). Almost
inevitably, he modelled his court on Chinese patterns, proclaiming the
name Parhae (Ch. Bohai) in . In dealings with Japan, however, the
new administration called itself Gaoli (Jap. Korai, Kor. Koryŏ), claim-
ing legitimacy through supposed descent from the ancient Koguryŏ
rulers of Manchuria, and so much of that former kingdom’s territory
did it command above and below the Yalu that some Korean historians
treat the period of its existence as one when the peninsula was still
divided, rather than unified under Silla. They call it the Nambuk Sidae
(‘North–South Period’). Parhae acknowledged Tang suzerainty and
traded with China, Korea and Japan. It reached the pinnacle of its
power under King Tae Insu (r. –), and although some may have
breathed a sigh of relief when it fell to the Mongolian Khitan under the
leadership of Yehlu Abaoji (–) in , the days of Silla itself
were by then numbered.
But all that lay in the future. Fortunately, the failure of China’s
imperialist ambitions on the peninsula didn’t impair the gradual warm-
ing of the Tang–Silla relationship. Partly this reflected Chinese relief
and respect for the firm creation of authoritarian rule in Kyŏngju.
Partly it was a mark of the Middle Kingdom’s self-confidence through
the early eighth century, the heyday of ‘Great Tang’, when curiosity
about other lands and tolerance of foreign communities in their midst
gave the main Chinese cities a distinctly cosmopolitan air. And eventu-
ally, as China faced hostility in central Asia from Tibetans and Arabs
and suffered revolt by one of its own military commanders, An
Lushan, in , it marked gratitude for Silla’s continued support dur-
ing the court’s temporary exile to Sichuan. Credit for these good rela-
tions belongs also to the sound judgement of the early kings. Munmu
had dispatched the first recorded tribute from post-unification Silla in
. Sinmun reorganized government systems along Chinese lines,
adopted Chinese court dress and set up a Confucian Academy. In 
he asked China for books on Tang ritual. His son Hyoso (r. –)
was a convinced Buddhist, and when he died the Empress Wu had the
palace gates in Chang’an shut for two days as a mark of respect. The
death of his younger brother Sŏngdŏk (r. –) brought forth a ful-
some letter of respect from Emperor Xuanzong. His reign represented
the high point in Tang–Silla relations, and the emperor, posthumously

                       
investing him with the title of Senior Guardian to the Heir Apparent,
honoured his country with the ancient epithet of junzi zhi guo (‘Country
of Gentlemen’). Two of his sons went to the Middle Kingdom, one as
a student at the Imperial Academy, the other to become a Sŏn monk
and eventual abbot of a monastery in Chengdu. He contributed troops
to help defend Dengzhou, in Shandong, against Parhae attacks in .
Arguably, it was Sŏngdŏk who brought the tribute system as close as it
ever came in almost two thousand years to fulfilling Chinese expectations
of it.
The tribute system was known as shida waijiao. The phrase shi da
(Kor. sadae) means ‘serving the great’, and when the Chinese
Confucian philosopher Mencius coined it in the fourth century  he
envisaged the vassal being overawed into compliance with the
suzerain’s wishes. To imperial China’s neighbours, however, it offered
a means of flattering the region’s superpower into possible approval
and support for their own designs. It meant sending missions convey-
ing New Year and birthday greetings, acknowledging imperial acces-
sions and deaths, announcing important events at the vassal court,
presenting tribute, and then in return looking for or even requesting
Chinese largesse or assistance. Silla dispatched such delegations in 
years of the eighth century, sometimes more than one a year. The sys-
tem meant considerable expenditure on both sides. If the cost of set-
ting up travelling parties weighed heavily on the tributary state, their
reception could not afford to seem parsimonious. The Tang govern-
ment opened a hostel in Dengzhou to accommodate groups arriving
from both Korea and Parhae, which tried to outdo Silla with the size
and frequency of its embassies. In  the  men of its embassy each
took home a gift of  rolls of silk. When parties from Silla and Parhae
arrived more or less simultaneously, they were treated and gifted on an
equal footing, but as time went by Parhae developed an edge. In  it
obsequiously sent four lots of tribute, and by the early ninth century
was dispatching considerably more than Silla, whose envoys were faced
with the more difficult journey. It is impossible to estimate the cost of
the tribute system in real terms for the historical records are frequently
imprecise about amounts of goods sent, referring simply to ‘gold and
silver objects’, ‘textiles’, etc., but all sides were out to impress and the
Tang court was undoubtedly open-handed with gifts of silks, teas,
ritual vessels, Buddhist images and so on. For its part, it was happy to
receive goods of economic value. Korea was renowned for high-quality
gold and silver goods and for brass with heavy copper content. Its
ginseng was superior; it was a source of drugs including the physic nut
latropha jampha and bezoar; and seafoods and pine seeds were on its list

           ,      ‒    
of tributary foodstuffs. Chinese scholars prized its tak mulberry paper,
first perfected in the early eighth century , and among the books it
sent were Buddhist sutras. But the Chinese court also appreciated rar-
ities. Silla sent a miniature horse in  and five more in , the same
year that Parhae sent  full-size horses. Both sent hunting birds, and
Silla also managed to come up with peacocks and walrus ivory, but it
doesn’t appear to have matched the Parhae gift in  of eleven
Japanese dancing girls.
If human tribute strikes us as objectionable, we should remember
that both Tang and Silla were slave-owning societies (if not to the
extent familiar to us in ancient Greece and Rome). A corollary to the
likely fate of the Japanese girls, which was enslavement, was the taking
or sending of what are sometimes described as official hostages. The
Chinese encyclopedia Cefu yuankuei ( ) devotes a separate sec-
tion to this system, which according to a memorial of  had already
affected more than  men of Silla to date, and details of its operation
suggest that rather than offensive it was at worst unfortunate, at best
quite desirable. Those so detained were often members of foreign roy-
alty, sometimes leaders of embassies. An enforced stay in the Chinese
capital probably came as no great surprise; it could lead to signal
advancement, and might even be accepted as a favour. Kim Inmun, son
of King Muyŏl, had spent several years in the imperial bodyguard
when Emperor Gaozong appointed him as second-in-command of
, Chinese troops sent to help Silla’s campaigns against Paekche
and Koguryŏ in the s. Hostages might be housed, clothed and
allowed to study in the Chongwenguan Confucian Academy in
Chang’an, established by Emperor Taizong in  for students from
tributary states. On occasions the Silla court actually requested permis-
sion for boys or young men to enter China for study purposes. If and
when they were eventually sent home, their experience could be put to
good use. The Chinese dynastic history Xin Tang shu identifies natives
of all three Korean kingdoms among the , students enrolled in the
Academy, and reports an edict of  commanding that all visiting for-
eigners should receive Chinese education. They were set examinations
and might then be awarded official posts. In the ninth century  men
of Silla, including members of the royal clan, are said to have achieved
this. The length of time a hostage might spend in China was imprecise.
Men marked out by particular distinction might be allowed to return
to Korea as assistant commissioners accompanying Tang missions. In
 Prince Kim Sasin, now holder of a post of lower-fifth rank at the
Tang court, memorialized the throne requesting permission to be sent
with the next embassy to his homeland. Less sanguine perhaps was

                       
Prince Kim Yunpu, who memorialized in  that although he had
had three jobs of up to sixth grade and twice gone home as assistant
commissioner, he had now been detained for  years. On occasions the
Korean court asked for the return of those it felt had been in China
long enough, but some hostages died before enjoying the opportunity
to see their homeland again.
Economic stringency in the early ninth century reflected a serious
copper shortage in China, prompting an imperial commissioner to
warn that supplies from Parhae and Silla must be safeguarded.
Foreigners were blamed for undermining the fortunes of Great Tang,
and warlordism increased. Wealthy Koreans exercised considerable
power over the Shandong peninsula, where political control fell into
the hands of a family of Koguryŏ descent, headed between  and 
by Yi Sado. A junior military commander in the army that helped to
suppress this over-mighty foreign subject was another Korean, Chang
Pogo. This man’s burgeoning career reflects not only the breakdown of
central authority in the Middle Kingdom, but also Kyŏngju’s own
growing financial and control difficulties. On leaving the army he
patronized the Buddhist faith and established a power base of his own
in Shandong, as well as building up a considerable navy on the island
of Ch’ŏnghae (modern Wando) off the south-west Korean coast. The
Bohai gulf was a lawless area. Pirates were seizing people in Silla and
selling them as slaves in China. When Chang’s ships swept the seas
clear of this menace and rendered them safe for trade, the Silla court
made him a garrison commander of , men on Ch’ŏnghae, both in
gratitude and to gain his loyalty. Using his strong links with the Korean
community in southern Japan, he completed a powerful economic tri-
angle between the three countries and monopolized the international
trade in ceramics. He was, in fact, the kind of supra-national entrepre-
neur with whom we are familiar today, and in the difficult period fol-
lowing the economic crisis of  the Samsung Corporation invoked
his spirit by establishing a Chang Pogo Foundation to examine ways of
encouraging creativity in international commerce. But the man it
dubbed the ‘King of Maritime Trade’ had actually turned out to be an
over-mighty subject. In  he was involved in a plot that put a lesser
royal, Kim Ujing, on the throne as King Sinmu. Although he was
rewarded with a military title, tax-collecting rights and even an official
residence in Kyŏngju, the nobility resented this social upstart, and
when the king died just four months later, Chang’s position was dan-
gerously exposed. He was assassinated in .

           ,      ‒    
̆
Today’s holidaymakers in Kyŏngju head for the Bomun Lake Resort.
Mostly they stay in or around the glitzy, fun-fairish area near the hotels
at its south-east corner, but if they walk along its western shore –
showered by cherry blossom confetti from lines of pink trees shimmer-
ing in the spring sunshine – they pass by a wooded hillside. In  a
stone monument was discovered recording the construction here in
  of Myŏnghwalsan, a fortress built to protect the ancient capital
of Saro. Another name for Saro had been Kyerim (‘Cockerel Forest’),
after the legend that a white cock crowed when Alchi, founder of the
Kyŏngju Kim clan, was discovered in a golden box in a forest, newly
born from an egg. (Three eggs in an iron cauldron, discovered among
funerary items in the Heavenly Horse Tomb, are believed to be a refer-
ence to this myth.) In time Saro became Kyŏngju, but to its inhabitants it
was Kŭmsŏng, the ‘Golden City’, a pun on the name of the Kim (‘Gold’)
clan, which besides exerting tight control over the opulent capital made
the name of Silla reverberate around north-east Asia. Reminders of its
proud history confront visitors round almost every corner in Kyŏngju,
dubbed an ‘open-air museum’ by more than one modern guidebook.
Sports teams, we all know, play better against more illustrious com-
petition: it is not so much imitation as inspiration. And in confronting
the glorious civilization of China in the early eighth century, both
Korea and Japan raised their game. They laid out rectilinear cities on
a grid plan – Sabi (Puyŏ) in the sixth century, Kyŏngju in the seventh
and Nara in the eighth – showing their admiration for the greatest city
anywhere in the contemporary world, the Tang capital of Chang’an.
It was imitation, of course, though not in any spirit of sycophantic
subordination. Rather, the Koreans and Japanese were demonstrating
that their skills were not inferior to those of the Chinese. Kyŏngju’s
new cityscape took shape under King Munmu. Measuring approxi-
mately . kilometres north–south by . kilometres east–west, it was
divided like Chang’an into squares (bang), or wards. The standard
measurement for a bang seems to have been  by  metres, enough
for more than  households. Whether there were just  of them or
,, as modern experts and the Samguk yusa have respectively
claimed, is still to be resolved, as are other features of the city’s ground
plan. Much, however, has become clear about this teeming metropolis
of around one million inhabitants, which drew foreigners from as far
afield as the Middle East and Japan. It was located on a broad plain, just
below the point at which tributaries from the surrounding hills flowed
into the Hyŏngsan river. One of the builders’ first tasks was to dig an

                       
artificial lake to help the drainage of the site, using tools supplied from
the nearby iron furnace. It was called Anapchi (‘Ducks and Geese
Lake’). The job was finished in  and turned to good advantage as
an attraction within the crown prince’s new Eastern Palace. Partial
remains excavated in the s show what a magnificent complex it
must have been (Picture Essay ). Partying was frequent: one of the
games that went well when the wine was flowing freely was forfeits,
played with an octagonal die of polished wood on whose faces were
written penalties such as ‘Drink three cupfuls in one go’, ‘Sing one
verse of Wolgyŏng’, ‘Empty away two cupfuls’ and ‘Let all other play-
ers hit you on the nose’.
Anapchi is one of the stops on the bus tour of Kyŏngju taken by
today’s tourists. Were it not for Kim Yusin’s leadership in the uni-
fication wars things might have turned out quite differently for Munmu,
and the old general would no doubt have been a guest of honour at the
Eastern Palace’s inauguration had he not died the previous year. It is
fitting, anyway, that the bus should pay a respectful visit to his tomb, as
it does to a memorial – of quite a different kind – to another of the
monarchs he served. Three things distinguish Queen Sŏndŏk (r. –):
she was the first of three queens to rule Silla in their own right; she gave
particular encouragement to Buddhism; and she ordered the building
of Asia’s oldest surviving observatory, Ch’ŏmsŏngdae (‘Reverently
Observing Stars Platform’). Completed in , it is now a star itself,
ready to face the battery of cameras pouring off the bus. The circular
building, shaped like a flask with a concave neck, stands on a square
base and is . metres high. It is constructed of  stone blocks in
twenty-four courses, twelve below and twelve above a single, south-
facing window. On top are two hollow squares, each made of four
blocks. To the present day, experts are intrigued as much by the sym-
bolism and mathematics of its design as by the concern for astronomy
that it reflects.
Close by the observatory, in Tumuli Park,  great mounds mark
the resting places of Silla royalty. Here the curious now stop for a peep
inside the Heavenly Horse Tomb, where replicas of the burial goods
are laid out for public scrutiny. Among them are a golden crown, a sil-
ver belt, gilt-bronze shoes, an iron sword, spear and axe, and, of course,
the saddle-flap painted with the galloping steed that gives the tomb its
name. Then, suitably awed, it’s back through the trees to the bus, to be
whisked away into the southern hills and to amazement of a different
kind. The P’osŏkchŏng (‘Abalone Stone Pavilion’) buildings where the
Silla court once entertained itself at parties have gone, leaving just a
granite channel-shaped something like an abalone shell winding under

           ,      ‒    
 Decorated roof-tile
The Silla court called its beautiful artificial lake Wŏlchi (‘Moon Lake’),
though nowadays it is known by the name it acquired in the Chosŏn
period, Anapchi (‘Ducks and Geese Lake’). It was set in landscape
designed to imitate Wushan, a scenic and holy mountainous region in
China, and stocked with exotic flora and fauna. Rocky islands created
in the lake were decorated as retreats for the Daoist Immortals. The
Eastern Palace was a worthy setting in which to impress visiting
embassies. So far the foundations of  buildings have been found, the
largest of which was Imhae-jŏn (‘Sea-side Pavilion’). Here more than
, guests could sit down to state banquets, entertained by music and
dance from both Korea and China. Ice was brought from a nearby stone
icehouse, still extant. Here too the last king, Kyŏngsun, entertained his
rival Wang Kŏn in  and surrendered the throne to him in .
Archaeological investigations begun in the s have unearthed
more than , utilitarian items from the bed and vicinity of the lake,
including a wooden boat, farming implements, armour, stirrups, glass
and crystal beads and polished bone ornaments. More than , tiles
have been found. A few of them are rectangular, and would have been
mounted vertically at the gable end of a descending corner ridge.
Korean tile-makers had perfected their art by the seventh and eighth
centuries , and decorated the circular end-tiles of roofs with hun-
dreds of different moulded designs based on the lotus, floral and cloud
patterns, deva spirits, dragons, and real and imaginary birds and ani-
mals. From an enormous ( cm) tile moulded in two halves, discovered
on the site of Hwangnyŏng-sa in , the faces of elderly men laughed
out. Mythical creatures such as the phoenix and the unicorn offered
power and protection to the building beneath. Forty-one rectangular tiles
discovered at Anapchi, glazed green and brown, were decorated with
fierce masks that glared forth from high up on the palace buildings,
frightening away evil spirits. The face seen here has been described in
general terms as that of a monster or ogre, reminiscent of the ancient
Chinese taotie. Close inspection, however, shows that between its horns
the creature carries the yŏŭi-ju (‘As you wish’) jewel seen in depictions
of the dragon and the bodhisattva Kwanseŭm, and that from either side
of its jaws waft strands of cosmic energy, or ki. Its intentions therefore
seem to be active as well as reactive, and Kang Woo-bang identifies it as
a dragon dedicated to fighting fire.


Decorated earthenware roof-tile (ch’imi) from Anapchi, th century, Kyŏngju,
. × . cm.


an ancient elm. Not much to look at, but there’s more to it than meets
the eye. Scholars in Korea, Japan and China all enjoyed a game that
required players to compose a poem before a cup of wine, floated down
a stream, reached the point where they were sitting. What made the
P’osŏkchŏng ‘race-track’ different, according to experiments conduct-
ed by modern hydraulic specialists, was that as water flowed through
the channel, twists along its irregular course created planned vortices
where a cup would be trapped and its rate of progress made unpre-
dictable. Players seated at each point would try to compose a poem, or
to drain the cup, before it was whisked away again. While King
Kyŏngae and his family, members of the Pak clan, were relaxing here
in , or perhaps were absorbed in prayer at the shrine, they were
taken unawares by the fearsome general Kyŏn Hwŏn, a Kim-clan sup-
porter. The women were raped, Kyŏngae was killed, and the Kims
reoccupied the throne in the bloodiest of circumstances.
An important visitor being shown around Kyŏngju in the Unified
Silla period would probably have gone to just these same places. In
addition, he would surely have visited the country’s greatest temple,
Hwangnyŏng-sa (‘Yellow Dragon Temple’), which graced the suburbs
of the city close to the Eastern Palace. It was begun in   and com-
pleted sixteen years later, and subsequent renovation and extensions
gave it a Golden (image) Hall with a -foot (.-m) Sakyamuni statue,
a lecture hall, a pagoda, a bell pavilion (for the great bell cast in ), a
sutra pavilion and surrounding domestic quarters and cloisters. The
Mongols destroyed it in  and it was never rebuilt, but modern
excavation of the foundations shows that it was eight times as large as
Pulguk-sa, and more than , artefacts have been recovered from
the site. Across the road from it still stand the lower three levels of
another pagoda, belonging to Punhwang-sa (‘Eminent Emperor
Temple’). Built of stone cut to look like brick, it was finished in ,
the same year as the Ch’ŏmsŏngdae observatory. The upper storeys
(seven or nine in number) have fallen in and made entry by the four
doorways impossible. The famous monks Chajang (seventh century)
and Wŏnhyo (–) both stayed in Punhwang-sa, and it may have
been from here that Chajang planned the construction of Hwangnyŏng-
sa’s own nine-storeyed pagoda, finished in . It was made of wood,
without the use of nails, by  Paekche workmen under the supervi-
sion of the architect Abiji, and is estimated to have been  metres
(. ft) high. The two temples were closely linked and both received
royal patronage. Their pagodas were of similar elevation, but whether
or not they were planned to balance each other, one of wood, the other
of stone and brick, is unknown.

                       
 Symmetry and proportion are evident in the layout of many
Korean temple complexes, including Pulguk-sa (‘Buddha Land
Temple’), which stands some  miles south-east of Kyŏngju. Like the
Hwangnyŏng-sa bell, its building was a project authorized by King
Kyŏngdŏk (r. –), whose reign marked the apogee of Unified Silla
culture. It was begun in  to replace an earlier temple called Hwaŏm
Pulguk-sa, dating from King Pŏphŭng’s time, and took seventeen years
to complete. For all that today’s temple is much smaller than it was
then, many Koreans would not hesitate to name Pulguk-sa if asked for
the most famous symbol of Unified Silla. Wherever tourism in Korea
is advertised its picture appears, blocks of softly coloured granite,
white marble balustrades, grey tiles, sandy courtyards and tanch’ŏng
(‘five-coloured’) woodwork, nestling into the lush background of pine,
bamboo and fruit trees up the Toham-san hillside. The silence and
calm that once enfolded it have gone. Visitors no longer climb up to the
front gate by the steep two-tiered staircase, the so-called Azure Cloud
and White Cloud bridges, but crowd in through a side gate. Once
inside they jostle to be photographed before the main Buddha hall,
Taeŭng-jŏn. The courtyard in front of it is bisected by a stone path
from the front gate, halfway along which stands a simple stone lantern
of Silla date, and on either side a soaring granite pagoda (Picture
Essay ). Both date from  and are thought to have been the work of
the Paekche craftsman Asadal. Though dissimilar, they were meant to
complement each other as yang and yin (Kor. ŭm). The one on the
right, Tabot’ap (‘Many Treasures Pagoda’), represents the Buddha
Prabhutaratna. It is . metres high and elaborate in design; its
sister on the left, Sŏkkat’ap (‘Sakyamuni Pagoda’), is the Buddha
Sakyamuni. It is . metres tall and simpler. Although it is not unusual
to find relics and treasures hidden inside stone pagodas, great excite-
ment accompanied the discovery inside Sŏkkat’ap of the world’s oldest
extant block-printed text, a page of the Pure Light ‘Dharani Sutra’,
in .
The style, proportions and materials of Korean temple buildings
imitated those of contemporary China, and were in turn replicated in
Nara Japan by Korean and local architects. They are to be seen, for
example, in Tōdai-ji, the centre for the Avatamsaka school developed
by the Silla monk Simsang from  onwards. Much of what we see
today at Pulguk-sa is not really so ancient. The buildings first ordered
by the chief minister Kim Taesŏng (–) had been ravaged by fire
more than once before being destroyed by the Japanese in . They
were reconstructed in the eighteenth century, fell into disrepair in the
Japanese colonial period, and were restored to their present excellent

           ,      ‒    
 Pagodas at Pulguk-sa

Cremation came to Korea in the seventh century  as a new form of

committal to the next life. Although not everybody preferred it, King
Mumnu opted for it as a means of saving expense when he died (a pri-
ority that had not marked his lifetime’s enterprises), and ordered his
ashes to be buried at sea so that his dragon spirit could protect his king-
dom. Ashes were one of the items that might be buried beneath a stone
pagoda, where they would become part of the sarira (‘relics’) of a holy
man and worthy of veneration. According to the Samguk sagi, the first
sarira were received by King Sŏng in  , from Liang. In modern
times many sarira items of great value have come to light. The recep-
tacle inside which the treasures were placed was frequently itself an
item of fine craftsmanship. From a stone pagoda at Kamŭn-sa of ± 
comes a gilt-bronze box decorated with four musicians standing around
a miniature stupa and playing a flute, a phoenix-headed lute, a drum and
cymbals. Concealed inside the box was a small crystal bottle containing
the sarira. By this time gold was being supplanted by bronze and silver,
so the discovery of a late seventh-century gold Buddha from Nawon-ri,
Kyŏngju, was particularly rare. Just as valuable, though in a different
way, were copies of the scriptures, containing the words of a Buddha
and counting as a physical manifestation of his presence. They too were
buried as sarira items.
Outstanding among the treasures found inside the Sŏkkat’ap stupa
when it was opened in  was a block-printed edition,  metres long
by . centimetres high, of the Pure Light ‘Dharani Sutra’ (Muju-
jŏnggwang tae-darani-gyŏng). Printed on paper, half of it had crumbled
away, but the remaining half was in good condition. It had been carved
out of twelve wooden blocks, each containing up to  lines of eight-
character text. The sutra had been translated from Sanskrit into
Chinese in Chang’an by Mi Toxian between  and , precisely the
period when the Empress Wu (–) invented eight new characters.
Though they were quickly abandoned after her death, four of them
appear on the Sŏkkat scroll. Pan Jixing suggests a printing date for it of
, and Kim Songsu claims that a text dated  found in a stone pago-
da at Kuhwang-dong, Kyŏngju, is written in the same hand. Clearly the
sutra was printed before the year of its concealment, , and even this
would make it the world’s oldest extant example of a printed text.
Where it was printed is uncertain. Chinese scholars have argued for
Luoyang. Certainly, it is just the kind of gift that could have reached the


Tabot’ap and Sŏkkat’ap stone pagodas at Pulguk-sa,  , Kyŏngju, heights:
Tabot’ap . metres, Sŏkkat’ap . metres.
Silla court from the Chinese capital during, say, the reign of King
Sŏngdŏk and been regarded as sufficiently precious to be buried as part
of Pulguk-sa’s inaugural ceremonies. But Koreans also claim the credit
for it, pointing out that Kyŏngju was quick to adopt other reforms
instituted by the empress, such as her short-lived calendric revision
(–), and may well have used the new characters. They also believe
that the mulberry-bark paper (tak chongyi) on which the sutra was printed
was invented in Korea for special use in the eighth century if not earlier.
Whichever is right, no one really doubts that block printing emanated
first from China, perhaps well before the Sŏkkat Sutra was produced,
and it seems highly likely that Kyŏngju craftsmen soon learned how to
print texts for themselves. Spreading the Buddhist message was a pow-
erful incentive to progress.


condition only in the s. Along the way, efforts were made to hon-
our the past by recreating the temple as far as could be remembered or
deduced from descriptions, and those today who imagine that they can
feel what it was like when it flourished as a haven of Silla religious
experience may not be so far off the mark after all.

 
The tribute system was the inter-state manifestation of Confucianism. It
was hierarchical: it emphasized China’s supremacy and its right to expect
formal acknowledgement from tributary states of their subordinate
status. It was ritualistic: it established a complex pattern for sending and
receiving missions and the ceremonial behaviour that accompanied their
exchange. It was text-dependent: the documents carried by Chinese
envoys to vassal courts were couched in high-flown language full of allu-
sions to the Confucian Classics, and a signal mark of imperial grace was
permission for a vassal state to use the Chinese calendar. As Mencius had
anticipated, culture could refine and pacify: Unified Silla genuinely
seemed to enjoy Chinese literature, music and dance, architecture and
sculptural forms, and it became Tang’s most compliant vassal state.
Despite its early affirmation of political autonomy, Korea admitted
China’s undeniably paramount authority in matters of Confucianism
and of Buddhism. The former had bureaucratic, literary and social
appeal, the latter visual and spiritual. Native Korean interpretations of
each philosophy would soon appear, but for the moment Koreans were
happy enough to learn from what their neighbours had to offer. The
centralized civil and military administration at Kyŏngju showed the
court’s admiration for Chinese models. The Ministry of Rites super-
vised the Confucian Academy (T’aechakkam) and appointed scholars
to teach the Confucian Classics: among its treasures were portraits of
Confucius and his disciples brought back by Sŏngdŏk’s son when he
returned from the Imperial Academy. Courses lasted nine years, and
students were aged from  to . Some may have been taught by Sŏl
Ch’ong (c. –). Son of the great monk Wŏnhyo by a widowed
Silla princess, Sŏl earned his position as trusted adviser to King
Sinmun by telling him the story of the peony, perhaps the first recorded
parable in Korean literature. The king of flowers, it went, was seeking
a companion. Given the choice between a beautiful and seductive young
woman – a rose – who offered physical comforts, and a dowdy, limp-
ing old man – a pasque-flower – the wavering king accepted the latter,
though not without a certain amount of persuasion. It was, of course,
the correct Confucian decision.

                       
 Very little of what the early Koreans wrote has survived. Just 
ancient poems, called hyangga (‘country songs’), have been preserved
in the Samguk yusa and elsewhere, and of these only a few with appar-
ent hwarang connections may date from the Silla period. Luckily, how-
ever, some of the work of Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn (–c. ) has survived.
Ch’oe was sent to China at the age of eleven and entered the Imperial
Academy. Six years later he passed the civil service examination and
worked for the Tang administration until , rising to the rank of cen-
sor. He is best known today for his poetry, but his prose was also so
effective that, according to Yi Kyubo, his denunciation of the Chinese
rebel Huang Chao terrified this fearsome warlord into submission. He
returned to Korea at the grand old age of  and became vice-minister
for war.
Music ranked highly in the Confucian definition of culture.
Thirty thousand foreign musicians were kept at Emperor Xuanzong’s
court, Koreans among them. In Korea itself, Chinese music and dance
was known as tangak (‘Tang music’), in contrast to their own and that
of non-Chinese foreigners, which was called hyangak (‘country music’).
Seven Chinese instruments (a lute, zither, two flutes, mouth-organ,
pan pipes and waist drum) are carved on a stone Amitabha stele of 
now in the Kyŏngju National Museum, and the Unified Silla ensemble
also incorporated the tang-p’iri oboe. A poem of  by Yuan Jie
(–) entitled ‘Ode to the Eastern Barbarians’ compliments
Koreans on trying to preserve authentic, old-style Chinese courtly
music in preference to what Yuan regarded as the inappropriate styles
then supplanting them. Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn linked the introduction into
Korea of Buddhist chant, pomp’ae, and its associated dances with the
return of the monk Chinkam from China in , but they almost cer-
tainly came earlier. The source of much of the new music and dance
lay to the west, and Ch’oe composed a group of five poems about
entertainments of central Asian origin, which he would have seen at
the Tang court. The first is inspired by circus acrobats, the last by a
masked lion dance:

Brandishing their bodies, swinging their arms,

They vigorously roll their golden bells.
The bright moon rolls and the stars shine
As even the whales dance in the calm sea waves.
Your mane is worn and piled with dust
From the sea of sand that you have crossed.
A shaking head, a brandishing tail,
You are the lion, king of all beasts.

           ,      ‒    

Much circumstantial evidence about the development of early society
and government comes from the Samguk yusa. When it came to writing
a good book, Iryŏn knew a thing or two. His stories are full of miracles,
mystery, sex and humour, and historians continue to draw on them,
despite their frequent lack of historicity, for the insight they give into
the colourful, superstitious and often dangerous lives led by inhabitants
of the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla. Great land-owning monas-
teries dominated the countryside and influenced governments, and the
monk’s brush flies most prolifically when it comes to describing Silla
Buddhism. It is here, for example, that the secret of Wŏnhyo’s improp-
er paternity is given away. According to Iryŏn, he was so overcome with
remorse at breaking his vow of chastity that he shed his monastic robes,
made a mask out of a gourd and toured the countryside converting
villagers in droves to Buddhism with his singing and dancing. In the
bawdy, masked dance drama (t’alchum) that is a popular feature of
present-day traditional Korean culture, one of the standard figures of
fun is the dissolute dancing monk. The historical Wŏnhyo, however,
was certainly no comic turn. He was the first of Korea’s own great
Buddhist thinkers, as well as a great popularizer of the religion among
people of all classes. After abandoning an initial plan to visit China
with Ŭisang in  he returned to Kyŏngju, where he read as many
Mahayana texts as he could and became renowned for his commen-
taries aimed at unifying their variant traditions. In Punhwang-sa,
Hwangnyŏng-sa and elsewhere he lectured and wrote on ‘Harmonizing
the Debates between the Ten Schools’, and the sect that he founded,
Pŏpsŏng-jong, was later known as Chungdo-jong (‘The Middle Way
School’). It was one of the group of Five Teachings (O-gyo) of Silla
Buddhism that emphasized study (kyo) and doctrinal orthodoxy.
Ŭisang was the founder of Hwaŏm-jong (‘Flower Garland
School’), another of the O-gyo. He accompanied a Tang envoy returning
to China and stayed there, studying, until prompted to return to Korea
in  by uncertainty about the fate of his recently united country. No
doubt he had sensed China’s expectation of a Korean welcome for the
restoration of Chinese rule, a kind of return to the ‘Lelang spirit’. But
he may also have heard of local resistance to the establishment of a
Chinese garrison in P’yŏngyang. Perhaps he hoped that by spreading
the lessons he had learned from his long analysis of the ‘Flower
Garland Sutra’ (Hwaŏm-gyŏng) he could help to resolve tension. In any
event, Hwaŏm-jong turned into one of Korea’s principal Buddhist sects.
The Chinese monk Fazang wrote to Ŭisang from Chang’an in ,

                       
 More than twenty years have passed since we parted, but how
could affection for you leave my mind? Between us lie ten
thousand miles of smoke and clouds and a thousand folds of
land and sea; it is clear we will not see each other again in this
life. How can I express, adequately, how I cherish the memory
of our friendship? Owing to the same direct and indirect causes
in our former existence and the same karma in this life, we
were fortunate; we immersed ourselves in the great scripture,
and we received its meaning by special favor granted us by our
late master. I hear with even greater joy that you have, on your
return to your native country, elucidated the Flower Garland
Sutra, enhanced the Dharma realm, and arisen from causa-
tion unhindered. Thus Indra’s net is multi-meshed and the
kingdom of the Buddha is daily renewed; you have widely
benefited the world.

China was the centre of gravity of the Buddhist world, attracting

pilgrims even from India itself. Those arriving from Silla could stay
first at a Korean monastery on the Shandong peninsula before ventur-
ing inland. One of those who went even further, to south Asia, was the
sixteen-year-old Hye Ch’o. Inspired by an Indian acquaintance to
embark on his own voyage of exploration to the source of the Law, he
sailed from Guangzhou to the Ganges delta, and spent some four years
touring holy sites before returning overland to a monastery in Chang’an
in . There he began his life’s work of study and translation, and his
journal, discovered at Dunhuang in , stands alongside those of the
Chinese pilgrims Faxian ( fl. –) and Xuanzang (–) as a
valuable description of early medieval India and its religion.
The O-gyos’ preference for learning and exegesis in the search for
enlightenment distinguished them from the Sŏn (Ch. Chan, Jap. Zen)
persuasion, which may have reached Korea in the late seventh century.
The very kernel of Sŏn belief, that fundamental truth is inexpressible
and that its apprehension may result from a state of mental readiness
as much as acquired learning, rendered it liable to local particularism.
Through the ninth century discrete sects developed in various geo-
graphical locations, supported by their neighbourhood gentry. They
are known as the Nine Mountain Schools (Kusan-mun). In the tenth
and eleventh centuries Sŏn lost ground to the Pure Land (Ch’ŏntae)
School, but Chinul’s great twelfth- to thirteenth-century syncretic
creation of Chogye-jong, in which enlightenment assumed primacy over
cultivation, gave it fresh impetus, and it remained the dominant element
in Korean Buddhist teaching through the difficult period of the early

           ,      ‒    
Chosŏn. Evidence of its continued vitality comes in very different forms,
including the composition by the monk Sŏsan (–) of one of
the most famous original Buddhist texts by a Korean, Sŏn-ga kwigam
(‘Sŏn School Tortoise Mirror’), and the significant part played by
monks in anti-Japanese resistance during the Imjin wars.
We have already encountered two dominant aspects of Korean
Buddhism, monasticism and scholarship. Two more, artistry and an
affinity for the countryside, were evident in the hills around Kyŏngju,
where Thomas Merton’s assertion in The Seven Storey Mountain that
‘the artistic experience, at its highest, [is] actually a natural analogue of
mystical experience’ was vividly corroborated. Hundreds of stone
statues, pagodas and temples were carved and built high across the
forty-something valleys of the sacred Namsan mountains. If those that
are portable have now been removed to the National Museum for safety,
dozens still remain, a reminder if one were needed of that epithet
‘open-air museum’. Silla’s sculptors excelled themselves, and attained
the peak of perfection in the Sokkuram (‘Stone Cave Hermitage’)
grotto. Here, in a cave dug from the hillside high above Pulguk-sa,
facing east towards the rising sun, the temple’s architect Kim Taesŏng
planned a  World Heritage Site. Its central figure is a white
granite Sakyamuni Buddha, more than  metres high, seated in the
lotus posture. A mood of transcendent tranquillity takes precedence
over naturalism. The head is outlined dramatically against a nimbus
carved on the wall behind him. Beneath the beehive hairstyle a crystal
jewel marks the centre of his forehead. The eyes, nose, mouth, ears and
three rolls of flesh at the base of the neck are carved with perfect sym-
metry. The folds of his robe sweep tightly across his chest from left
shoulder to right breast, leaving his right shoulder bare. His left hand
lies in his lap in the contemplative gesture and the right points down to
the earth in the earth-witness mudra. The hem of his robe is arranged
over his lower legs with careful artistry. The image is both formal and
unostentatious, and its impact is all the greater for it. Carved in relief
out of the cave walls around the Buddha are fifteen attendant bod-
hisattvas. The Sokkuram grotto dates from the mid-eighth century,
simultaneously the apogee of Tang artistry. If the works of Silla crafts-
men betray their awareness of Chinese models and taste, what they
created in stone and bronze proclaims native Korean prowess.
Artistry of a different kind shines forth from numerous stone
pagodas and memorial stelae. For whatever reason – and according to
Nancy Steinhardt ‘we cannot explain why . . . China and Japan have so
few stone pagodas and Korea has so many’ – architects made this
form of construction a characteristically Korean treasure. While by no

                       
means unique to the Unified Silla period, it dominated the plastic arts
at this time when government and society were so imbued with the
Buddhist faith. The Korean stone pagoda is usually square in form,
although a small number are lantern-shaped, bell-shaped or octagonal.
Three, five or more tapering storeys stand on a square pedestal.
Generally, each of them is a solid block of stone, although the lowest
may comprise supporting pillars or three-dimensional figures of pro-
tective bodhisattvas, monks or lions. Between each storey projects a
canopy. Early pagodas are unadorned and achieve their effect through
perfect balance and simplicity. Those of the eighth and ninth centuries
are more elaborate, their stone faces adorned with delicately carved
relief figures of guardian deities, flying devas and musicians, along with
lotus emblems and wispy clouds.
Another glorious feature of temple layouts were their bronze bells
(Picture Essay ). The best-known Silla example hangs today under an
open-air pavilion in the grounds of the National Museum at Kyŏngju,
and every day, on the hour, visitors cluster round it and wait expectant-
ly to hear its doleful note. (They do not need to stand so close, for these
days it comes from a sound-reproduction system nearby, and even
when it was rung ‘live’ it is said that the sound could be heard  miles
away. If this were ever true, which is highly doubtful, it must have been
when it hung in its original surroundings at Pongdŏk-sa.) Great bells
of this sort were rung before morning and evening services to call the
faithful in from the countryside. Today’s visitors have probably heard
or read the story that when this particular one was being cast, it was so
large that it cracked repeatedly and could not be rung. Until, that is,
, when the master of the foundry threw his own three-year-old
daughter into the molten metal to appease the dragon spirit in charge
of fire and metal. Then the new bell tolled beautifully, ringing out with
a mournful note sounding like a child’s cry, ‘Emi! Emi!’ (‘Mummy!
Mummy!’). This is another of Iryŏn’s legends, although the same tale
of a sacrificial child was linked with the Seoul city bell cast in , and
its connection with the Pongdŏk-sa, or Emille, bell seems to have
become common knowledge only since . In fact, the fame of the
latter should not depend on eschatology and voyeurism, for the skill of
Silla metalworkers deserves better recognition. The bell is . metres
( ft) high, . metres ( ft  in.) in diameter, and weighs . tonnes.
Commissioned by King Kyŏngdŏk in honour of his father, Sŏngdŏk, its
side bears a long dedicatory inscription eulogizing his preference for
education and skill over gold and jewellery, and his efforts to encourage
virtue in farmers and merchants. Four devas with censers kneel on
cushions, surrounded by a delicate tracery of ribbons and lotus fronds.

           ,      ‒    
 Temple bell from Sangwŏn-sa
Temple bells are one of the glories of traditional Korean craftsmanship
and reached their artistic apogee in the Unified Silla period. They were
Korea’s special contribution to the ‘international’ phase of Buddhism,
which prompted the sponsorship of enormous works of art in China
and elsewhere. Three things distinguish them from their Chinese coun-
terparts: an elaborate suspension knob incorporating a hollow acoustic
tube; four panels of nine studs placed immediately below the band
around the top; and decoration on the walls of the bell comprising pairs
of flying devas and circular lotus patterns, which also mark the points
for striking the bell. Ornamental bands encase the stud panels and encir-
cle the top and bottom rims of the bell. The devas, which show similar-
ities with the same kind of spirits fluttering around the walls of caves in
Dunhuang and elsewhere, frequently carry censers, musical instruments
or gifts of food to present to the Buddhas. Until the ninth century they
fly with their knees drawn up under them; thereafter they also sit cross-
legged on seats of clouds.
The Emille bell is the largest surviving example of the genre, but the
oldest is one cast for Sangwŏn-sa temple on the holy mountain of Odae-
san, Kangwŏn province. A story in the Samguk yusa says that the monk
Chajang went on pilgrimage to the shrine of the bodhisattva Munsu
(Manjusri) in China, and was told by a dragon in a vision that he would
find , Buddhas on the mountain. Climbing Odae-san in   he
saw nothing for the thick fog, but on his way down he met Munsu in
person and was prompted to found the temple () and set about
organizing the Yul-jong (Vinaya) sect.
The bell was cast by order of a nobleman’s wife, Hyudori. Two pairs
of matching devas, kneeling on wispy clouds, adorn its sides. They carry
a konghu harp and a saeng mouth-organ, familiar instruments in Tang
and Unified Silla ensembles, though the harp later disappeared from use
in Korea and the style of the mouth-organ would undergo many
changes in future centuries. The devas wear thin, loosely draped dresses
fastened with a circular brooch at the waist, and bangles on their wrists.
Their hair is tightly coiffeured on top of their heads, and swirling rib-
bons and tassels stream out around and behind them. Musical devas
continued to adorn bells, and the walls and ceilings of temples, in later
ages. By modern times they had grown used to carrying almost every
kind of musical instrument, but in deference to the Neo-Confucian
sense of propriety, they had also learned to fly much more heavily clad.


Bronze temple bell from Sangwŏn-sa, Odae-san, Kangwŏn province, ,
height . m.


Bands of floral arabesque ring the top and bottom edges and surround
the four stud panels. The bell is one of Korea’s best-loved National
Treasures.

When I first saw Kyŏngju I felt as if I was taking a step back into the
past. Pulguk-sa was in the process of restoration and still fronted with
market gardens instead of today’s parking lots and tourist shops. The
country road along which I walked to get there from the town was
almost deserted. On the way I stopped to rest in a grove of pine trees.
They shaded the tomb mound of King Sŏngdŏk, buried in  and still
guarded by the remains of twelve zodiacal animals in military uniform.
The silence was numinous and all-embracing. Nearly thirty years on
from that visit in , the public-relations people have done a good
job: Kyŏngju hotels are full of tourists; the Namsan hills are full of
climbers; buses and taxis queue up outside Pulguk-sa; sightseers
throng the temples and gawp at the tomb mounds. Yes, Kyŏngju
deserves its popularity, though silence is now regrettably hard to come
by. Among Koreans, this city is a symbol of pride in what is widely seen
as the first ever period of unified Korean rule, and across the southern
half of a peninsula divided since  the concentration of so much
political and cultural glory in one place is a source of tangible inspira-
tion. How far that is wholly appropriate is another matter, for Unified
Silla’s domain never did incorporate the full territorial extent of the
Three Kingdoms, and some of its subjects remained unhappy at what
they saw as division into northern and southern regions. So by all means
let us acknowledge Silla’s success, but let us notice too that across the
top of the wider picture loomed the first manifestation of what would
prove to be a persistent threat to Korea until modern times: a rival
regime in Manchuria. And let us not forget either that if Kyŏngju could
boast  years as capital of Unified Silla, its successor, Kaesŏng, would
have many more,  to be precise, as the seat of Koryŏ government.
Today, that historic city lies within the frontiers of the .

                       
  

Koryŏ, ‒:
The Struggle for Independence
The veneer of unity that the Koryŏ dynasty guarded for nearly five
centuries concealed mounting problems for the royal Wang clan,
which surrendered control first to its military leaders (‒)
and then to the Mongols (‒). This chapter shows how
Korea tried to steer a difficult diplomatic path through intensify-
ing inter-state rivalries. It reveals the tension at court between
Buddhism and Confucianism, and shows how both were identi-
fied with important aspects of cultural progress.

The early Middle Ages had been a glorious period in the history of East
Asia. The civilization of Tang China, Unified Silla Korea and Nara Japan
matched – outshone even – that of any other part of the contemporary
world, and drew ambassadors, pilgrims, scholars and merchants from
as far away as South Asia and the Middle East. But the dawning of the
tenth century proved calamitous, as one great ruling clan after another
fell. Tang was the first to go in . The name given to the short but
intense spell of disunity that followed in China, ‘Five [northern]
Dynasties and Ten [southern] Kingdoms’, says it all; and when re-
unification came in , relief exceeded even resentment at the Song
dynasty’s tough new laws. Parhae went in , absorbed into Abaoji’s
growing Khitan empire, which eventually extended across southern
Manchuria and parts of northern China: it showed its presumptuous
challenge to Chinese regional domination by taking a dynastic title,
Liao. Refugees poured into northern Korea, among them the heir to
the Parhae throne. But metaphors of frying pans and fires spring to
mind, for in Korea too armies were on the march and halcyon days of
stability under the Unified Silla had gone. The tyrannical rebel Kyŏn
Hwŏn declared himself ruler of Later Paekche at Chŏnju in , and
an aristocratic soldier-monk, Kungye, followed suit by proclaiming
Later Koguryŏ at Kaesŏng in . The latter was dispatched by one of
his own military commanders, Wang Kŏn, in . The Unified Silla
government in Kyŏngju hung on until Wang’s army approached the
gates in , and then negotiated reasonable surrender terms. Later


Paekche was mopped up the following year, and the brief but unpleas-
ant period known as the Later Three Kingdoms was over.
Wang Kŏn named his new regime Koryŏ (‘High and Beautiful’), a
deliberate evocation of ancient Koguryŏ. But rather than harking back
to a time when the peninsula was divided and China dominated the
region, the new king had to look to the future. As three new powers –
Song, Liao and Koryŏ – competed for territory and status, north-east
Asia embarked on a long and unsettled period when fluidity, rather than
the traditional Sinocentric hierarchy, characterized the international
political system, and when asylum seekers would troop from state to
state in search of sanctuary and a peaceful life. In Korea, the task con-
fronting Wang Kŏn, or King T’aejo (‘Great Forbear’) as he is usually
known, was to ensure that his country recovered its unity, strengthened
its identity and confirmed its right to political independence.

  

Today, Kaesŏng lies a short distance north of the  in the . It is
a modestly sized town of some , inhabitants that has suffered
badly in time of war because it lies between Seoul and P’yŏngyang.
Many of its old buildings and monuments have been destroyed. The
Museum of London is working with the Korean authorities on a long-
term archaeological rescue project, but the instinctive aversion of the
 regime to international tourism means that, in stark contrast to
the situation in Kyŏngju, historical sites currently on show reflect little
of the town’s former glory. In  it attracted publicity only as the site
for a modest joint ‒ manufacturing venture turning out iron
pots and kitchenware, a symbolic reminder, perhaps, of the role that iron
wares played in the much earlier economic fortunes of the peninsula.
(By  work had begun on developing a wider ⁄ industrial
park outside the town.) A thousand years ago, thanks to the efforts of
T’aejo, Kaesŏng was one of the region’s major cities, a magnet drawing
people from across Asia.
T’aejo’s family came from the north-western island of Kanghwa,
far from the Silla capital in Kyŏngju, and was in trade and shipping
rather than government. Having triumphed over both Kyŏn Hwŏn and
Kungye, yet still little more than chief of ‘a confederation of warlords’,
he had to tread a thin political line, satisfying his own supporters, placat-
ing those of the regimes he had deposed and deterring an immediate
challenge from the direction of either Manchuria or China. By taking
the name Koryŏ, T’aejo challenged the assumption by the erstwhile
leaders of Parhae, and their recent conquerors the Khitan, that they

                       
were the true heirs of Koguryŏ and might lay claim to its former lands.
On the other hand, his own claim to current political legitimacy
derived from King Kyŏngsun’s surrender to him at Anapchi in ,
that is to say, in succession to Silla, the former conquerors of Koguryŏ.
If this anomaly made the legitimization of his position look uneasy, the
disorder into which he had helped to throw the country threatened to
undo the progress made under Silla.
T’aejo took positive measures to secure his position. Showing a
glimpse of statesmanship, he rewarded Kyŏngsun’s capitulation by
granting him a title superior to that of any Koryŏ nobles and recruiting
former Silla officials into his own government. They had, however, to
uproot themselves from their old power base in Kyŏngju and move to
his new capital in Kaesŏng. He married a queen from the royal Kim
line of Silla and took a further  wives from the ranks of powerful
noble families, an astute political move aimed at diverting possible dis-
sidence among them as well as ensuring the birth of an heir. He
ordained that appointment to official posts must be on ability and
integrity. When, by , his own observations showed that local mag-
nates, drawing their income from stipend villages, were still exploiting
and oppressing the poor and weaker members of society, including the
women, he reiterated the importance of effective rewards and punish-
ments and chastised them.
As King T’aejo grew old not all the sŏngju (‘castle lords’) who had
helped bring him to power would surrender their territorial privileges,
not even to gain a royal father-in-law: only when King Kwangjong
(r. –) freed many of their slaves did the throne manage to break
the grip of these warlords and their private armies. In , conscious
of his approaching end, T’aejo issued a set of Ten Injunctions (Sip
hunyo), principles and practical considerations for the future conduct
of government. The opening statement, Number One, affirmed the
importance of Buddhism to the fortunes of the kingdom. The Sixth,
on the other hand, reminded his successors that they must not neglect
the ancient spirits of mountains and rivers, and the last was a reminder
of the importance of studying history and the classics as a guide to the
present. This, T’aejo’s final testament, gave balanced encouragement
to Buddhism, shamanism and Confucianism, and when his tomb and
the surrounding area were excavated prior to the rebuilding and open-
ing of his mausoleum to the  public in , a gilt-bronze statue
of the king was discovered that reflected his eclectic beliefs. Seated like
a deified Buddhist image, he wore a royal crown decorated with symbols
of hills, clouds and the sun and moon. Nearby were placed a number
of curved official belts adorned with beads. Among the paintings on

  ̆,    ‒    
the walls and ceiling of the tomb were the blue dragon, the white tiger
and symbolic pictures of pine, bamboo and plum blossom.
By the time the sixth king, Sŏngjong (r. –), set up the Altars
of Earth (sa) and Harvest (jik) in Kaesŏng in  the status of the city
was well established. P’yŏngyang, Seoul and Kyŏngju were designated
northern, southern and eastern capitals respectively, but it was
Kaesŏng, the central capital, that really forged ahead. It was an admin-
istrative, educational and religious centre, the location of the only
permanent markets in the country and the destination for incoming
foreign missions. Where court ritual and ceremony – the official face of
Confucianism – were concerned, even Liao envoys commented on the
excellence of its (Chinese) style. But the strength of Confucianism
really flowed from the conviction with which scholar-officials allowed
it to influence their public and private lives, and that was a matter of
lifelong learning. Korean scholars took their education seriously. When
illness detained the Chinese refugee Shuang Ji in Kaesŏng during ,
he made good use of his time by helping King Kwangjong to set up a
civil service examination system. Two syllabi tested knowledge of
Chinese texts, one (chinsa) of literary works, the other (myŏnggyŏng) of
the five Confucian Classics. Both would lead successful candidates into
the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, and offered members of pow-
erful country families the chance of a legitimate way into government.
A third degree, chapkwa, was more practical, and covered law, mathe-
matics, medicine and divination. The cause of education was advanced
still further by King Sŏngjong and his minister Ch’oe Sŭngno (–
). In  the king founded the National University (Kukcha-gam),
successor to the Silla king Sinmun’s T’aehakkam in Kyŏngju and pred-
ecessor of modern Seoul’s Confucian Academy, Sŏnggyun-gwan. A
hundred years later, leading scholars had established a dozen independ-
ent schools (sŏwŏn) of their own that would rival it, creating a bifurca-
tion into state and private sectors that is still a characteristic of Korean
higher education. (More ominously for the interim, the foundations had
been laid down for the growth of factions around the private academies
that would bedevil politics in the Chosŏn era.) The state system was sub-
sequently given a responsive boost by King Injong (r. –), who set
up schools in rural areas (hyanghak) as well as in the capital (kyŏnghak).
Their purpose was to train young men in a particular, Confucian, mind-
set and to identify future officials. If we are minded to criticize the
immediate objective, however, we miss the point: the Korean literati were
well aware of the broader value of training minds, and those who pre-
ferred a different ideological path could always follow the one leading to
the monastery doorway.

                       
 A good deal of the credit for Sŏngjong’s Confucianizing reforms
goes to Ch’oe Sŭngno. He had known all five of the Koryŏ kings to date,
and was critical of those who came after T’aejo for not living up to the
founder’s expectations. He stressed the importance of the king behav-
ing towards his subjects in accordance with the humane principles laid
down in the Book of Changes and the Analects of Confucius. Urging the
king to follow Chinese example more closely, but not slavishly, he made
proposals for strengthening central government authority with a system
modelled on the Song government in Kaifeng. The resultant structure,
which tried to cover both civilian and military matters and to guard
against excessive royal autocracy, was neither simple nor permanent. It
included a Privy Council (Chaech’u), three Chancelleries, a Censorate
and Six Boards, of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Punishments and
Works. In addition, both Sŏngjong and Hyŏnjong (r. –) followed
up Ch’oe’s ideas for extending central control into the countryside,
where twelve provinces were created in  and prefects and magistrates
began to check the power of the castle lords.
Politicians and religious leaders invariably take liberties when they
reinterpret their sources of inspiration, and in urging Sŏngjong to
revive T’aejo’s principles as a means of improving government moral-
ity and effectiveness, Ch’oe was no exception. In particular, he sought
to curb the powers of the Buddhist community with a forthrightness
that might have offended the dynastic founder. T’aejo knew that he
must acknowledge his need for transcendental support. Although he
had adopted ‘Award from Heaven’ (Ch’ŏnsu) as his reign title in ,
Korean kings, unlike Chinese emperors, did not generally bolster their
position by claiming a heavenly mandate for their actions. Pragmatic
considerations might mean the inevitable pursuit of Confucian meas-
ures, but even Confucians felt some empathy with Buddhism, which
continued to claim pole position in religious observations at court. The
royal clan provided Buddhist leaders, and Buddhist rites were observed
across society and across the country. Numerous artists and craftsmen
benefited from its patronage. T’aejo would have been foolish to upset
the status quo, and his First Injunction charged that ‘The success of
every great undertaking of our state depends upon the favour and pro-
tection of Buddha. Therefore, the temples of both the Meditation and
Doctrinal schools should be built and monks should be sent out to
those temples to minister to Buddha.’ He went on, however, to warn
that the uncontrolled proliferation of temples risked wasting energy
and resources. In  Ch’oe Sŭngno, shifting the emphasis, said that
Buddhism should attend to people’s spiritual needs, while Confucian-
ism looked after the affairs of state.

  ̆,    ‒    
 Most people found that shamanism satisfied their spiritual needs as
well as Buddhism, and would have seen no point in trying to separate
them. The court patronized three festivals as state events. Yŏndŭnghoe
was the lantern-lighting ceremony that lit up the whole dark country
on the fifteenth day of the first moon, in the depths of winter. By
contrast P’algwanhoe, on the fifteenth day of the eleventh moon, was
the harvest festival, and village communities turned it into an exuber-
ant, raucous event. The court’s celebrations reflected both native and
imported traditions. Itinerant entertainers, kwangdae, brought in the
culture of the countryside (Picture Essay ), while Chinese dances
added a more sedate touch. Among new ones introduced at the com-
memoration of  was a choreographed version of the Chinese ball-
throwing game p’ogurak, still performed today as a tangak dance at the
National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. As T’aejo
had anticipated, the early Chosŏn rulers did later cancel the observation
of P’algwanhoe and Yŏndŭnghoe. But they continued to observe and
sponsor a third festival, one of exorcism and celebration that marked
the end of an old year and the beginning of the next. This was narye,
dating from early Koryŏ, when the programme often included the Silla
masked dance Ch’ŏyong. Ch’ŏyong was the son of the dragon that cared
for the East Sea, and the reputed son-in-law of the Silla king Hŏn’gang
(r. –). According to the Samguk yusa version of his tale that was
later sung,

Under the moonlight of the Eastern Capital

I revelled late into the night.
When I came home and entered my bedroom
I saw four legs.
Two legs were mine,
Whose were the other two?
The person underneath was mine,
But whose body was taking her?
What should I do?

His decision, in fact, was to forgive his wife’s seducer, the God of
Sickness, who in gratitude promised to avoid any household displaying
Ch’ŏyong’s portrait on the doorpost. The Ch’ŏyong dance remained a
firm favourite at the Chosŏn court and was depicted in pictures of ban-
quet entertainments throughout the dynasty.
China still called many of the intellectual shots across the region,
but in political terms Kaesŏng had to show that it was going to be
nobody’s lackey. T’aejo’s Fourth Injunction read:

                       
 In the past we have always had a deep attachment for the ways
of China and all of our institutions have been modelled upon
those of Tang. But our country occupies a different geograph-
ical location and our people’s character is different from that
of the Chinese. Hence, there is no reason to strain ourselves
unreasonably to copy the Chinese way. Khitan is a nation of
savage beasts, and its language and customs are also different.
Its dress and institutions should never be copied.

As a gesture of sympathy for the people of Manchuria, many of whom

were related to his own, T’aejo had ostentatiously allowed a present of
 camels sent by Liao in  to starve to death. But his government still
pursued diplomatic contacts with its Chinese neighbours. It accepted
official calendars as signs of investiture from Later Tang, Later Jin, Later
Han and Later Zhou rulers, and adopted Chinese court dress in .
The year after the introduction of the new examination system, four
books on filial piety were sent to China. No sooner were the new Song
rulers installed in Kaifeng in  than King Kwangjong sent officials
asking them for Chinese musicians and instruments, and the following
year, as a gentle reminder of Korea’s own literary and religious reputa-
tion, he sent the Ch’ŏnt’ae monk Ch’egwan with copies of Buddhist
books reputed to have been lost during the chaos in China.
In the first  years of the Song dynasty Korea sent twenty
embassies to Kaifeng and received sixteen in return. But neither tradi-
tional admiration for Chinese culture nor willingness to show a degree
of cooperation added up to automatic Korean compliance with China’s
expectations. When China asked for Korean help in attacking Liao,
which was threatening tributary communications in , King
Sŏngjong approved but failed to send it: so perhaps it came as no sur-
prise when the Korean ambassador Wŏn Uk’s plea for Chinese aid
against the Khitan in  was ignored. This left Kaesŏng patently
uncertain over which ‘great’ was currently the one to serve. Six missions
left for China between  and , but off to the Liao capital in
Shangjing (modern Harbin) also went precautionary singing girls,
eagles and maps, and, rather more pragmatically,  students to learn
the Khitan language. As a sign of which way it thought the wind was
blowing, in  Koryŏ adopted the Liao calendar.
To meet the Khitan threat, Sŏngjong reformed the military sys-
tem. All commoner males between  and , with the exception of
government officials and monks, were liable for military service (though
evasion was commonplace). Drawing on professional soldiers from
hereditary military families, Sŏngjong created two guard armies and six

  ̆,    ‒    
 Wooden mask, th–th century
Tourists in modern South Korea enjoy masked dance performances as
an amusing spectacle. Koreans value them also as an ancient cultural
form with origins lying far back in the Three Kingdoms period. Some
derive from sŏnang (‘guardian spirit’) plays associated with seasonal and
fertility rites. Others, sajagye, revolved around worship of the lion as a
bodhisattva and came from central Asia, perhaps in the Unified Silla
period. In the Koryŏ, a further category of plays and acrobatic enter-
tainments was known as sandae togam. In early Chosŏn it was managed
by a government department of the same name. Masked dance was asso-
ciated then with humorous entertainment, especially social satire, and
this is the form in which the plays are usually presented today. They
have no story line and comprise a series of boisterous, often bawdy
sketches, which, while reflecting the Neo-Confucian norms of society,
mock corruption and debauchery in all walks of life.
Masked dance drama was popular across south, central and eastern
Asia. Its traditions disregarded frontiers, and performers crossed from
both Paekche and Silla to Japan. The Tang court enjoyed it. A painting
in the Shōsōin Treasury shows an itinerant entertainment troupe in the
eighth century. Low-class actors called kwangdae, which was perhaps
a name for their masks, passed easily in and out of the Koryŏ court. A
group known as sŏllang put on masked dance shows at the P’algwanhoe
festival and may have been descended from the hwarang of the Silla
period. Masked performances of the Ch’ŏyong tale are said to have
originated in the ninth century. The Chosŏn court played it for visiting
envoys in the hope that the masks would frighten away evil spirits before
their journey home. Nevertheless, the moralistic atmosphere of the
court periodically gave sandae players a hard time, and they must have
developed a phlegmatic attitude to changes in their fortunes. A painting
dated  in the National Museum shows them performing Ch’oyŏng
at a banquet; King Injo expelled them from court in ; and we see
them back again performing for the Society of the Elderly and Brave
(Kiyŏnghoe) in .
Craftsmen made masks from whatever materials came easily to hand,
including gourds, wood, bamboo, clay and paper. They gave them features
caricaturing the figures they represented and painted them brightly and
humorously. The Hahoe Mask Museum at Andong preserves more than
 examples from different regional cultures. One of these is that of
Hahoe itself, where the set of plays put on for the Pyŏlsin ritual festival
on the fifteenth day of the first moon is listed as an Intangible Cultural
Asset. Nine Hahoe masks (National Treasure no. ) date from the late
Koryŏ or early Chosŏn period and are the oldest extant examples in


Wooden mask, th–th century, Hahoe, North Kyŏngsang province,
 × . cm.

Korea. They represent a scholar, aristocrat, bride (seen here: her half-
closed eyes indicate shyness and the small mouth her relative silence),
widow, monk, female flirt, butcher, busybody and fool. Deeply carved
from alder wood and preserving traces of lacquered decoration, five of
the masks have separate and movable chins. Their deep-set eyes and
long noses were a suggestion to the historian Kim Won-yong of foreign
influence.


divisions to defend the capital and border. Those serving in the five
provincial and three county armies shared farming among their duties,
but despite the promise of land as reward, their status was little better
than that of the peasantry with which their numbers were often made
up. The top brass in the military council (Chungbang) found them-
selves inferior in practice to civilian administrators in the Privy Council,
with which they were supposedly on a par. But when the Khitan inva-
sions tested the system in the eleventh century they found it wanting,
and by the twelfth century malcontents at home were showing up its
weaknesses still further.

  

Kaesŏng’s caution appeared justified when, after decades of fighting,
China finally succumbed in  and signed a peace treaty at Shanyuan
agreeing to pay Liao annual tribute of silver and silk. Emboldened by
this, the Khitan found King Mokchong’s message of congratulations
unconvincing, and in  they mounted a major invasion across Koryŏ’s
northern boundary, the line of the Yalu and Tumen rivers. Strong
resistance was led by Kang Kamch’an (–). As magistrate of
Hansŏng he was said to have summoned a marauding -year-old tiger,
severely chastised it and placed restrictions on its future lifestyle. Now
he defeated a ,-strong Liao army at Kŭiju. But this tiger fought
back, and ‘cut the Sino-Korean umbilical cord with fire and sword’
(Rogers) by sacking Kaesŏng. Koryŏ too began paying tribute to Liao,
and in  tried to protect itself by starting a defensive wall that even-
tually stretched some  miles inland from the mouth of the Yalu river,
along a line that lay well to the south of the border.
Despite this inauspicious beginning, the eleventh century gradually
saw the working out of a pragmatic relationship around the East
China Sea. In mixed culture zones like the Manchurian border
regions, geopolitical frontiers and questions of national identity meant
less than survival and prosperity. State-controlled markets operated
and maritime trade flourished irrespective of political tensions. When
a merchant, Huang Zhen, brought a message to Kaesŏng from Emperor
Shenzong in  indicating China’s willingness to reopen diplomatic
relations suspended since , the Koreans were happy to respond.
They sent a request for physicians, painters and sculptors, and the
Korean government built a hostel for Chinese envoys so luxurious
that it was later turned into a royal palace. The first to use it, in ,
was An Dao, whose two specially built vessels, dubbed ‘divine ships’,
carried gifts of clothing and textiles, belts, tea, teapots, silver vessels,

                       
bowls, wine warmers, horses, riding crops, musical instruments and
candles. The Koreans promptly sent back gifts of gold, silver, rice,
clothing, belts, horses and saddles. During the ‘golden age’ of Song–
Koryŏ relations that followed, China sent its neighbour large and costly
quantities of textiles, tea, drugs and books. The acerbic Confucian offi-
cial Su Shi warned against the security risk of supplying books and
maps to the Koreans, who might pass vital information on to the
Khitan. He also complained about the expense of entertaining Korean
visitors while China continued to send tribute missions of its own to
Shangjing, though it seems likely that the balance of trade in official
gifts stood economically in China’s favour. Making inter-governmental
and personal gifts was a valuable way of exchanging luxury and cultural
items, foodstuffs and medicines across the region.
Books transmitted to Korea in this way included titles on history,
philosophy, belles lettres, ritual and music, and in  the Taiping
yulan encyclopedia. Buddhist texts were widely exchanged between
Song, Liao, Koryŏ and Japan. King Munjong’s fourth son, the monk
Ŭich’ŏn (–), took thousands of missing titles with him to
China in . That he was no mere delivery boy, but a true biblio-
phile, is evident from nearly , books he collected from China and
Japan to incorporate into his Supplementary Tripitaka. Returning from
China in , he devoted himself to drawing together the doctrinal
and meditation schools into a revived form of Ch’ŏnt’ae. He lay the
foundation for the subsequent blending of the two streams by Chinul
(–), and Chinul’s school, which he named Chogye after the
Guangdong monastery of the great sixth patriarch Huineng, was set
on a permanent footing by one of the greatest Korean Buddhist lead-
ers, T’aego (–). Today’s Chogye-sa in Seoul, headquarters of
the religion for millions of South Koreans, was formerly known as
T’aego-sa.

  

If the triangular relationship around the Bohai gulf was not entirely
relaxed, it was at any rate tolerable, at least until another threat loomed
over the northern Manchurian horizon. Then, as Aguda led the
Jurchen from the Sungari region into the furthest Liao territories,
warning bells rang in both Kaesŏng and Kaifeng. Koryŏ troops took
delivery of their first gunpowder weapons in  and may have used
them as General Yun Kwan (d. ) campaigned against the Jurchen
in , building nine new fortresses around Hamju in the north-west.
In  Emperor Song Huizong, anxious perhaps to stiffen Korean

  ̆,    ‒    
resolve, sent King Yejong a message honouring him with the title of
‘true king’ (Ch. zhen wang) and absolving him from feudal obligations.
But then, as Aguda nailed his colours to the mast and assumed impe-
rial appurtenances of his own, Huizong’s apprehension got the better
of his political judgement. In an attempt to take charge of events, in
 and  he sent Yejong two huge gifts of musical instruments
(Picture Essay ), asking the Koreans to bring Jurchen representatives
to him to discuss an anti-Liao alliance. Yejong refused the Son of
Heaven. It was true that Koreans did not like the Khitan, even if the
court did watch entertainments put on for it by Khitan refugees, and
although they denounced the Jurchen as barbarians, they took into
account that these people also claimed descent from Koguryŏ and
seemed well on the way to wresting Huizong’s heavenly mandate from
him. Neither did his successor, King Injong, want to be seen as
Huizong’s puppet, and nor at this stage did he want to promote an
alliance that could threaten Korea. His hesitation was warranted:
Aguda’s forces overwhelmed both Liao and northern China, and as the
Chinese court fled Kaifeng in  and Huizong was taken captive to
Manchuria, Kaesŏng pledged submission to the new Jurchen regime,
the Jin (‘Golden’). Injong was persuaded by his father-in-law Yi
Cha’gyŏm that this was the new interpretation of ‘serving the great’. It
was a decision that did not meet with general approval, and the monk
Myoch’ŏng raised an unsuccessful rebellion, but thereafter Koryŏ–Jin
relations settled into an acceptable routine, and annual embassies were
swapped for almost a century.
To foreign courts, Kaesŏng was no doubt synonymous with Korea.
And indeed, it was not just the capital, but also home to a considerable
percentage of the Korean people. Contemporary estimates numbered
its residents at around . million, out of a total population of no more
than five million. Although this was very likely an exaggeration, there
is no doubt that the metropolitan area already dominated the peninsula
and was the place to which all would-be social climbers had to migrate,
just as Seoul set the pace across South Korea in the second half of the
twentieth century. We have an eyewitness account of it, written by a
-year-old Chinese scholar, Xu Jing, who accompanied an embassy to
Kaesŏng in . The reports filed by his predecessors must have
whetted his curiosity about the Korean court, and despite tight surveil-
lance and limitation on his movements, he built up his own broad pic-
ture of life in the capital and its surrounding country during his
month-long stay. Many of the ceremonies he saw and the habits of the
literati he met would have made him feel at home. His hosts, Kim Pusik
among them, shared his interest in art and music, and if the Koreans

                       
were anxious to pick their visitors’ brains, Xu was just as skilful at
gathering information from them. On his return to China he wrote a
book, the Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing (‘Illustrated Account of the
Xuanhe [year] Embassy to Korea’), which he presented to the emperor.
Its  chapters covered such things as towns and cities, gates, palaces,
clothing and headgear, transportation, weapons, customs, women and
slaves, and were divided into about  subsections. Rather than a con-
tinuous prose description, the text was written in the form of extended
captions to the illustrations. The pictures were later lost, but the notes
survive. As well as pointing to instances where Korean procedures
imitated the Chinese, such as, for example, the king’s personal testing
of successful chinsa candidates on their ability to compose shi or fu
poems, Xu also noted aspects of daily life that he found different and
interesting. He was impressed by Koreans’ cleanliness, but shocked by
their habit of mixed bathing in streams. He commented on their habit
of book-collecting, which had led to the creation of excellent libraries
(and shortly afterwards he may have been distressed to hear that some
of them had been burnt during a failed rebellion by Yi Cha’gyŏm in
). One section was devoted to Korean ships. Arriving in two
‘divine ships’ of their own off the mouth of the Han river, the Chinese
were met by ten or so official boats and carried ashore in ‘guest boats’.
Xu’s was about  feet (. m) long and manned by a crew of . It
contained five rooms, and its beautifully appointed main pavilion had a
high ceiling covered in silk decorations. Fine though it sounds from his
description, Xu’s comments on Korean shipping in general are less
than complimentary, raising the possibility that he was telling his
imperial dedicatee what he thought he might wish to hear. Koreans
had, in fact, long dominated East Asian maritime trade, even out of
Nanjing. Very soon, however, Chinese seagoing and shipbuilding were
to receive a fillip from the Song court’s move to Hangzhou, at which
point Korean ship-owners began to be cut out of the profitable route
between China and Japan. Although evidence suggests that there were
Koreans among the crew of a merchant ship that sank off the south-
west coast of Chŏlla in , its cargo of more than , pieces of
celadon and other porcelain wares, recovered from  onwards,
contained just three Korean vessels.
As the Chinese embassy was carried to Kaesŏng, Xu would have
had a chance to observe the countryside. Theoretically all land belonged
to the state, and villagers worked on large estates to provide income for
the landlords who were entrusted with it. These included members of
the royal clan, aristocratic families rewarded with prebend lands for
military or political service, government departments, local officials,

  ̆,    ‒    
 Confucian sacrificial music
To medieval Koreans, music was either ‘elegant’ (aak), ‘Chinese’ (tang-
ak) or ‘native’ (hyangak). Most of their instruments were familiar else-
where in East Asia, and despite the names of the categories, Chinese
tunes turned up in all three. But local traditions were strong and import-
ed tunes were quickly Koreanized, even those of tangak and aak that
Emperor Huizong sent in  and  respectively in an effort to over-
awe the Korean court with the splendour of Chinese ceremonial culture.
To traditional Confucianists, music was a vital component of govern-
ment. It still is to the communist government in today’s North Korea,
and to many South Koreans the performances accompanying the sac-
rifices to the royal ancestors at the Chongmyo Shrine and to
Confucius at the Confucian Academy (Sŏnggyun-gwan) – survivors of
those unique and splendid gifts in the early twelfth century – mean more
than just an occasion reconstructed for tourist cameras. The participants
in the rites, including descendants of the last royal family at Chongmyo,
honour their ancestors and spiritual forebears with ancient liturgy and
authentic respect. Though revised in the Chosŏn period to suit Korean
ideas and taste, and watered down nowadays in length and format to sat-
isfy contemporary time schedules and stamina, they still provide a
thrilling glimpse into the arcane, colourful and rich tapestry of medieval
East Asian ceremonial. In China itself these rites were discontinued after
the fall of the Qing dynasty, but in Seoul they survived the end of the
monarchy and outlasted the colonial period, a tribute to Confucian
powers of spirituality and a gentle hint at regime continuity.
Huizong’s gift in  comprised  beautiful instruments, 
volumes of music and  more of performance instructions. The instru-
ments included sets of iron slabs (panghyang), lutes, zithers, harps,
flutes, oboes, mouth-organs, ocarinas and drums. The music was a
splendid contribution to the tangak music and dance already known in
Kaesŏng, and King Yejong had it performed three times before the year
was out. Two years later, encouraged by this reception and also by the
request in  for five Koreans to study ritual (li) and Confucian cere-
monial (ya) in China, Huizong dispatched  instruments, a truly
amazing gift. Physically and logistically, the job of loading and trans-
porting them, not to mention the bulk and weight of the accompanying
vestments for officiants, musicians and dancers, must have been formi-
dable. Whether they made the journey by land or sea is not clear – either
would have been dangerous – but all seem to have arrived intact. Among
them were  sets of bells (p’yŏnjong) and  of stone chimes
(p’yŏn’gyŏng). Even today, bell sets are . metres and chimes . metres
in height, and in  they can have been no smaller or lighter. Along


Confucian sacrificial music, Sŏnggyun-gwan.

with other instruments such as the wooden tiger (ŏ) and tub (ch’uk), they
were supposedly unique to aak (Ch. yayue). This underlines another
outstanding feature of the donation. Never before had this refined
music, reserved solely for Chinese imperial sacrifices, been offered to
a ‘barbarian’ ruler. In his growing anxiety to counter the rivalry of the
Jurchen, Huizong could not have dreamed up any greater flattery.
Korean kings throughout the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties, accepting its
transcendental powers, continued to perform the music as an impreca-
tion in the national interest.


magistrates and Buddhist monasteries. Many of these treated the land
as if it were their own, and lax oversight by the court permitted the
growth of a new class of powerful landowners deriving income from
unauthorized activities and sources, some of which later involved col-
laboration with Mongol overlords. Free farmers were able to rent ‘peo-
ple’s land’, provided that they could afford to pay taxes and labour
dues. These might be lower than the rents demanded by landlords, but
rulers were well aware that resentment at the perceived injustices of the
land tenure system posed dangers, and periodically they made attempts
at reform. A land survey led Chŏng Tojŏn (d. ) to put forward pro-
posals in  that resulted in the confiscation and redistribution of
estate lands under the Rank Land Law (kwajŏnpŏp), one of Yi
Sŏnggye’s first measures as founder of the Chosŏn dynasty.
Xu complimented the Koreans on weaving silk, even if they were
not, he believed, so good at breeding the worms, and he observed that
Korean tea was bitter compared with Chinese varieties. He was unfairly
critical of Korean notions of health care, which he wrongly believed
had relied mainly on shamanic rites and exorcisms until a big Chinese
donation of doctors and medicines had arrived in . His claim that
Kaesŏng didn’t have many shops also seems surprising, though he may
have been judging it against Kaifeng, which was a major regional
entrepôt. Certainly, Kaesŏng merchants in the Chosŏn period had a
reputation for efficiency and determination that must have dated back
to the Koryŏ. The central market was managed by the Kyŏngsi-sŏ,
which fixed prices, opening hours and rules of operation. Metal
coinage had been introduced by King Sŏngjong back in , and cop-
per cash like that of the Chinese – circular with a square hole in the
middle for threading on a string – had been produced by a mint set up
. When this turned out to be unpopular, a new issue in  was
promoted by the opening of an official tavern in the capital. But peo-
ple were conservative and still preferred to barter, using cloth as the
chief exchange commodity: in  one bolt of cloth was the equiva-
lent of eight pecks (tu) of rice. Pace Xu Jing’s disparaging and possi-
bly face-saving comment on the number of its shops, Chinese, Khitan,
Japanese and Arab merchants headed for Kaesŏng: the Muslim owner
of a dumpling shop was even immortalized in the first verse of a popu-
lar song, Ssanghwajŏn (banned in  on the grounds of what the
Neo-Confucian authorities deemed to be its lewdness). What Xu said
was, however, more correct with regard to rural towns in general.
Although P’yŏngyang and Hansŏng (Seoul) had permanent market-
places, local and provincial trade elsewhere consisted mainly of periodic
fairs for delivering routinely needed goods such as medicinal herbs

                       
and drugs, and for obtaining items that would fetch a good profit when
traded abroad, like horses.
Just three years after Xu Jing’s embassy, in , trouble came to
Kaesŏng, when the chief minister Yi Cha’gyŏm, threatened with dis-
missal, burned down seventeen-year-old King Injong’s palace. Nine
years later, when Injong rejected Myoch’ŏng’s advice that the chances
of recovering old Koguryŏ territory now in Jin hands would be
stronger if he rebuilt it in P’yŏngyang and moved the capital there,
the charismatic monk rebelled. Loyal Confucian ministers summoned
Kim Pusik from Kyŏngju to head an ad hoc army, and the spirit of
Ch’oe Sŭngno might have been heard cheering it on to victory. The
Confucian regime clung on to the reins of power until , but
Injong’s successor Ŭijong (r. –) brought relations between civil
and military authority to an impasse. This hedonistic monarch’s pref-
erence for aesthetics over economics was symbolized by a new pavilion
in the palace grounds, which he had roofed with expensive celadon
tiles. He treated army officers degradingly, and when Kim Pusik’s son
set fire to General Chŏng Chungbu’s beard, the latter had had enough.
He staged a coup that overthrew Ŭijong, killed some of the Confucian
leaders and ushered in a ‘military period’ that preserved the monarchy
and the dynasty, but reversed the traditional superiority of civilian
bureaucracy over military command.
The new climate had some of the characteristics of a banana
republic (or of the contemporary Japanese shogunate), the generals
competing with each other while maintaining a pretence of deference
to civilian authority. Twenty-five years of administrative chaos then
followed until the Ch’oe clan came to the fore, and over four genera-
tions maintained what has come to be known as the Ch’oe dictatorship
(–). Choosing the kings and sheltering behind a façade of
continued royal legitimacy, Ch’oe Chunghŏn, Ch’oe U, Ch’oe Hang
and Ch’oe Ŭi ensured that actual military control was implemented by
a largely civilian bureaucracy qualified by exam success. Confucian tra-
dition was already so inherently felt in Korean government circles that
even usurpers like Chunghŏn afforded more comfort to bureaucrats
trained in its scholarly ways than to Buddhist apologists, whom he con-
demned. At the same time he pledged to improve conditions for the
long-suffering peasantry. Evoking the memory of Wang Kŏn, he pre-
sented the king with Ten Injunctions, saying that

If the people are destitute, how can sufficient rent be collected?

The local officials are sometimes dishonest and corrupt; they
seek only profits, thereby injuring the people. The slaves of

  ̆,    ‒    
 powerful houses fight to collect land rents, making the people
groan in anxiety and pain. Your Majesty should select good
and able officials and appoint them to the provinces to prevent
the powerful families from destroying the people’s property.

But it didn’t happen, nor did Chunghŏn’s own autocratic behaviour

provide any sector of society with real encouragement: his own was per-
haps the most obvious example of those ‘powerful families’ he criticized
for enriching themselves through extensive landholding. Uprisings of
peasants, soldiers and slaves occurred repeatedly throughout the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Elite Patrols (Sam pyŏlch’o) pro-
tected the Ch’oe clan’s security, and individual leaders within it were
supported by large bands of personal retainers who owed them strong
allegiance. But in the end it was not domestic discontent that under-
mined Ch’oe chances of continuing power, but Koryŏ’s first experience
of the frightening military machine of the Mongols.

  

In the medieval as in the modern world, diplomatic exchanges opened
up more than commercial opportunities, and were used for political
and military intelligence gathering. Perhaps, as the twelfth century
wore on, the spies failed to appreciate what they heard about devel-
opments across central Asia. Perhaps peace around the Bohai gulf
bred complacency. Perhaps Korean politicians were too absorbed in
serious domestic upheavals. Whatever the reason, nobody – neither the
Chinese nor the Jurchen nor the Koreans nor their own distant rela-
tives the Khitan – spotted what the Mongols were up to, and it was to
cost them all dearly. By , when a gathering of pastoral nomad
chieftains swore allegiance to Chinggis Khan, they were well on the
way to building one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.
Using a combination of brilliant cavalry skills, which both Jurchen and
Khitan may once have shared but had lost after years of settled exis-
tence, and divide-and-rule tactics, which the Chinese themselves had
customarily employed to control the barbarians, they took control of
large parts of Manchuria. They forced the Jurchen to evacuate their
capital from Zhongdu (modern Beijing) to Kaifeng (), suppressed
any hope of Khitan irredentism and gave the Koreans notice that they,
the Mongols, would now expect the greatest quantities of tribute.
By the time Chinggis Khan died in , his armies commanded
central Asia and had advanced as far west as the Crimea. The three sons
and a grandson among whom his territories were divided, far from

                       
being satisfied with what they got, continued his expansionist policy. In
 the new supreme khan, his third son Ögödai, launched the first of
several attacks on Korea. Bands of peasants, slaves and monks put up
brave resistance, but Kaesŏng fell without much of a struggle and the
Mongols felt confident enough to withdraw the bulk of their troops,
leaving behind garrisons in the main towns and administrators to liaise
with Koryŏ local authorities in running the country. Chinggis and Ögö-
dai had used widespread massacre in their conquest of western Asia.
Kublai, elected khan on his brother’s death in , switched attention
to the east, and while he certainly didn’t go soft, he realized the need
for a more accommodating approach to such a civilized region. In
Korea cooperation was particularly desirable, since he saw the kingdom
as a launch-pad for invasions of southern China and Japan, and for
such a venture Korean nautical expertise would be indispensable. The
Korean response, however, was mixed. Banking on the Mongols’ dis-
like of the sea, the court, the government and their servants and slaves
had taken refuge in summer  on the island of Kanghwa, near the
mouth of the Han river. There the nobility maintained their accus-
tomed lifestyle and could perhaps have tolerated the status quo
indefinitely, had not the Elite Patrols continued to fight the invaders,
supported by peasant and slave units. Although the Ch’oe dictatorship
presented no real threat to Mongol supremacy, its continued intransi-
gence prompted five further invasions. The worst of these came in
–, when, says the Koryŏsa, more than , Koreans were
taken prisoner and the number of dead was too great to count. It was
during this campaign that Kyŏngju’s wonderful pagoda at Hwangnyŏng-
sa was destroyed. Only when the last of the military leaders, Ch’oe
Ŭi, was assassinated in  was the court able to affirm its desire for
peace, King Kojong deciding that collaboration was the sole option.
Even then, the Sam pyŏlch’o fought on from new bases on Chindo and
Cheju islands, and only after , Mongol troops had successfully
attacked them on Cheju did the court return to Kaesŏng (). By
then, Kublai Khan’s new capital at Khan Balek (Dadu, modern Beijing)
was well on the way to completion. As his Chinese dynastic title Yuan
(‘Beginning’) proclaimed, it was supposed to be the start of a new order
in East Asia.
The Mongols were exacting overlords. From Korea they required
lavish tribute and royal husbands for Mongol princesses. Since 
they had expected the Korean crown prince to reside as a hostage in
Liaodong, where he was awarded the title King of Shenyang and ‘ruled’
over the Korean population. The first to be so invested was Wang Sun,
who was actually not the crown prince but who had been sent as a

  ̆,    ‒    
decoy and remained undetected for years. When Kojong died in 
his son was en route to the Mongol capital at Karakorum (‘Black
Camp’) in western Mongolia. Earlier that same year Möngke Khan had
also died and his brother Kublai was himself journeying northwards to
Karakorum for the election of a new Great Khan. The two men met
and began a long personal friendship, which the modern historian
Ki-baik Lee () sees as sycophantic. Both the new Koryŏ king,
Wŏnjong (r. –), and later his son, Ch’ungyŏl (r. –), who
took Kublai Khan’s daughter as the first Mongol queen of Korea, were
willing to travel long distances for personal consultations with the
Great Khan.
Kublai’s appetite for conquest was still unsated, and he now demand-
ed Korean military assistance. Japan was slipping into a long period of
weakened imperial authority and military disunity. The Kamakura
shogun Tokimune unwisely managed to offend Kublai by refusing to
switch diplomatic recognition from Southern Song Hangzhou to Dadu,
and needed to be taught a lesson. Given the Mongols’ poor seafaring
qualifications, Koreans would have to play a significant part in the inva-
sion that Kublai now ordered. Korean yards built more than  ships,
and according to the dynastic history Yuan shi, , of the ,
soldiers who sailed in them in November  were Korean. The fleet
was the largest ever to threaten the Japanese coasts, yet its attack was a
failure. Its planned sailing was delayed by Wŏnjong’s death in June;
Japanese resistance on Kyūshū took the invaders by surprise; a great
storm arose to hamper them; and by the time the retreat was sounded
some , men had perished.
The Great Khan was not to be denied, and the Japanese failed to
help their cause by murdering two of his envoys in . Even China
was unable to resist his cavalry, and when Hangzhou was captured from
the last Song emperor in , he gained access to the shipbuilding
yards of the Yangzi delta. There he ordered  more ships, planning
that they should transport , soldiers from the port of Quanzhou
to link up with , Chinese, Mongols and Koreans aboard a further
 vessels sailing from Korean ports. He invited King Ch’ungyŏl to
Dadu to discuss his plans, and a Korean, Hong Ta’gu, was put in over-
all command of the naval expedition. Once more things went wrong.
The yards could complete only  new ships, and unsuitable river ves-
sels had to be commandeered. Setting sail in June , the fleets failed
to liaise; the Japanese again resisted valiantly; and a typhoon forced the
attackers to abandon their assault. Tens of thousands died, the Mongol
mantle of invincibility lay ruined, and the tale of how the imperial
ancestors had intervened to protect them with a ‘divine wind’ (kamikaze)

                       
entered Japanese mythology. Even though the Yuan shi’s claim that the
fleet consisted of , ships may be exaggerated, hundreds of wrecks
could await discovery off Kyūshū, and in  underwater archaeolo-
gists excavated the first of them. More than  feet ( m) long, it had
been built in Fujian, and among its rich store of well-preserved arte-
facts were crossbow bolts, arrowheads, leather armour and a Mongol
helmet. Especially significant was the discovery of a ceramic bomb
filled with gunpowder and iron shrapnel, ancestor of the mortar bomb
and harbinger of modern warfare. (The first recorded use of a mortar
bomb in Europe comes in , in Italy.)
New measures, introduced as Kublai pressed ahead with his
attempt to create a multi-national empire, make it clear that neither
friendship nor obsequiousness strengthened the Koryŏ hand. The
word ch’ung (‘loyal’) had to be incorporated into kings’ titles (Ch’ungyŏl
was the first of six so named); government ranks were given new,
provincial-style titles; and the court was required to adopt Mongol
dress. Korean historians see these as more than just a cosmetic exercise,
rather as a demotion of the country to son-in-law status. Then, seek-
ing a spiritual authority recognizable by Tibetans, Chinese, Koreans and
Japanese that would authenticate his temporal powers, Kublai devel-
oped a theory claiming to have inherited universal Buddhist supremacy
from his grandfather Chinggis Khan. He took as his spiritual adviser
the Tibetan Grand Lama ‘Phags-pa, giving him authority over the
Buddhist community throughout the Mongol empire. At his request
‘Phags-pa also devised a new alphabet for writing all the languages of
the empire. It had  letters and was based on Tibetan script. In Korea,
where it arrived in , it was used until the fall of the Mongol
dynasty in , but scholars brought up to revere Chinese characters
were never going to take it seriously. On the other hand, genuine cultural
sharing did take place in Dadu. The court acquired Korean musical
instruments. Korean artists met Chinese calligraphers and painters
whose work they admired and whose tastes and styles influenced their
own. Artisans of different nationalities were brought together. A ten-
storeyed pagoda commemorating a royal wedding in  was built at
Kyŏngch’ŏn-sa by Chinese and Korean craftsmen, exemplifying one of
the more acceptable Korean duties within the confederation. Today, it
stands in the National Museum of Korea.

  

Royal supremacy did not rise like a red phoenix with the court’s return
to Kaesŏng in . Life in the capital was still dominated by powerful

  ̆,    ‒    
families that had cooperated with the Mongols and accumulated lands
during its absence on Kanghwa, and now saw a chance to enter govern-
ment. They lacked the traditional aristocracy’s respect for the scholar-
bureaucrat, and the literati, who had been reduced to following orders
during the military period, sensed that the time had come for them to
reassert Confucian principles and influence policy. Neo-Confucianism
was already well established as the major political and social philosophy
in China, where the crystallization by Zhu Xi (–) of early
Song thinkers’ ideas into a practical lifestyle was gaining wide accept-
ance. An Hyang (–) brought a complete set of Zhu’s works
from China and set up a state fund for Neo-Confucian education in
. Despite having many friendly contacts with China, he was a
Koryŏ loyalist. So was Yi Saek (–), one of those who encour-
aged King Kongmin (r. –) to introduce reforms aimed against
the Mongols and their collaborators, and even to take military action
against them in the north. Now Kongmin may deserve his reputation
as a gifted painter and calligrapher, but as a statesman he was not
skilful enough to carry through tricky reforms. And when, with assis-
tance from a former Buddhist monk, Sin Ton, he tried to do just that,
sacking ministers of state, returning expropriated lands to their origi-
nal owners and freeing many slaves, he threw the court and literati into
a state of turmoil. It was not simply a question of whether or not to go
on ‘serving the [Mongol] great’, or just scholarly sour grapes at the
success of the nouveaux riches families. Rival cliques formed; intrigue
filled the air; and the attitudes of Buddhists and Neo-Confucians, once
reasonably tolerant of each other, began to polarize. Allegiance to the
Koryŏ dynasty itself was wavering.
An erstwhile monk turned rebel leader, Zhu Yuanzhang, adminis-
tered the coup de grâce to the Mongols in China and brought their
dynasty to an end there in . The ultimate beneficiary of this service
in Korea was Yi Sŏnggye (–). Although he had served Koryŏ
well as an army commander, frustration finally led him to drive its last
king into exile and execute several members of the royal family. His
move was the culmination of the anguish suffered by men of princi-
ple at the turn of events from Kongmin’s reign onwards. Even so it
did not meet with universal approval. The young master of the
Confucian Academy, Chŏng Mongju (–), had devoted his
career to putting his principles into action. He set up local schools to
teach Neo-Confucian morality and a granary to issue relief rations in
times of hardship; he carried out diplomatic missions to the Ashikaga
shogun in Japan and Zhu Yuanzhang’s new, and strongly Confucian,
Ming court in Nanjing; he admired Yi Sŏnggye and felt, like him, that

                       
the Koryŏ court’s excessive commitment to Buddhism was the root cause
of corruption in public affairs. But unlike Sŏnggye he chose to stand by
it. His sense of loyalty drove him in fact to martyrdom, for he plotted
against Sŏnggye, and in the very year that the latter accepted the royal
insignia of a new dynasty, Chŏng was assassinated on the Good Bamboo
Bridge in Kaesŏng by agents of Sŏnggye’s son Pangwŏn. Yi Sŏnggye
affirmed his country’s allegiance to the Ming dynasty. It was a Confucian
step: whether it was a step forwards or backwards is debatable.

 
Wang Kŏn’s dynasty managed to survive for more than four centuries.
Although his testamentary advice about the value of Buddhism had, on
the whole, been heeded, it had been inadequate to prevent the nation’s
political fragility being exposed by enemies from outside and within. In
cultural spheres, however, the Koryŏ bequeathed lasting memorials to
its people’s imagination and intellect that its founder could have been
proud of.
Books were a matter of importance and status. In  Kim Pusik
received an order from King Injong to compile a history of his coun-
try. He would have understood the political agenda. He had recently
suppressed Myoch’ŏng’s revolt in P’yŏngyang. What his book would be
expected to do was to justify the Koryŏ regime’s own overthrow of its
predecessors two centuries earlier, and to explain how Unified Silla had
been the rightful conqueror of Paekche and Koguryŏ back in the sev-
enth century. That way, the legitimacy of his own king’s authority and
dedication to peace would be affirmed, and those like Myoch’ŏng who
advocated expansion northwards into Manchuria would be silenced.
Kim himself was descended from Silla aristocracy, and he might also
have welcomed a chance of boosting his own ancestors’ image. Though
now officially retired, he had access to books in the court library at
Kaesŏng and was probably able to draw on a team of official researchers.
Taking Sima Qian’s first general history of China, the Shiji, as his
model, he compiled basic annals (pon’gi) for each of the three kingdoms
– twenty chapters for Silla, ten for Koguryŏ, six for Paekche – a set of
monographs, and a collection of  biographies. In keeping with his
objectives he didn’t stop in , as the title of his book might imply, but
covered the Unified Silla period as well, and submitted the complete
work to Injong in . What the king read was a text edited in accor-
dance with Confucian principles. It was factually objective – at least, as
far as Kim and his team could make it so – but it provided a moralistic
account of history. Its content had been selected with Kim’s idea of the

  ̆,    ‒    
king’s requirements in mind. It omitted whatever Kim and his fellow
bureaucrats thought it unnecessary for their king to know about. Its
coverage concentrated on matters of concern to the literati and neg-
lected more popular affairs, and drew on Chinese accounts of the
period for information on specialist subjects as far apart as music and
astronomy. The king, of course, knew this full well, even if today’s
users need to make the appropriate allowances. Yet even with this pro-
viso, and the reservation that some of its dates are inaccurate, the
Samguk sagi remains invaluable as a source of information about early
Korean history.
Iryŏn’s aims, when he drafted the Samguk yusa  years later,
were different. His book was a deliberate attempt to supplement the
Confucian-oriented selection of information in the Samguk sagi with
Buddhist stories, most of which emanated from Silla. He tells how
Buddhism arrived in Koguryŏ and Paekche, and writes about such top-
ics as pagodas, famous teachers, hermits, exorcisms and filial devotion.
He briefly introduces Old Chosŏn, Wiman Chosŏn, Lelang, Puyŏ,
Koguryŏ, Paekche, Kaya, the Samhan polities and other smaller tribes
in a section entitled ‘Strange Events’. And among the foundation
myths he tells is his account of Tan’gun’s birth, perhaps a call for
Koreans in troubled times to put aside rival claims about whether
Koryŏ was descended from Silla or Koguryŏ, and unite under the ban-
ner of a still older founder figure.
Scholars across East Asia had long prized Korean paper and brushes.
Now, men of Koryŏ went on to even more significant achievements in
book production. Fonts of characters for movable-type printing were
first made from clay, but, finding these too fragile, craftsmen experi-
mented with metal type. Monasteries took the lead, casting the pieces
in their forges, so it may be no coincidence that the world’s oldest sur-
viving example of a text printed with movable metal type is a Sŏn book
dated , Pulcho chikchi simch’e yojŏl, now in the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris. Early efforts were inferior in quality to sheets print-
ed from hand-carved wooden blocks such as those preserved in Haein-sa
(Picture Essay ), and fine block-printed editions never lost their appeal.
Nor did printing mean the end of fine calligraphy. Sutras continued to
be beautifully written and painted on blue or white paper under the
auspices of the court’s Offices of Gold and Silver Letters. Indigo dye
protected mulberry paper against worms, so the choice of coloured
paper was not simply a matter of aesthetic preference.
The first mention of metal type comes in the collected works of Yi
Kyubo (–), who commissioned a printing of Ch’oe Yunni’s
Sangjong kogum ye (‘Codification of Ancient and Modern Rites’) of

                       
. Twenty-eight copies were produced on Kanghwa between 
and . Yi gained his first official post when he was nearly , but he
was not really a political animal. He preferred literature, music, paint-
ing and drink – not necessarily in that order: devotion to zither-playing
and heavy drinking made him, he said, a disciple of the old Chinese
poet Tao Qian ( –). Despite a Confucian upbringing, he was
open about his Buddhist sympathies, and wrote optimistically about
the saving potential of the Tripitaka edition of . Although his
forthrightness made him enemies and he experienced a period of exile,
he eventually rose to the post of Sangguk, Chief Minister. Perhaps
James Scarth Gale’s assessment of him in the s as ‘the greatest
scholar and statesman that Korea had yet seen’ is exaggerated, but as a
writer alone he deserves a place on a pinnacle. He was a fine prose-
writer of everything from official documents to essays on literary history,
and he composed widely in his preferred medium of verse. One of his
best-known pieces is an account of Chumong’s Koguryŏ foundation
tale, which despite its length is lyric rather than epic, and combines ele-
ments of myth and tribal history. In contrast, little poems like ‘The
Frog’ show why his poetry has been likened to that of the great Chinese
Li Bai ( –), and earned him – like Li – a reputation as an
emotional poet:

No angry words or fierce looks cross your eyes,

And yet at times your stomach swells with fire.
Proud of the music of your band you sing,
And yet, uncharmed, we turn our ears away.

The arts of the brush were rated more highly than those of the
hands, but their ceramics earned Koreans a high reputation across the
region. Potters probably worked with immigrant Chinese teachers,
but the interruption to contacts with northern China in  proved
to be an incentive, driving the Koreans on to show their self-reliance.
Both countries now excelled in ceramic production, and if Koryŏ arti-
sans turned out less in variety and overall quantity than their neigh-
bours, they ceded nothing in aesthetic quality or technical skill. Xu
Jing was complimentary about Korean celadons, but he didn’t men-
tion their white porcelain, inspired perhaps by Chinese Ding wares, or
the black vessels they made by underglaze painting with iron. Neither
did he see the later copper-red underglaze painting or the famous
inlaid celadons (Picture Essay ), which only appeared after his visit
and which nowadays epitomize Korean cultural innovation. Chinese
kilns produced so much celadon that it was used as ballast by sea-going

  ̆,    ‒    
 Printing blocks for the Korean Tripitaka

Printing blocks for the Korean Tripitaka, , Haein-sa, North Kyŏngsang
province.

The idea of art and religion serving the interests of statesmen and
government is perfectly familiar to us. Had it not been for the author-
ity and sponsorship of rulers, the West would lack many of its great-
est buildings, monuments, statues and paintings, and the glories of the
King James Bible would have been unknown. East Asia offers plenty
of analogous examples. The tribute system provided countless oppor-
tunities for the skills and artistry of China’s craftsmen to be admired
beyond its frontiers, while Buddhism, ironically turned into the hand-
maid of many a ruling class, provided an internationally recognizable
visual language. Blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen adorned
the courts of Middle Eastern potentates, while great works of
Buddhist statuary looked down on their sponsors from Afghanistan in
the west to Japan in the east. The Mongol leaders, commanding an
empire that also transcended former national frontiers, were quick to
exploit both tributary communication and religious imagery.


 In times of trouble, rival sides in Asia were accustomed to invoke
spiritual aid from Buddhist deities, just as they did in the West from
the Christian God. So while the Mongol leadership espoused Lamaist
Buddhism, Koreans believed that a complete woodblock printing of
the scriptures, a scholarly and expensive undertaking, would earn
them divine protection. King Hyŏnjong had initiated such a project in
 when the Khitan threatened, and the resulting Great Canon
(Koryŏ Changgyŏng) took  years to finish. The ,-volume set and
its plates were stored in Puin-sa, near Taegu, together with a ,-
volume supplement (Sok Changgyŏng) compiled by Ŭich’ŏn at the end
of the century. The Mongols burned them there in . Better luck
awaited the Korean Tripitaka (Koryŏ Taejanggyŏng), even if it too
failed to fulfil its strategic objective. Still believing in the redemptive
power of the scriptures, King Kojong’s court assembled a team of
monks in  to begin a fresh carving, based on the best available edi-
tions of more than , Chinese, Khitan and Korean texts. Its ,
blocks of magnolia wood, measuring  by . by . centimetres and
weighing . kilograms, each contained  lines of fourteen characters.
They were completed in  and lacquered. When, despite them, the
Mongol general Jalairtai returned less than two years later to inflict
worse mayhem than ever before, the Tripitaka was safe on Kanghwa,
where it stayed until the late fourteenth century. Then it was moved,
first to Seoul and finally to the mountain security of Haein-sa. Here,
in  a special library was built for it where the slatted wooden walls
protected the blocks in an airy environment, safe from the ravages of
temperature and humidity, to the present day.


 Inlaid celadon jar
Chinese potters evacuated to Korea during the turbulent tenth century 
passed on to local craftsmen their enthusiasm for new wares and tech-
niques. Potters from northern China seem to have settled in central
Korea, while evidence from the south-west indicates the presence of
still larger numbers of immigrants from south-east China. There, a
ceramic production centre grew up in a pleasantly wooded area around
Kangjin, Chŏlla Namdo province. The rich reddish soil contained high
iron levels; abundant stocks of timber and flowing water were available;
and finished wares could conveniently be shipped up the west coast to the
capital. ‘Dragon kilns’ snaked up the hillsides. One at Sadang village,
first excavated in , was  metres ( ft) long.
Two elements were essential for celadon manufacture: special glazes
containing a small amount of iron oxide, and a reduction firing temper-
ature of ,–, º. The colours spread across a spectrum from
yellowish olive green to a pale grey-blue, and were prized for their like-
ness to jade, with its associated powers of longevity. Koreans called their
best shades ‘kingfisher-coloured’. Decoration was added by moulding,
incising or underglaze painting, and a delicate glaze crackle was also
used. Lotus, peony, chrysanthemum, willow, cranes, clouds and ducks
featured among the designs, joining with purity of form, stylistic range
and colour to achieve aesthetic brilliance. Then, from around the middle
of the twelfth century, what many Korean experts regard as the acme of
beauty was reached, the development of inlay (sanggam). By cutting out
the design and infilling it with white or black slip, Koreans perfected a
technique unknown in China. The supremacy that this gave them, how-
ever, was short-lived, and in less than a hundred years a growing heaviness
in form and lack of originality betrayed an industry depressed at the
Mongol invasions and lacking in inspiration.
The Koryŏ court wanted as much celadon as it could get, not only
for its intrinsic beauty but also because its purity was associated with
Buddhism. Not that this restricted its use: all kinds of goods, utilitar-
ian as well as ritualistic, spread widely across the country. The National
Museum, for example, owns a stoneware hourglass drum refreshingly
painted with a swirling floral pattern in brown iron oxide under a
celadon glaze, a special technique giving it a Chinese cizhou effect. A
cup and saucer set, the cup standing on a raised perch in the middle of
the saucer, was a distinctively Korean shape, and tables were graced by
celadon dishes, cups and wine pourers. Scholars stood celadon vases and
brush-holders on their desks and used celadon water-droppers shaped
in animal or human form. They specially liked the high-necked, narrow-
waisted Korean version of the meibyŏng (‘plum blossom’) vase. Women


 Inlaid celadon jar, th–th century, height  cm.

kept cosmetics in celadon boxes, and laid their heads at night on celadon
pillows. (Osaka Municipal Museum has one in the shape of two lions.)
Buddhist monks performed rites using celadon censers and kundika
water sprinklers, and collected alms in celadon bowls. Xu Jing describes
an incense-burner covered by a crouching lion, perhaps the very piece
discussed by Gompertz on page , as ‘the most distinguished of all
their wares’.


junks. The Koreans may not have matched that, but their output was
still plentiful. Wandering along country paths in Sadang, near the site
of the Koryŏ kilns at Kangjin, in , I realized that I was walking on
a pavement of broken shards. Stooping to pick up pieces, I found that
they were fragments of inlaid celadon. They had lain there and been
trodden underfoot since somebody had discarded them, perhaps 
years before.

In the history of Koryŏ we see many of the elements that would char-
acterize and shape Korean politics and society through succeeding cen-
turies: the rise of Neo-Confucianism, with its emphasis on lineage and
male dominance; respect for education, examinations and literary
record; an imbalanced social hierarchy, notwithstanding a degree of
social mobility; the dominance of civil leadership, prompting the occa-
sional military backlash; the throne’s struggle to control the aristocracy
in the capital (yangban) and hereditary families in the country (hyangni);
political factionalism; crises originating in Manchuria; tensions over
land issues; recurrent peasant uprisings; the popularity of Buddhism,
especially in lower-class society; and the patronage of shamanism by all
levels of society. And if a whiff of medievalism hangs over the attempt
to bolster the dynasty by writing up the Tan’gun myth or by carving
the Tripitaka woodblocks, the cool aplomb with which Yejong handled
Emperor Huizong’s cultural hegemonism seems thoroughly modern.
By no means was Koryŏ the beginning of the modern era, but
Korea had without doubt turned the corner from antiquity and begun
to experience the demands of nationhood. There is irony here. Our
own age is consumed by the quest for progress, often into an unknown
future. In the Sinocentric world admired by yangban scholars, advance
from antiquity was seen as retreat and decline. The past represented a
Golden Age, and reforms sought to turn the clock back towards what
could be deduced of it from classical texts. Emperor Huizong called
the music he sent to Yejong in  ‘new music’. What he meant by this
was not something like the difference between plainsong and poly-
phony, or the leap from Tallis to Monteverdi. It was, paradoxically, the
latest in a series of attempts by Chinese court musicologists to recreate
the supposedly perfect ceremonial music of antiquity, the Zhou, Shang
and Xia dynasties, in the hope that Heaven would be pleased to hear
it again and send blessings to the Middle Kingdom. According to
Huizong, ‘caring for fine rites and making music is really our first duty
when it comes to governing the country and regulating the outside
world’, and his accompanying message to Yejong in  quoted, a bit
tactlessly, the well-known saying from the Shijing that there was nothing

                       
like music ‘for changing the evil customs of a place’. What was actually
new about his music, first heard in Kaifeng in , was that it used a
scale devised by a -year-old Daoist, Wei Hanjin, based on units of
measurement derived from the length of the emperor’s third, fourth
and fifth fingers. If it sounded weird to the Koreans they were too tact-
ful to say so, and performed it throughout the year. After that, as visits
from Chinese envoys dried up, they probably allowed it to become
Koreanized with some relief.
In China, no serious reforms were proposed without an attempt to
validate them by citing historical or canonical precedent. Korean politi-
cians were not so tightly circumscribed, although we have seen how
heavily the imperative of legitimization weighed upon Wang Kŏn, how
Kim Pusik followed Confucian principles in his positive use of histori-
ography, and how, in Iryŏn’s Samguk yusa, Buddhist scholarship also
acknowledged the value of stories from earlier times. History, as Ch’oe
Sŭngno reminded King Sŏngjong, offered heroes to emulate and warn-
ings of pitfalls to be avoided, and if the new king learned the lessons of
his five predecessors, he could stand in relation to T’aejo as Tang
Xuanzong had done to his ancestor Taizong. None of this meant that
society stood still, either in China or Korea. Inventions and innovations
aimed at settling immediate problems contributed to longer-term
developments: changes in ceramic decoration were tried and met with
approval; improvements were made to printing methods; land was
occasionally redistributed and slaves freed. But not because any of
these were perceived as steps towards a permanently changed world.
To look forward into the unknown, to base policy on predictions of
new and as yet untried circumstances, was not part of the Sinocentric
way. Even the object of peasant revolt was to restore happier times past,
not to revolutionize the basis of socio-political thinking about the future.

  ̆,    ‒    
  

Early to Mid-Chosŏn,
‒:
The Search for an Acceptable
Orthodoxy
The Chosŏn (sometimes referred to as the Yi after the name of its
ruling clan) can be divided into three periods: from  until the
Japanese invasions of ‒; from the early seventeenth century
until the arrival of the Western powers in the s; and the age
of modernization and reform preceding Japan’s seizure of Korea
in . In the last of these three, Korean leaders proved less
resistant than Chinese to the idea of accepting foreign assistance
to restore their country’s fortunes.
In the political and social spheres, Confucianism triumphed
over Buddhism as orthodoxy, though Buddhism continued to enjoy
widespread popular adherence. Both philosophies influenced the
arts. The Korean literati greatly admired and imitated the cultural
tastes of their political suzerains the Chinese, but after the cataclysm
of the Japanese wars they also opened their minds more widely to
native and European traditions. In the fine arts they still preferred
East Asian styles and forms, but in the later nineteenth century the
impact of Western culture was noticeable in town planning, archi-
tecture, medicine and patterns of religious belief.

It was . In Christian Europe Richard  was king of England, while

in western Asia the Scourge of God, Tamerlane, was trying to recreate
the great empire of his supposed ancestor Chinggis Khan, building tall
towers out of the skulls of his massacred opponents – two men with
quite different views on the sovereignty of the ruler, sharing only an
exalted concept of his entitled independence. The contemporary por-
trait of Richard preserved in Westminster Abbey suggests that he
brought sensitivity to his understanding of divine kingship, and
throughout  he handled his opponents at home and abroad with
quiet diplomacy. But the bust of Tamerlane in the State Historical


Museum in Moscow, reconstructed from the skull unearthed from his
tomb in Samarkand in , shows a man of uncompromising, ruthless
determination, one whose enemy Ibn Arabshah described as fearless,
cunning and awe-inspiring. As things turned out, neither the
Plantagenet kingdom nor the Timurid empire would last very long. But
across the world in East Asia, Yi Sŏnggye was inaugurating a dynasty
that would still be ruling Korea long after the Turkic Muslim’s own
empire had gone, the British had put paid to the Mughal dynasty
founded by his descendant Babur – even after the Victorian age in
Britain itself had come and gone. Twenty-five kings of the Yi clan
reigned throughout the Chosŏn dynasty, the longest in Korea’s history.
They too believed in their divine mandate, although their Confucian
concept of royal responsibility to Heaven and Heaven’s people was
quite different from anything that inspired Christian, Muslim or
Mongol kings, princes and governors. Yi Sŏnggye had his portrait
painted more often than Richard,  times it is said, but no original or
early copy survives. A nineteenth-century picture shows him standing,
feet apart and hands across his stomach, wearing a blue robe embroi-
dered with five-clawed dragons and a confident, thoughtful expression.
Credit for laying the foundations of the enduring Chosŏn oligarchy
goes to the early kings and to the elite class of Confucian ideologues,
the yangban (or sadaebu), that served them. The civilization they
shaped bears so many signs of their admiration for China that un-
suspecting observers may be deluded into believing that Korean and
Chinese society and culture were to all intents and purposes one and
the same, yet through the second half of the long period covered in this
chapter the yangban enjoyed, and depicted via their arts, an outlook on
life that was capable of reinterpreting rather than blindly imitating the
Chinese example they admired. (The same went for lower-class artists:
they too enjoyed painting landscapes and flower-and-bird studies like
the Chinese, but the results were often strikingly different.) Hae-jong
Chun points out that genuine cultural interchange might have been all
the greater had it not been for the tributary relationship, which limited
contact to officially approved occasions at court and frontier locations.
But nowhere, of course, was free trade yet a recognized concept, and
across East Asia diplomatic relations between nations of unequal
standing all followed the Chinese tributary pattern. Despite the loyalty it
still felt to the deposed Ming regime, the Chosŏn court established trib-
utary relations with the Qing after  for reasons of both diplomatic
and cultural pragmatism. And coming effectively second in the inter-
national hierarchy, it tried to maintain a superior / inferior relationship
with Japan and the Ryūkyū kingdom. The educated men hand-picked

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
to go on foreign missions valued meetings with local scholars, and
despite the nasty taste left by memories of Hideyoshi’s vainglorious
exploits, diplomatic links between Seoul and Edo soon restored vital
contacts between Korean and Japanese literati and artists with a
shared interest in Chinese literature, philosophy and art. (Berlind
Jungmann has shown, for example, how the Korean interpretation of
Chinese literati painting, namjŏnghwa, helped to influence the develop-
ment of the Japanese nanga style.) But intellectual pleasures could not
hide economic difficulties. Missions were large and expensive. Tributary
goods required by China tended to fall into the luxury category, espe-
cially gold, silver, textiles and animal skins, and far outweighed the
economic value of the imperial largesse dispensed in return. Hae-jong
Chun stresses the serious drain this constituted on Korea’s tax silver,
only partially mitigated by acquisitions made privately by members of
tribute embassies. James Lewis points too to the ‘enormity of the
[economic] burden’ laid on Korea by official trade with Japan. Cotton
played such an important part in this that in  the Ministry of
Revenue had to raise the cloth tax to counteract the effects of the half-
million p’il being exported each year in exchange for Japanese copper
and tin. In the southern ports ships were also loaded with cotton and
ginseng for dispatch to the Ryūkyūs, from where incoming vessels
brought a wider range of goods, but in smaller quantities – gold,
copper, cinnabar, swords, aromatics, medicines (including pepper, which
was used as a form of currency exchange) and sharkskins. From the
mid-seventeenth century rice supplanted cotton as Japan’s number-one
desideratum, and substantial gifts of ginseng added further to the costs
of outfitting an embassy.

   

It was time for a change in , and Song Neo-Confucianism, which
Korean scholars first encountered in late thirteenth-century Dadu,
promised a restoration of higher moral values and leadership qualities,
as well as an end to the economic power of the Buddhist community.
The new Ming authorities embraced it strongly, and political elites in
Kaesŏng also saw its potential. So when Yi Sŏnggye claimed the title of
king, he laid aside some personal respect for Buddhism and did so on a
Neo-Confucian ticket, expressing his intention of restoring proper
relations between the ruler and his people, and acknowledging Korea’s
need of China’s approbation. The distinguished scholars Yi Saek and
Chŏng Mongju contested his right to overthrow the Koryŏ rulers, but
among his supporters, Yi Saek’s pupil Chŏng Tojŏn proved one of the

                       
most valuable. He helped legitimize his master’s usurpation of the
throne by talking up Chosŏn’s link with Kija. It was on his advice that
Yi Sŏnggye had broken up large estates belonging to Koryŏ nobility
and the Buddhist community in , redistributing land among his
own officials, government agencies, schools and Confucian shrines. He
expressed reservations about the Buddhist monk Muhak’s choice of a
site on the northern banks of the Han river as the best location for a
new capital, but once the argument was settled and the palaces and city
walls built, in  he organized the transfer of the capital from Kaesŏng
to Hanyang (Seoul). He attacked Buddhism, especially for those beliefs
that encouraged individualism to the detriment of social activities. He
laid the basis for a revised legal system based on the Ming code, intro-
duced the long-established Chinese shi lu (Kor. sillok) system of court
record-keeping and dynastic-history compilation, and began work on
the official history of the Koryŏ period. It was completed as Koryŏsa in
 after many false starts. (The sillok of the Chosŏn dynasty were
published in – by the Japanese colonial government, , vol-
umes of primary historical material that have no parallel anywhere in
the world.) Nevertheless, Yi Sŏnggye’s abdication in  unleashed a
very un-Confucian battle for the succession among his four sons. One,
Pangsŏk, was murdered, and Chŏng Tojŏn met the same fate for sup-
porting him. When Yi Sŏnggye himself died, ten years later, he was
canonized as King T’aejo (‘Exalted Ancestor’), the temple name of the
founding emperors of the Song, Liao, Jin and Ming dynasties in China.
It was appropriate for one who had inaugurated an intense period of
Sinicization. The course he charted, redirecting Korean politics and
scholarship along a path firmly in parallel with China’s, would have a
profound influence on Korean society. And however ambivalent some
of his compatriots might later feel about their obligations to the Middle
Kingdom, the Dragon Throne would consider itself entitled to claim
Korean allegiance so long as Yi T’aejo’s descendants occupied the
palaces of Seoul. In  Emperor Taizu approved the title of the
dynasty, Chosŏn, with its implications of links with ancient China.
He dispatched symbols of investiture to King T’aejong and accepted
Korean tribute in return. Korean literati immersed themselves in the
study of Neo-Confucian books. The importance of education and
examinations in the Confucian classics was reiterated. Magistrates were
ordered to act in accordance with Neo-Confucian principles. A new
warmth filled relations between the two courts.
Yi Sŏnggye’s concept of kingship may have been no less auto-
cratic than Richard’s or Tamerlane’s, but he and his descendants,
whatever their exaggerated ideas about their heavenly mandate and

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
the king’s rights and privileges, owed their continued possession of
the throne as much to an acceptable balance of power with their
nobility as to any mutually agreed concept of royal prerogative. The
complex system of bureaucracy that constituted the country’s central
administration constrained their potential for autocracy, and the fact
that they could be held personally responsible to the Chinese emperor
for the conduct of their national policy gave ministers an argument
against their excessive arrogance. Not all kings were thus deterred,
however, and everybody – whether commoner, minister or relative –
took care to approach them with an exaggerated show of respect and
awe-filled deference. They themselves understood just how difficult,
time-consuming and exhausting were the demands of acting in accor-
dance with unimpeachable Confucian etiquette. Sitting on top of the
social and political pyramid was not a comfortable perch. Neither was
it easy to fend off family and political rivals and follow the middle
way exalted in the Confucian Classics. Equity and equality didn’t come
into it: pragmatism showed that it was more important to satisfy the
yangban than merchants or slaves, just as in foreign and economic
relations an expensive show of deference towards China must be main-
tained, with the hope of compensation at the expense of Japan and
the Ryūkyūs.
If the Chosŏn tree set deep roots in T’aejo’s time, its first heavy
fruition was unquestionably enjoyed in the reign of the fourth king, his
grandson Sejong (r. –). Not for nothing is he frequently referred
to as ‘the Great’. No early portraits of him exist, but modern depic-
tions reveal a self-confident, generous nature, and the hagiography that
surrounds him in Korea today paints a picture not only of a true poly-
math but of one born before his time, an example fit to inspire genuine
social and technological progress. The list of his interests and achieve-
ments, though not quite endless, certainly makes impressive reading. It
is corroborated by an extraordinarily detailed set of sillok for his reign,
faithfully recording eyewitness accounts of everything he said and did
over  years on the throne. On their basis alone he fully deserves the
statue that looks down on today’s visitors crossing the grounds in Seoul’s
Tŏksu Palace. One of his first moves, in , was to found a research
centre charged with seeing what intellectual and institutional lessons
could be learned from China, the Chiphyŏn-jŏn (‘Hall of Assembled
Worthies’). Consisting of about twenty of his most promising young
scholar-officials, it studied legal, historical, literary and cultural topics.
An interest in all aspects of agriculture, from the raising of silkworms
to land taxation and from improvements in irrigation to the keeping of
meteorological records, is attributed to his concern for the ordinary

                       
people. He had newly devised rain gauges distributed around the coun-
try, and is credited with encouraging the invention of improved sundials
and water clocks. A book of practical advice entitled Nongsa chiksŏl
(‘Plain Words on Agriculture’) was researched and published in ,
and Sejong took personal charge of an experiment on palace land
designed to learn lessons about crop management in bad weather. In
 he reduced the harvest tax from  to  per cent, and commanded
local officials to help farmers maximize food production: a dramatic
improvement was reported. He sponsored research into medicine at
home and abroad, particularly the study of native herbs as a branch of
agriculture. The result was a -volume pharmaceutical encyclopedia
published in  and entitled Hyangyak chipsŏngbang (‘Compendium
of Native Prescriptions’), followed by another in , in  volumes,
called the Ŭibang yuch’wi (‘Classified Collection of Medical Pre-
scriptions’). Sejong promoted medical education, aiming to benefit the
common people – even women and prisoners – as well as the nobility.
Integral to educational measures commissioned by Sejong were
improvements in metal-type printing and the quality of fonts. Both
bronze and lead fonts were used (the latter to print books in large type-
face for the assistance of the partially sighted), although wooden block-
printing was preferred for books required in multiple copies. Sejong
appreciated literature. His statue shows him seated, holding the book
Hunmin chŏng’ŭm (‘[For] Instructing the People, Correct Sounds’).
This was a primer devoted to popularizing the han’gŭl alphabet, recently
invented by either the Chiphyŏn-jŏn or the king himself. Han’gŭl was
really intended as a step towards widening literacy in Chinese charac-
ters, but the masses did not take to it and the literati had no need of it
(Picture Essay ). Its time would not come until later.
Although Sejong was intent on keeping rites and ceremonies at
court up to the best Chinese standards, he acknowledged the value of
preserving local customs out in the country. In both environments
music and dance were of vital importance. Marketplaces shook to the
strident notes of the t’aep’yŏngso (a double-reed oboe with a wooden
stem and conical metal bell), complicated rhythms on the changgo
hourglass drum, and the shouts and clapping of excitable spectators,
while at court royal sacrifices, diplomatic events and social occasions
took place to the strains of more esoteric melodies. The notes of aak
and tangak had to be perfectly modulated and produced. They had to
be complemented by the slow, smooth movement of dancers and regu-
lated, stately actions of officiants. To achieve the purest possible ritual
performances, Sejong ordered the reform of court music. The work
was entrusted to Chŏng Inji, minister of personnel, rector of the

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
 A page from Sŏkpo sangjŏl Han’gŭl cha
The announcement of the completion of King Sejong’s alphabetic
project comes in the Sejong sillok for the end of the lunar year . Two
years later the book Hunmin chŏng’ŭm (‘Correct Sounds for Instructing
the People’) was unveiled, along with an explanatory document by Chŏng
Inji and colleagues from the Chiphyŏn-jŏn entitled Hunmin chŏng’ŭm
haerye. This guide, ‘Explanations and Examples’, reassured numerolog-
ically concerned Neo-Confucian readers that the consonants were divid-
ed into five groups corresponding to the Five Elements, the five tones
of the musical scale (velar/wood/la, lingual/fire/do, labial/earth/fa,
dental/metal/sol, laryngeal/water/re) etc.; that the combination of three
basic vowels represented Heaven, Earth and Man and produced eight
more (matching, for example, the eight sounds, p’arŭm, into which musi-
cal instruments were classified); and that all vowel sounds together were
either yin or yang. Letters were grouped into squares consisting, at max-
imum, of an initial consonant, a single or combination vowel, and a final
consonant. The shape of the letters and their arrangement into squares
may have been derived from the Tibeto-Mongol ‘phags-pa script. Today,
 of the original  letters are still in use.
One of the first books to be printed in the new script was Yongbi
ŏch’ŏn ga (‘Songs of Dragons Flying in the Heavens’), a paean of 
poems written by scholars of the Chiphyŏn-jŏn in praise of Sejong’s
ancestors, notably King T’aejo. Published in  in Chinese characters
and Korean han’gŭl, it is still regarded as one of the great classics of
early Korean literature, and one way and another, Sejong could surely
have done little more to recommend use of his script. (Except, that is,
to abandon its primary purpose of promoting literacy in Chinese char-
acters among ordinary people: that was quite enough to condemn it in
the eyes of the upper class.) Although some sirhak scholars used it in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the pejorative name ŏnmun (‘vulgar
script’), coined for it in  in a critical knee-jerk memorial by Ch’oe
Malli, stuck right down to the twentieth century. Only then did the
nationalist phonetician Chu Sigyŏng (–) invent the modern
name han’gŭl, which, like the script itself, caught on as a symbol of
Korean separateness amid the culture of the greater Japanese empire.
Like Chinese, han’gŭl was written in vertical lines and read from right to
left. Calligraphers still sometimes write it like this, though for all prac-
tical purposes it is now printed horizontally from left to right. The
example shown here is from the ‘Life of Sakyamuni in Detailed Sections,
with Han’gŭl Translation’. The original version, in Chinese characters,
was reissued by Crown Prince Sejo at the request of his father, King
Sejong.


A page from Sŏkpo sangjŏl Han’gŭl cha, published .


Confucian Academy and author of a postscript to the Hunmin
chŏng’ŭm, and to a fifth-grade junior official named Pak Yŏn. New tunes
performed in  were deemed acceptable (though they were certainly
not a genuine restoration of ancient Chinese ones as was the intention),
and Pak was promoted. His musical notations for the song cycle Yongbi
ŏch’ŏn ga (‘Songs of Dragons Flying in Heaven’) were appended to the
Sejong sillok, using the new and advanced notational system
chŏngganbo. But the most lasting memorial to his scholarship and to
Sejong’s encouragement of music came later, in the encyclopedia
Akhak kweibŏm (‘Musical Studies Guide’), which was compiled and
published by command of King Songjong (r. –) in . This
remains the most valuable source of information on traditional Sino-
Korean music. Intended for scholarly use, it appeared in Chinese char-
acters, and ironically, given Sejong’s legacy, no complete translation
into han’gŭl was made until .
A paragon of virtue indeed was King Sejong the Great! Yet how-
ever much we may approve his forward-looking measures, he was, of
course, a man of his own age and not of ours. He confirmed the execu-
tion of an official’s wife for committing adultery; he supported an
official who divorced his wife for failing to bear him a son; and he
approved an order that yangban women should not be allowed out onto
the streets of the capital in daytime. Committed to his grandfather’s
political philosophy out of filial respect and from genuine conviction
that Neo-Confucianism would benefit all classes of society, Sejong
accepted as corollary that Buddhism undermined social and economic
interests. His predecessor T’aejong had defrocked more than  per
cent of monks on charges of unregistered ordination, confiscated huge
amounts of Buddhist land and slaves, and dissolved more than  per
cent of the monasteries. Sejong approved, but nevertheless recognized
that the country’s deep-rooted commitment to Buddhism, evident even
at court, was not going to go away in a hurry. He tried to hasten it on
its way: he commanded that its seven schools should be reduced to just
two, Sŏn(jong) and Kyo(jong), ordered the closure of still more mon-
asteries and introduced a ban on monks from outside Seoul entering
the city, an interdict that would survive right down to the late nine-
teenth century. But he turned a blind eye to some continuing obser-
vances, even attending them himself, and he patronized the leading
monk, later known as Hamhŏ (–), who sought to find com-
mon ground in the teachings of Buddhism and Confucianism. Nor
was he unaware that Buddhism still oiled the wheels of international
statecraft: the ambassador Pak Sŏsaeng told him in  that as official
presents, books about the faith were valued highly in Japan, and

                       
throughout the fifteenth century the Chosŏn court continued to send
copies of Buddhist scriptures requested by the Ryūkyū authorities.
If the Confucian ideal of a sage king, someone to emulate the
mythical Chinese heroes Yao and Shun, was in practice unattainable,
Korea seemed to have found a fair substitute in Sejong. He was one of
the world’s great monarchs, so great in fact that his successors in the
fifteenth century were bound to pale in comparison whether or not they
tried to live up to his example. Indeed, though both Sejo (r. –)
and Sŏngjong (r. –) were cultured men who encouraged literary
projects such as the compilation of T’ongguk t’onggam (‘Complete
Mirror of Korea’) and Akhak kweibŏm respectively, what sticks in the
public memory is that Sejo was an usurper who killed his seventeen-
year-old nephew Tanjong to forestall any possible restoration attempt,
and that Sŏngjong’s accession at the age of thirteen came thanks to the
machinations of his maternal grandmother, Sejo’s queen Yun. Herein
lies the crux of Chosŏn’s longevity and the fallibility of the Korean
monarchical system. While society as a whole allowed a man to take
concubines, it denied their offspring (known as sŏŏl or sŏja) the rights
due to the sons of his legal wife. In the case of the succession to the
throne, on the other hand, the preservation of the male lineage was
deemed of great importance. Not only might the rule of primogeniture
be waived in favour of a younger son or another male relative if the
king’s eldest son seemed unfit to be heir apparent – thus enabling the
ruling clan to hang on to the throne longer than was the case in European
monarchies – but sons borne by royal concubines might also be eligible,
especially if their relatives could muster enough political clout. The
potential for rivalry and intrigue is obvious.
No political system – be it despotism, oligarchy or democracy – is
static, no institution – whether monarchy, state council or parliament –
perfect as its agent. Around the world, ideologies ranging from
Christianity and Shintō to Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism have
been called in to lend credence to rulers’ modi operandi, yet in the end
people’s perceptions of what they can expect from their leader have
often been determined as much by the latter’s character as by constitu-
tion or philosophical creed. That said, if the monarchy was the foun-
dation of British political life and symbol of its statehood and nation
for almost one and a half millennia, as has been claimed, no less was
true in Korea. The roots of the Korean national monarchy lay far back
in the Silla Council of Nobles, the Hwabaek, from whose ranks a king
was chosen. The king afforded Unified Silla in its prime a measure of
self-respect in relation to both China and Japan. Through much of the
Koryŏ period the monarchy was weakened by the power of great yang-

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
ban and hyangni families in the capital and the countryside, opening the
way for military and foreign domination. Yet it survived, and by pin-
ning Neo-Confucian colours so firmly to the mast, the early Chosŏn
kings managed to combine principle and pragmatism, and restore to
the institution an authority authenticated by the weight of ancient
scriptures; a command over the education of all those who aspired to
enter the government; a glamorized ritual that was replicated in every
magistracy across the country and in households where the senior male
worshipped the spirits of his ancestors; and respectability in the eyes of
the Chinese court.

-  
Like other -isms, Confucianism has meant many things to many people.
To the leaders of the Three Kingdoms, it was a means of underpinning
their authority as state formation progressed. To upper-class Koreans
in the Unified Silla period it was a framework for personal study and a
pattern for civic development. To men in the Koryŏ period it still spoke
of desirable virtues, of loyalty, respect and determination, even if they
were now more attracted by Buddhism’s offer of personal salvation,
not to mention its practical inducements such as money-lending and
bargains at jumble sales. Neo-Confucianism – a Western name for what
the Koreans knew simply as ‘scholarly teaching’ (yugyo) or the Way
(Do) – had evolved as a new breed of thinkers in tenth- and eleventh-
century China, anxious to lift that country out of the doldrums into
which it had fallen and to recapture imagined ancient glories, realized
that the old Confucian Classics were now well past their sell-by date.
They took them down, dusted them off and re-examined them in the
light of Buddhist metaphysics. This took them into realms of debate
about hitherto unconsidered existential topics, until Zhu Xi pulled
their cosmological speculations together and codified their newly iden-
tified principles into practical rules for political and social harmony.
Most important of these was the assertion that, just as the cosmos was
ruled by the Supreme Ultimate (Ch. tai qi, Kor. t’aegŭk), so was the
state ruled by an absolutist monarch and the lineage or family by its
patriarchal head. Autocracy and hierarchy must rule if the chaos
represented by Khitans, Jurchens and, later, the Mongols was to be
overcome.
The introduction of Neo-Confucianism to Korea gave fresh hope
to those who were unhappy about the dominance of Buddhism at their
own court, men like Chŏng Mongju, Yi Saek, Yi Sungin, Chŏng Tojŏn
and, of course, Yi Sŏnggye. And the leaders of the new Chosŏn regime

                       
studied and accepted Zhu Xi’s teachings on everything from state
protocol to the interpretation of history, until the man they called
Chuja, ‘Master Zhu’, became the symbol of orthodoxy, and his pre-
scriptions for successful conduct in both public and private life, every-
thing from passing examinations to running a household, sacrosanct.
The education system took his commentaries on the Four Books and
the Five Classics as its basis. They exalted the Three Bonds and Five
Relationships (samgang oryun): bonds of subject to ruler (loyalty), chil-
dren to parents (filial piety) and women to men (hierarchy), and rela-
tions between ruler and ministers, fathers and sons, elder and younger
brothers, husbands and wives, and friends and associates. No educated
person, or even perhaps many of the uneducated majority, was unaware
of the rules he laid down for proper conduct in family life in his Chuja-
garye (‘Zhu Xi’s Domestic Rituals’). These put special emphasis on the
so-called Four Rites, sarye, the celebration of capping (see p. ) and
marriage and the observance of mourning and ancestral worship. It
took some time for long-established Buddhist and shaman rites, such as
those connected with weddings and funerals, to fall into line with pat-
terns originating in China, and in the countryside they sometimes
never did. But in Chosŏn Korea standardization of social organization
and behaviour came to be the first meaning of Neo-Confucianism. So
precise were its hierarchical prescriptions that they inevitably resulted
in discrimination, for example against wives in cases of marital break-
down, widows not allowed to remarry, sons of secondary marriages
barred from the regular examinations, and merchants facing constraints
on enterprise lest their profit-making challenge the leadership status of
scholars. Sometimes the rules were applied even more strictly than they
were in China, and upward social mobility into the literati class was
even more difficult.
In the fifteenth century some scholars, objecting to the rewarding
of aristocratic ‘meritorious subjects’ (kongsi) with government posts,
formed groups dedicated to high standards of official probity and con-
cern for the interests of the peasantry. They were known as country
scholars (sarim). Although they did not altogether eschew public serv-
ice, some did shun official advancement and take to the countryside to
pursue social improvements via their own lines of intellectual contem-
plation and research, a way of life that was, ironically, not so very
different from the Buddhist practice of eremitism that Neo-Confucian
apologists condemned as detrimental to the interests of society. Out of
their tradition came the first great Korean speculative philosopher, Yi
Hwang (–), the man whose name, says Michael Kalton, marks
‘the advent of maturity in Korean Neo-Confucian thought’. Retiring

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
from public life in  and taking the brush-name T’oegye (‘Return
to the Valley’), he devoted his remaining years to metaphysical specu-
lation based on the works of Zhu Xi, on which he became the first
Korean to express constructive criticism. In particular, he pondered
over the great Chinese debate about the cosmic dualism of principle (i)
and matter (ki) and its contribution to the workings of the Supreme
Ultimate, the Neo-Confucian equivalent of the Dao. Closely related
to principle was the question of inherent nature, and to matter and
force that of physical energy, or to put it another way, every human
individual was made up of mind and body. From there stemmed dis-
cussion of human nature, and for T’oegye consideration of Four
Beginnings and Seven Emotions. The Four Beginnings had been iden-
tified by Mencius as benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wis-
dom, and the Seven Emotions by the Liji as happiness, anger, sadness,
fear, love, hatred and liking. T’oegye concluded that the Four
Beginnings arose from principle and the Seven Emotions from matter,
and to his mind the spiritual took precedence over the (more ambigu-
ous) physical. In  he began a long correspondence with a younger
scholar, Ki Taesŭng (brush-name Kobong, –), in which the
greatest philosopher of the next generation, Yi I (Yulgok, –),
later participated. Yulgok himself, having dabbled at first with the idea
of becoming a monk, had finally embarked on a successful career in
official service, rising to the very top of the government before dying at
the identical age when T’oegye had made his own momentous break
with public life, just . Kobong and Yulgok argued that the relation-
ship between i and ki was one of mutual dependence rather than
superiority and inferiority, and that, for the scholar, practice was as
vital as abstract analysis in pursuit of self-fulfilment. As this Four-
Seven Debate, as it is known, rumbled on, so widely did the controversy
spread that the ‘study of nature and principle’ (sŏngnihak) constitutes
a second meaning of Chosŏn Neo-Confucianism.
In  Chu Sebung, the county magistrate at Sunhŭng, North
Kyŏngsang, opened a private academy dedicated to the memory of the
Neo-Confucian scholar An Hyang, who had lived nearby. The court
did nothing to discourage the subsequent proliferation of similar sŏwŏn
(‘writing courtyards’); indeed, it granted royal charters to many. By
 nearly one hundred had been established, and by the end of the
eighteenth century there were over four times as many. They acted as
centres for academic debate, provided communal facilities for ritual
and cultural occasions, and collected and published books. (By the
s they also represented aristocratic privilege and a fiscal liability, and
when they stimulated too much independent argument over political

                       
and economic matters, the Taewŏn’gun closed down all but  of
them.) A proposal from T’oegye led to the Sunhŭng academy being
awarded the royal title Sosu sŏwŏn (‘Transmitted Cultivation Academy’)
in , but by then T’oegye himself was already disillusioned with
political service. What he disliked about it was the rise of sectarian
rivalry and political prejudice. He would have grieved to see how, soon
after his death, it erupted so violently that to later observers factionalism
– over matters of ritual as well as rivalry for official preferment – came
to represent a third meaning (or at least, trait) of Neo-Confucianism.
We saw how in Sejong the philosophy had the capacity to bring the best
out of a ruler. But the axiomatic linkage between political and moral
issues meant that whilst it certainly generated scholarly discussion,
tolerance was not one of its hallmarks, and the bigotry and prejudice of
its competing cliques evoked the kind of terror experienced by contem-
porary Catholics in Elizabeth ’s England or Puritans in Carolingian
times. Bloodthirsty purges of political and scholarly rivals and dis-
senters, worthy of Tudor or Stuart England at their worst, were insti-
tuted by or in the name of the king. Korean scholars traditionally called
them sahwa (‘scholars’ disasters’), though Western historians today
prefer Ed Wagner’s term ‘literati purges’. Those in the fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries reflected confrontations between merit sub-
jects, grateful for royal patronage and thus responsive to centralized
rule, and sarim scholars, defending the principles of Neo-Confucianism
less subjectively and favouring local control over the new wealth pro-
duced by the agricultural revolution. After the mid-sixteenth century
sectarianism and rivalry over political appointments were more to
blame. Twelve major sahwa occurred between  and , and even
afterwards an atmosphere of suspicion and fear frequently hung over
courtiers, and executions and banishment were ordered on the flim-
siest of grounds. Not even kings themselves, or their relatives, were
exempt from the machinations of spies, whistle-blowers and cut-throat
partisans. Indeed, they were at the very heart of them, since the whole
web was woven around the throne, the succession to it and the power
of noble families to control it. Neo-Confucian absolutism expected
constructive criticism of the ruler’s behaviour via the Censorate, but
made no legal provision for organized opposition. Since it also demand-
ed the utmost loyalty of all men to their ancestors and kinsmen, the
ruthlessness of inter-lineage competition was intensified and a quiet life
was hardly to be expected.
For some experts a dispute over official appointments in 
marks the first appearance of factionalism (tangjaeng), but its origins
actually lay some way back: nine of the twelve sahwa in fact preceded

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
it. Most of those purged were sarim, who fell at the hands of the hun’gu
(‘meritorious and conservative’) group. One who died was Cho Kwangjo.
As a member of the Censorate he had proposed a simplification of the
examination system, publication of han’gŭl translations of the Confucian
Classics and the creation of village assemblies (hyangyak), but thanks
also to his efforts to control the hun’gu he was framed, condemned and
executed by judicial poisoning in , aged just . The year  saw
two alignments – of gentry residents in western Seoul, who supported
the advancement of Sim Ŭigyŏm, and those in the eastern quarters
who backed Kim Hyowŏn – and through the remainder of the century
these expanded the scope of factional arguments as they threw their
allegiance behind Yulgok and T’oegye in the Four-Seven Debate. The
Easterners (Tongin) held the upper hand, but in  they fell out
among themselves over the appointment of the heir apparent and split
into Southerners (Namin), followers of T’oegye, and Northerners
(Pugin), who preferred the philosophy of another sarim, Cho Sik
(–). Confusion was compounded through the s, the
decade that saw the Japanese invasions, until, in , by which time
the Northerners were divided into no fewer than five factions, it was
the turn of the Westerners (Sŏin) to seize the whip hand. But they too
were bifurcated by now, and the story of the next sixty years concerns
the fortunes of their Meritorious and Hardline factions, who dominat-
ed the government up to and after  respectively. Then in ,
after yet another argument over the nomination of a crown prince, this
time for King Sukchong (–), four principal factions emerged.
They were two parties of Westerners – the Noron (‘Old Teaching’) and
Soron (‘New Teaching’) – the Southerners and the Lesser Northerners.
Dignified by the appellation Four Colours (sasaek), these would survive
and control government affairs until the second half of the nineteenth
century.
In  the execution of Crown Prince Sado split the ruling Noron
party into Principle (or Dogmatist, Pyŏkp’a) and Realist (Sip’a) divi-
sions, and the latter also recruited broad-minded scholars from the
ranks of the Southerners. The Realists were the political face of the
sirhak movement, men – Neo-Confucians, indeed – who were prepared
to consider reshaping the mould of Sinocentric thought and behaviour
and to try out whatever ideas might be best for their country, whether
they came from China, from their own native traditions or even from
Europe. Some questioned the unchallenged authority of Zhu Xi’s
orthodoxy and investigated the rival teachings of Wang Yangming
(–), which many Chinese scholars preferred for the scope
they afforded for individuality. Long-accepted historical sources were

                       
re-examined as a fresh guide to government; new studies were launched
into areas as diverse as astronomy, geography, education and military
affairs, as well as the implications of Western science and religion
introduced to China by the Jesuit missionaries. One of the most emi-
nent Realists was Chŏng Yagyong (Tasan, –), at one time a
favourite of King Chŏngjo and a would-be social reformer. His writ-
ings covered everything from the principle-matter debate to history,
from music and mathematics to social order and good government. He
studied the role of technology in agricultural improvements and sub-
mitted a report on rural poverty in Kyŏnggi province. He investigated
the reasons for bureaucratic corruption, defended the poor against
unjust capital punishment and reflected on Mencius’s justification of
rebellion against oppressive leadership.
In the fifteenth century Neo-Confucianism had encouraged innova-
tion, and in the eighteenth it provided the ideological support for a
social, political and economic renaissance. In the intervening period
factions multiplied because it tolerated no other political parties or group-
ings, and in later times its heritage might be described as equivocal. Signs
that its long command of political processes through the Chosŏn had
prevented any system of organized opposition from developing among
the government’s critics were evident during the twentieth-century
colonial period, when anti-Japanese groups at home and abroad proved
unable to work together in the common cause, and again in post-mili-
tary-era South Korea, when Kim Daejung and Kim Young Sam failed
to unite in  to challenge Roh Tae Woo. On the plus side, some
Western observers saw Neo-Confucianism as the work ethic and social
cohesiveness that drove South Korea’s remarkable economic success in
the late twentieth century. International recognition, such as Michael
Robinson’s view that ‘in the main, traditional Confucian values have
supported Korean economic growth’, flattered Koreans, who in the
s and ’s had been in the habit of blaming Neo-Confucianism for
everything from their unhappy experience of authoritarianism to class
conflict. A wave of enthusiasm for its potential swept through the ranks
of younger scholars, at least until the financial crisis of  restored a
sense of balance. It was a far cry from the traditional anti-commercial
ethos propagated by early Confucians, but it showed that modern
Confucians still respected both education and the profit motive.

  

Political arguments cost Korea dearly during the s. Hideyoshi
Toyotomi, the warrior who had only recently unified Japan, harboured

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
greater ambitions: his attention was focused on the Dragon Throne in
Beijing, no less. Korea would provide his pathway, and might even be
his ally were King Sŏnjo to accept the sanctimonious and threatening
proposals he sent him in . Sŏnjo quite properly refused to join his
campaign, but his ministers disagreed over whether the Taikō was a
real threat or not. Kim Sŏng’il, leader of the predominant Tongin fac-
tion, refuted dire warnings of danger from Yu Sŏngnyong, of the Sŏin
faction, and as late as the first month of  a plea from the vice-min-
ister of war, Song Yingchang, for the training of defensive troops went
unheeded. While the Koreans prevaricated, Hideyoshi assembled more
than , men around Nagoya (some say as many as a quarter of a
million), over five times the complement of the Spanish Armada that
had recently threatened England.
The fleet carrying the vanguard army used the island of Tsushima
as its launch pad. Regarded by Koreans as their own but controlled by
the Japanese Sō clan, Tsushima had long been a troublesome pirate lair.
In an effort to control it, earlier kings had authorized trade via the ports
of Pusan (Tongnae county), Chep’o (Ungch’ŏn) and Yŏmp’o (Ulsan),
and in  King Sejong had sent an expedition against it. Japanese
communities grew up in the three ports, but after rioting by immi-
grants in  Pusan was designated the sole point of entry and exit.
(Frustrating though this was to merchants on both sides, the order
remained in force until .) It also became the way in for the First
Division of the Japanese army, the , men of the Christian daimyō
Konishi Yukinaga, who went ashore on the twelfth day of the fourth
month (m/d), or  May . The Catholic faith that many of
them professed had been acquired from Jesuit missionaries over the
preceding  years. So had the Portuguese-style iron helmets, plate
armour and long arquebuses they took into battle. Pusan and Tongnae
castles were swiftly taken, with furious slaughter of defenders and
civilians alike, and the way was clear for the next wave of soldiers to
land. Korean resistance was totally inadequate. In the words of their
own commanders, ‘our forces . . . are nothing more than [an] ill-trained
rabble ignorant of combat’, while the leadership itself was rent by
rivalries. The Koreans were hopelessly outclassed in numbers, strategy,
equipment and morale. Instances of great heroism notwithstanding,
bows and arrows and primitive muskets were no match for samurai
swords and arquebuses. The losers were beheaded, thousand upon
thousand of them. Konishi’s army entered Seoul on m/d, just 
days after landing at Pusan. It met no resistance because the court had
already fled in the direction of P’yŏngyang, taking the royal ancestral
tablets with it. Hideyoshi was exultant at the apparent fulfilment of his

                       
plans, and planned to embark for Korea the following spring. But
unlike the army, the Korean navy was well armed with cannon and
mortar and arrow-launchers, and less than a week after the fall of Seoul
a fleet commanded by Admiral Yi Sunsin destroyed  Japanese ships
off Kŏje island. In follow-up engagements in early July the armoured
turtle-boat (kŏbuksŏn) made its appearance (Picture Essay ).
Hideyoshi’s rejoicing was premature.
The Korean king appealed for Chinese assistance. Beijing har-
boured doubts about Korea’s loyalty and sought to bring about an
armistice, but by the time Sŏnjo reached P’yŏngyang the Wanli em-
peror had already approved the sending of aid, and when the court
evacuated again as far as the border town of Ŭiju the first rescue mis-
sion was dispatched. It was far too small and Konishi’s army easily
ambushed and massacred it at P’yŏngyang. But Yi Sunsin’s command
of the west coast meant that Konishi failed to receive essential supplies,
and as his rival the Buddhist general Katō Kiyomasa forged much fur-
ther ahead into Hamgyŏng province, Japanese lines became greatly
over-extended. Support for the Korean regular armies came from two
unexpected sources. Bands of guerrillas, estimated to number ,
nationwide, attacked Japanese camps and destroyed their supplies.
Many of the resistance fighters were former slaves, pressed into service
when the war came and now providentially liberated by the destruction
of their registration documents. And thousands of monks, answering a
call to resist the invader from the Sŏn grand master Sŏsan (–),
a poet and calligrapher now in his seventies, formed themselves into
effective and morale-boosting units.
In January  more Chinese assistance arrived, as the Ming gen-
eral Li Rusong crossed the frozen Yalu at the head of around ,
cavalry and foot-soldiers, with cannon drawn on carts. This time it was
they who out-thought and out-fought the Japanese, and the recovery of
P’yŏngyang after a great battle marked a turning point in the war. The
Japanese lost up to , men, and on  May surrendered control of
Seoul as well. The city’s few remaining inhabitants, said chief council-
lor Yu Sŏngnyong, looked like ghosts. When Sŏnjo returned to his
ruined capital in November, he found only parts of the Tŏksu Palace
habitable. In July , as the Japanese fought their way back to the
south coast, the final battle went their way at Chinju. Sixty thousand
defenders and inhabitants were massacred, though a surprise Korean
heroine, a kisaeng named Non’gae, earned immortality by embracing
General Keyamura Rokusuke on top of a cliff and then toppling both
of them to their deaths in the river below. The story may be apoc-
ryphal, but a memorial to her can still be seen in Chinju. The battle was

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
 Building a turtle boat
People in south-eastern Korea danced to express their joy at what
Admiral Yi did for them during the Imjin Waeran (‘Black Dragon
Japanese Struggles’). Their folk dance, Sŭngjŏnmu, now with words
extolling his moral leadership and sense of loyalty, is still performed by
the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. Incense
burns to his spirit in shrines near the spots where he was born and died.
In a modern age when tension between Korea and Japan is never far
below the surface, Yi Sunsin remains an undoubted National Hero
Number One. Ironically, until  there was no focus in the capital for
nationalistic respect to be shown to him. Then, in a prime example of
Confucian hero exaltation, Park Chung Hee gave the great opponent of
imperialism an officially sponsored boost to his reputation by unveiling
Kim Saejung’s commanding bronze statue of him. Its pose demon-
strates the Confucian qualities of determination and loyalty, and its
location, in the centre of Sejongno and in direct line south of Kwanghwa-
mun, could not be more significant. Unfortunately, such is the density of
the traffic that whistles past it that tourists tend to ignore it.
In the Yŏngsan War Memorial, however, they take their time over
another dramatic memorial to the great admiral, a big (:.) recon-
struction of the kŏbuksŏn turtle boat with which his name is inescapably
linked. According to an eighteenth-century description there were two
versions of the design, one dating from the fifteenth century and the
other from the late sixteenth. Yi Sunsin, then Left Navy Commander
for Chŏlla province, and the naval architect Na Taeyong completed their
own reconstruction of the earlier one only a matter of days before the
Japanese armada arrived. The flat-bottomed ships were built on planks
 centimetres thick. Seven courses of similar-sized beams made up the
sides, which tapered from . metres in length at deck level to .
metres at the keel. The maximum height measured . metres, includ-
ing . metres from keel to gunwale. The figurehead was . metres tall
and . centimetres wide at the mouth. A turret stood at the creature’s
tail. Two sails provided extra propulsive power to assist the  oars.
The ship was entered through a single opening in the convex protec-
tive decking, its ‘turtle-shell’. Covered in vertical iron spikes to repel
boarders, the roof may also have been clad with interlocking hexagonal
iron plates as protection against fire-arrows. Below decks there were two
levels, the upper one divided into  compartments, which included the
captain’s cabin and sailors’ accommodation. Smoke poured frighteningly
from the dragon’s mouth, where four cannon were concealed, and from
the stern. It is estimated that one vessel could transport up to  men
and that its potential range was more than  miles in a day, but rather


An artist’s
impression of
the building
of a turtle boat.

than being a long-range transport vessel its greatest novelty was as a bat-
tering ram that could withstand collision with wooden boats and force
its way into the midst of an enemy fleet with terrifying fire power. It was,
according to Yu Sŏngnyong, ‘so fast and nimble that [it] looked like a
spinning spindle’.
The turtle boats played a significant part in Admiral Yi’s victories
but were few in number. Most of the ships under his command were
open-topped p’anoksŏn, warships driven by rowers below deck while
the fighting men attacked from behind raised gunwales above them.
P’anoksŏn carried cannon of four sizes, shooting balls of iron or stone
and raining three-metre-long burning arrows down on enemy heads.
The captain commanded operations from a raised castle. The concept of
the turtle boat evolved from this kind of design.


a warning that the Japanese were not yet to be written off. They built
a string of castles (wajō) along the Kyŏngsang coast, and while ships
bore many exhausted and relieved samurai away from Korea, ,
men were left to garrison them, an ominous reminder that Hideyoshi
was used to getting his way. In the meantime, the war was temporar-
ily suspended.
Almost from the beginning the Chinese had sought peace, and had
opened truce talks in the spring of  without consulting their
Korean allies. In June negotiators purporting to come from Emperor
Wanli accompanied Japanese troops leaving Pusan, and after an audi-
ence with Hideyoshi in Nagoya returned with his exorbitant demands.
These included marriage to a Chinese princess, the restoration of trade
and the ceding of southern Korea to Japan. No mention was made of
his hankering after the Chinese throne, and in a letter to his wife, to
whom he pretended that his retreating troops were coming back from
Korea as victors, he wrote that if he got what he wanted he would now
leave China and Korea alone. Wanli himself was told that Hideyoshi
would surrender in return for enfeofment as the ‘king’ of Japan, and
when the Ming envoy Yang Fangheng eventually sailed to carry out this
investiture in October  but made no mention of Hideyoshi’s con-
ditions, the wrathful daimyō once more unleashed his forces. This time,
in August , many hundreds of ships (perhaps even ,) carried
more than , men, and the second invasion began with the odds
firmly on Japan’s side. Meanwhile, a review of military systems carried
out by Yu Sŏngnyong, despite pinpointing the inadequacy of Korean
armaments and the inappropriateness of exempting the large slave
class from recruitment, had not led to significant improvements. And
worse, Yi Sunsin, who had been raised to Supreme Commander of the
Three (Southern) Provinces only in September , had been falsely
impeached by his jealous rival Admiral Wŏn Kyun and deprived of his
command, narrowly escaping execution. Success in the first naval bat-
tle of the new campaign went to the Japanese, and once more the samu-
rai poured ashore at Pusan.
Their first great victory, at Namwŏn in late September, was also
one of the most bloodthirsty in the whole six-year trauma. Despite the
arrival of a supporting Chinese army under General Yang Yuan, the
Japanese Army of the Left took huge numbers of heads, sliced off
their ears and noses, and sent them home to Hideyoshi as trophies.
After that Chŏnju fell without a fight, and there Katō Kiyomasa’s
Army of the Right, which had taken a more easterly route, caught up:
the road to Seoul lay invitingly ahead. But once more the dependence
of advancing troops on west-coast sea lanes for their supplies was

                       
demonstrated. A swiftly reinstated Yi Sunsin saw off  Japanese
ships at Myŏngyang, just north of Chindo, on m/d ( October),
and the Japanese army, rather than confront the strong Korean-
Chinese defence of Seoul without adequate provision, swung away
east and south. On its way towards Ulsan and the hoped-for safety of
the wajō it passed through Kyŏngju, destroying the historic Pulguk-sa.
Ulsan turned out to be no safe haven, for the Japanese were outnum-
bered by the Koreans and a strong Chinese force, but after terrible suf-
fering on both sides relief arrived to lift the siege and complete a sur-
prising, if hollow, Japanese victory. And at the other, western, end of
the line of wajō the allies received another salutary shock. Here stood
Sach’ŏn and Sunch’ŏn castles, sheltering , and , Japanese
respectively, and in Sunch’ŏn harbour some  Japanese ships await-
ed evacuation orders. Both castles should have been taken by the
numerically superior allies, yet Sach’ŏn brought slaughter to more
than , Chinese soldiers, and Konishi Yukinaga’s defence of
Sunch’ŏn again showed that the Chinese were brave but less than
adept at scaling walls with ladders or siege machines, and they paid
another heavy price. Even so, the final victory was Yi Sunsin’s, as his
ships destroyed the Japanese vessels attempting to escape the
Sunch’ŏn trap. But in the Noryang strait opposite Namhae island he
was killed by a bullet, a bitter-sweet but fitting end to a distinguished
and active military career. Ironically, his invisible rival Hideyoshi had
gone before him on m/d, not heroically in battle, not through any
dramatic act on the part of the Koreans or their Chinese allies, but
‘peacefully, at home, after a long illness’. His grand escapade, in fact,
had never taken him beyond Japan’s shores.
Eyewitness accounts give an idea of what all sides had been
through. ‘Wounded men were abandoned, while those who were not
wounded but simply exhausted crawled almost prostrate along the
road . . . Even men who were normally gallant resembled scarecrows on
the mountains and fields because of their fatigue, and were indistin-
guishable from the dead.’ After any savagely fought war, survivors
declare ‘never again’; yet one day, Koreans and Chinese would endure
similar agonies as they fought side by side. A Chinese report from
Korea in  recorded: ‘Our soldiers frequently starved. They ate
cold food, and some had only a few potatoes in two days. They were
unable to maintain their physical strength for combat; the wounded
could not be evacuated.’ It is tempting, indeed, to see parallels between
aspects of the Imjin Waeran (‘Black Dragon Japanese Struggles’) of
– and the Korean War of –: China confronting its enemies
on Korean soil; the swift and devastating marching of armies up and

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
down the country; the suffering inflicted on the land, the people and
the buildings; the terrifying use of ‘human wave’ battle tactics by the
Chinese; the barbarity of soldiers on both sides; the futile peace ne-
gotiations in which Korean interests, if represented at all, were subor-
dinated to those of other combatants; the long-lasting psychological
trauma that each war induced. Of course, history never does really
repeat itself. In the seventeenth century recovery seemed to come quite
quickly: the country had escaped the colonization Hideyoshi dreamed
of and the partition he proposed to China, and trade and diplomacy
were soon restored. Post-, the Korean peninsula appeared to fare
worse. But things would never be the same again after either war.
The Chosŏn population, which had shot up from . million in
 to perhaps  million in the sixteenth century (at the end of which
the English, by way of comparison, numbered some  million souls), is
said to have slumped to around  million by the mid-seventeenth.
This may in fact reflect the loss of census records during the war, but
destruction had engulfed palaces and hovels alike, and disease and
despair followed. In  a yangban rebel leader, Yi Kwal, drove King
Injo out of Seoul, and three years later a fresh wave of invaders, the
Manchus, marched in to break up the Korean-Chinese alliance and
demand Chosŏn allegiance. Injo’s prevarication brought them back in
. Most of the court fled to Kanghwa, but the king and Crown
Prince Sohyŏn, unable to escape from the southern fortress outside
Seoul, knelt in the snow and acknowledged Manchu suzerainty.
Manchu preoccupation with their coming invasion of China meant
that the kingdom was spared a repetition of its worst experiences with
the Mongols; but the fact that this time the Ming were in no position
to help prompted the yangban to re-evaluate the Middle Kingdom as a
default source of protection for their own nation’s interests. Some did
remain steadfast in their loyalty to China; some opted to reinterpret
their Neo-Confucian inheritance in a Korean context; and some, wit-
nessing the spiritual and intellectual novelties introduced by Jesuit mis-
sionaries in China, decided that Catholicism and European science
could serve their country too. (Ironically, it was Prince Sohyŏn who
brought books on Western learning back from Beijing in  after
serving a period as a hostage.) Its evident victory against Hideyoshi
notwithstanding, the position of the Ming dynasty too was under-
mined. Although the Koreans had provided its armies with food and
horses during the wars, the cost of an unprecedentedly high level of
support for a tributary contributed to its economic decline, and the
losses endured by its top-quality north-eastern army units encouraged
the Manchus in their war preparations: like Korea, China still had

                       
more battling and suffering to come. Peace did at last settle on Japan,
and when Tokugawa Ieyasu (–) established his family’s rule
he satisfied a long craving for stability. Japanese soldiers, already inured
to unspeakable horrors after centuries of civil war and merciless killing,
had even so described Korean battle areas as a manifestation of hell.
That their compatriots stood to gain from new skills brought to Japan
by the many artisans taken there as prisoners, especially ceramic crafts-
men, must have come as scant consolation.

   

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a golden period for
monarchy worldwide. They had their victims (Kwanghae [Korea]
forced into abdication, ; Charles [England] beheaded, ; Louis
[France] guillotined, ), but their luminaries shine out the more sig-
nificantly in contrast – Louis  and , George  and , Peter and
Catherine of Russia, Kangxi and Qianlong of China. Korea, too, could
boast two outstanding kings. If Yŏngjo (r. –) and Chŏngjo (r.
–) could not share contemporary rulers’ taste for empire-
building, they could nevertheless participate fully in an age of brilliant
cultural creativity, even extravagance.
After an uneasy start (in  Yi Inchwa led Soron extremists in an
unsuccessful rebellion against the Noron-dominated government),
Yŏngjo’s was the longest reign in all Korean history. The king, showing
an evidently genuine interest in the lives of ordinary people, would go
to meet them at the palace gates, and visit the Chongno market to lis-
ten to merchants’ stories. Concern for the poor and the abandonment
of too much agricultural land underlay the introduction of a grain-loan
system and the optimistically named Kyunyŏkpŏp (‘Equal Tax Law’)
measure in . The halving of the cloth tax, used to finance the army,
was welcome, but the measure had only limited success because the
yangban’s traditional tax exemption meant that farmers now had to
shoulder the burden of an extra harvest levy. Determined to rid the
court of the political feuding and personal animosities that had marred
his father’s, Sukchong’s, reign, Yŏngjo lambasted and lectured faction-
al leaders, erected a stele honouring t’angp’yŏng ‘[party] harmony’ at
the Sŏnggyun-gwan Confucian Academy and closed down some 
unauthorized sŏwŏn for promoting partisan politics. He allowed the
Noron to consolidate power that they would never again lose; in return,
they accepted his demand that there should be no victimization of the
Southerners, though acute rivalry did persist. It promised so well; so it
is ironic that nowadays Yŏngjo’s own intransigence is blamed for splitting

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
the Noron into Dogmatists and Realists, and sad that the explanation
for this links him in the minds of many people with a story of cruelty
and death rather than with efforts to alleviate suffering. The issue
concerned his treatment of his son, Changhŏn (–), who grew
up to be a severe disappointment to his father. In accordance with
custom, he was nominated regent when he was married in  at the
age of fifteen. It should have been auspicious, but in the later words of
his wife, the Lady Hyegyŏng, ‘it was a sad, sad day’. By  his eccen-
tric behaviour had become so unacceptable that Yŏngjo replaced him as
heir apparent with his grandson, Changhŏn’s son, rendering Changhŏn’s
titles of crown prince and regent all but empty. Thereafter Changhŏn
went from bad to worse, drinking heavily, falling into fits of uncontrol-
lable violence, wandering the city streets, bringing prostitutes into the
palace and killing anyone who displeased him, until he was eventually
deemed by the king and his physicians to be mad. When he refused to
take poison, his father had him shut up in a rice chest, where he died in
agony after eight days in the sun. Members of the Noron were divided,
the Dogmatists approving and the Realists secretly criticizing the
lengths that the king had gone to in defence of the succession. JaHyun
Kim Haboush’s view is that a modern psychoanalyst might interpret
the behaviour of Changhŏn – or Crown Prince Sado (‘Pondering
Grief ’) as he was quickly renamed by a now remorseful Yŏngjo – as
reaction against paternal rejection, when as a child he was denied
regular access to his father in accordance with Neo-Confucian concepts
of princely upbringing.
If Yŏngjo’s memory is tarnished by this story, that of his grandson
King Chŏngjo shines all the brighter because of it. Concerned for the
welfare of the poor, he distributed grain to the most needy, accepted
their petitions, tried to protect abandoned children and abolished the
office that hunted runaway slaves. (His ambition to abolish slavery alto-
gether was still unfulfilled when he died at the age of . Its defenders
in Korea were as entrenched as William Wilberforce was finding them
in the Western world.) According to a memorial by Minister Pak Chega
(–), he would ‘consult even such lowly people as grass and
reed cutters’ in the event of trouble. By encouraging improvements to
dams and irrigation he helped stimulate food production and the value
of cash crops. Known as a fair judge, he had the national law code
revised in . Periodic orders for parties and gifts honouring the
over-sixties, -seventies and -eighties showed his interest in the elderly,
and caring for his own sick grandfather (and suffering badly himself
from boils) deepened his knowledge of medicine. Admitting the popu-
larity of Buddhism, he approved the building and rebuilding of temples,

                       
though still not within the walls of Seoul. He even founded one him-
self, Yŏngju-sa, near Suwŏn, a hint of moral and spiritual turmoil in
the mind of one who was not just a diligent Neo-Confucian but the
exemplar par excellence of its principal virtue, filial piety. In the course
of his reign Chŏngjo paid  processional visits to royal tombs dotted
around Kyŏnggi province, and as they totted up we begin to see how
obsessed he was with trying to expunge his own sense of guilt at his
father’s death. In  he re-buried him at a geomantically auspicious
site on Mount Hwa, south of Seoul. To guard it – and to strengthen his
own position against rival political factions – he began to build a new
castle-city, Hwasŏng, and when complete he stationed half of his new
central army, Changyongyŏng (‘Stout and Brave Garrison’), in it
(Picture Essay ). He never got round to transferring the whole court
there, but he paid annual visits to his father’s tomb, staying in a special-
ly built detached palace (haenggung) and keeping a check on the monks’
performance of rites for his father’s soul at Yŏngju-sa. A royal excur-
sion such as this was a large and expensive undertaking that needed
careful planning: a detailed picture of the visit of , on which
Chŏngjo also took his widowed mother to celebrate her th birthday,
shows a procession of more than , people and , horses.
In his award-winning novel Everlasting Empire (Yŏngwonhan
chekuk), Yi Inhwa depicts Chŏngjo as a commanding but far from
secure figure, a sensitive man forced to plot and intrigue to keep con-
trol of his feuding ministers; anxious, like Yŏngjo, to harmonize their
rival factions and, like the sirhak scholars, to modernize his country, yet
convinced of the truth of its Neo-Confucian heritage and unsympa-
thetic to the Catholic converts who associated with sirhak within the
Pukhak (‘Northern Learning’) group; a king rumoured to have died
by a poisoner’s hand. Actually he probably had skin cancer, but what
undoubtedly fuelled the regicide theory was the fact that his sudden
death followed immediately after he had taken a leaf out of the Chinese
Son of Heaven’s manual by proclaiming himself the earthly embodi-
ment of the Heavenly Principle, thereby affirming his dedication to the
concept of benevolent despotism. T’oegye’s interpretation of the Book
of History had said that such a ruler could understand the past, antici-
pate the future and govern the present in accordance with Heaven’s
will, and the fearsomely scholarly Chŏngjo was devoted to restoring the
primacy of the ancient Confucian Classics. To the Dogmatists, who
preferred Yulgŏk’s concept of the sage king working alongside his
scholarly ministers, this implicit downgrading of orthodoxy as embod-
ied in the works of Zhu Xi might have been the last straw. Throughout
Chŏngjo’s reign they had filled most of the top government posts, the

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
 Hwasŏng fortress

Hwasŏng fortress, Suwŏn, Kyŏnggi province.

Construction of the castle at Hwasŏng began on the slopes of P’aldal

(‘Eight Directions’) Mountain in the first moon of  and was com-
pleted in the eighth moon of . It was, in fact, an expansion of the
-roomed detached palace of  into a fortified township of .
square kilometres, now containing  palace rooms, gardens and pavil-
ions, altars, military garrisons, an archery range and home farms to keep
the inhabitants fed and comfortable in the event of siege. Hwasŏng
means ‘Flowery City’, and it was also known as Susŏng (‘City of Trees’),
both names indicating the pleasant place it was intended to be as a resi-
dence for a court that, as it turned out, never fully arrived. Background
research was carried out in the royal library to compare Chinese and
Japanese construction methods with early Korean castle-building. Final
details of the construction work under the direction of Ch’oe Chegong
and Cho Simtae were recorded in the nine-volume Hwasŏng songyuk
ŭigwe. It reveals that , workmen were employed, and were reward-
ed with rice, beans and medicines. They included  stonemasons, 


plasterers,  carpenters and , decorators. The stone and brick
walls were designed by Chŏng Yagyong, whose interest in Western
machinery, learned in China, stood the builders in good stead. He is
credited with constructing and using the first crane ever seen in Korea.
Soldiers of the Changyongyŏng kept guard from watchtowers and
could fire from slit windows. Their stationing at Hwasŏng was not merely
a defensive measure. The Military Training Command (Hullyŏn Togam),
first established by Yu Sŏngnyŏng during the Imjin Waeran, commanded
five armies around the capital, including the Royal Guards
(Ŏyŏngch’ŏng). Chŏngjo, concerned about the dominance of the
Dogmatist group among its officers in Seoul, purged them; he replaced
the Royal Guards with an enlarged Inner Palace Guard, and created a new
,-strong command at Hwasŏng, a personal response to a potential
military challenge to his authority.
Today, close by the mausoleum that Chŏngjo built for Prince Sado,
are those of Lady Hyegyŏng and of Chŏngjo himself with his wife. The
castle was extensively damaged during the Japanese colonial period,
but rebuilding began in  and is scheduled for completion by .
Tourists can still walk the walls of the city, which bears the modern name
Suwŏn (‘Watery Fields’) and is a  World Heritage Site.


only Southerner to hold high position being Ch’oe Chegong (Pon’am,
–). Now, perhaps, they saw their power in danger of slipping
away.

 ’ 

The Dogmatists saw their Sinocentric world outlook challenged by
sirhak ideas and their political and economic security threatened by
Yŏngjo’s and Chŏngjo’s reformist measures. Take the traditional Neo-
Confucian dislike of commerce, for example. The central market that
Xu Jing had come across in Kaesŏng had evolved into Six Licensed
Shops (yuk ŭijŏn) in early Chosŏn Seoul: in return for rent paid in
goods, the government leased premises in its main street, Chongno, to
merchants dealing in thread, silk, cotton cloth, ramie and hemp cloth,
fish and paper. As money spoke, independent traders began to chal-
lenge the authorities and rival the licensed shopkeepers. In the seven-
teenth century, when fiscal policy shifted away from collection in kind
and the need for currency increased, even some yangban families saw
the opportunity for profit, shook off their suspicion of trade and forged
insider deals with these authorized monopolists. More people became
town-dwellers, education expanded and merchants traversed the coun-
try with essentials and luxuries. Book sales rose. Those printed with
metal type were too expensive for ordinary folk, and cheaper plates of
wood or clay were used for titles in popular demand, especially love
stories. The sirhak advocate Pak Chega memorialized in favour of
greater maritime trade in  so that ‘books and pictures from all over
the world might be procured, and thus the obstinate and narrow-mind-
ed views of our local scholars might be shattered without attacking
them directly’. Wholesale and retail marketing developed, and guilds
were formed. In  Yŏngjo’s government removed some of the
licensed traders’ privileges, and in  Chŏngjo approved a further
boost to private commerce with the Commercial Equalization Act.
Three market areas were now permitted in Seoul, in Chongno and
inside the great East and South Gates, and provincial towns large and
small also boasted regular markets. Yangban families with links to the
old monopolists started to lose out, and began to associate with crafts-
men like furniture makers, seal-carvers, jewellers and weavers, who
were also breaking free of earlier controls and producing new ranges of
artefacts for private buyers. In the markets, commoners clamoured for
cheap and colourful examples of folk arts to brighten their homes.
The cultural profile of the age was inevitably affected by all of this.
It was not only private yangban patronage that encouraged wider

                       
manufacturing of craft goods, but the court too, with its splendid rituals,
banquets and receptions. According to JaHyun Kim Haboush, it saw
itself as the true inheritor of the ‘spiritual heirship to the now defunct
Ming imperial house’, a claim that, even if it was too impertinent to
express in so many words, was hinted at by the appearance in throne
rooms of screens painted with the sun, moon and five peaks, symbolic
of the ruler’s sacred power. At any rate, it was a piece of self-deception
that had to be lived up to, vide, for example, the swift order for the
replacement of ritual instruments when they were destroyed by fire in
. But delusion or not, it did not simply result in the aping of
Chinese cultural features. Both Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo encouraged sirhak
ambitions, the former by commissioning Hong Ponghan’s great ency-
clopedia Tongguk munhŏn pigo (‘Korean Reference Materials’), the lat-
ter by setting up the Kyujang-gak Library and Research Centre in the
Kyŏngbok Palace. (We are reminded of Kangxi’s research academy, the
Meng Yang Chai [‘Studio for Receiving Cultivation’], and George ’s
great book-collecting habit.) Here Chŏngjo personally taught young
scholars. His own writings, all hundred or so volumes of them, may not
have occupied much space amid the , in the entire collection,
but they showed his devotion to the classics and his interest in law,
medical science and military arts. He was also more than competent as
an artist and calligrapher. What he did not approve of, however, as a
dedicated classicist, was the lighter, less allusive style of writing adopt-
ed by Pak Chiwŏn (Yŏnam, –) in Yŏrha ilgi (‘Jehol Diary’).
This record of Pak’s visit to Beijing with an embassy in  reflected
the intellectual curiosity of the sirhak scholar. For some it represents
the beginning of modern Korean literature, though others see this in
the Biography of Hong Kiltong (Hong-giltong-jŏn), reputedly the work
of Hŏ Kyun (–).
The cultural parameters of the yangban, though still fixed on
Chinese models, were expanding. From studios like those of Chŏng
Ch’ŏl (Songgang, –) and Yun Sŏndo (Kosan, –)
came sijo, three-line poems that were ideal for evoking Koreans’ love of
nature and the whole gamut of their emotions. The first major anthol-
ogy, however, Ch’ŏnggu yŏngŏn (‘Songs of the Green Hills’, ) was
compiled by a chungin (see p. ), Kim Ch’ŏnt’aek, and was followed
by Kim Sujang’s Haedong kayo (‘Songs of Korea’, ). The brush,
hitherto the archetypal symbol of the invisible cords tying scholars to
their Chinese sources of inspiration, now became an instrument
expressing distinctive Korean aspirations. Female writers tried out the
potential of han’gŭl, and painters discovered real-life subjects on their
own doorsteps.

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
 The voice followed the example of the wrist, and yangban with
time to spare mastered the singing of long and difficult Korean songs,
kasa and kagok. I looked for visual evidence of Chosŏn music-making
on a research trip to Korea in , when it became clear that although
it was not a subject of particular interest to painters (less so than to
those in China, for example), when it did appear its style and content
were likely to be distinctively local as well as stereotypically Chinese.
Surviving examples of early Korean painting of any kind are extremely
rare. For this, Hideyoshi’s men frequently get the blame, though pic-
tures, of course, may have perished in fires at any time over the centuries,
and others may yet turn up in tombs or be awaiting recognition in pri-
vate collections or antique shops. What we know about Korean artists
of the Koryŏ and early Chosŏn, however, is that they strongly admired
and imitated Chinese painting styles. An P’yŏng (–) alone had
a great collection of works by Chinese masters going right back to
Gu Kaizhi, including  pieces of calligraphy by Zhao Mengfu and 
pictures by Guo Xi. An Kyŏn’s (b. ) still-extant Dream Journey to
Peach Blossom Spring clearly reflects his admiration for the great Song
dynasty landscapist. Pictures of the seventeenth century and onwards
are not in such short supply, and among them I found music illustrat-
ed in predictable settings, scholars playing the zither, ox-herds playing
flutes, performances appreciated across water or in the moonlight: all
standard Chinese stuff. Chosŏn artists were adept at producing paint-
ings virtually indistinguishable from those of their Chinese role
models. Those engaged by the Court Painting Office, the Tohwa-sŏ,
produced such things to order. Though few in number – Yŏngjo dou-
bled their ranks to  in  – some of them still rank among Korea’s
best painters. Most were poorly paid and looked down on by court offi-
cials, who as amateur artists themselves took pride in following the
more individualistic style of the Chinese literati. In fact, the Tohwa-sŏ
was not as stylistically constrained as the Imperial Painting Academy
was in China. Its members were versatile enough to paint in both
Northern (Academy) and Southern (literati) Chinese styles, and to
produce Korean sehwa (New Year paintings) depicting symbols of
longevity, the Daoist Immortals, mythical guardian figures and the
ever-popular Korean tiger. One of the greatest Korean painters of all
time was Chŏng Sŏn (Kyŏmjae, –). Although he was an excel-
lent landscape painter in the Chinese style, Kyŏmjae’s reputation as the
most influential artist of early modern times really stems from his
innovative move to break away from idealistic landscapes (kwannyŏm
sansu) and create a distinctive technique for rendering the actual sights
he saw as he left the Tohwa-sŏ to take up an official post at Ch’ŏngha,

                       
North Kyŏngsang province. Through his fifties he developed ‘true-
view landscapes’ (chin’gyŏng sansu), making bold use of chopped axe-
cut strokes and dots to portray granite outcrops, rushing waterfalls and
sunlit glades amid thick forests, set against a background of razor-
sharp mountain peaks (Picture Essay ). He painted locations close to
home outside Seoul, high up in the Diamond Mountains, and across on
the east coast. His pioneering approach was in keeping with the inspi-
ration of the sirhak movement, and where he led other artists followed,
in Korea and, later, Japan. Not all could really capture the essence of
the Korean landscape as successfully as he, but one who did, and man-
aged like Kyŏmjae to execute both Chinese and Korean styles, was the
scholar-artist Kang Sehwang (P’yoam, –), whose album of
sixteen Scenic Spots around Songdo (Kaesŏng) adopted an even more
impressionistic style than Kyŏmjae’s.
Moved as I was by Kyŏmjae’s landscapes, what caught my attention
was a ten-panel screen attributed to him, recording the magistrate of
Tongnae county greeting Japanese envoys at Pusan. Musicians accom-
panied the official procession and provided the entertainment in the
Guest House outside the walls of the Japan House (Waegwan). Painted
some time between  and , this kind of detailed documentary
record was in the same vein as the informative album leaves illustrating
accounts of banquet entertainments given for the court’s Society of the
Elderly and Brave (Kiyonghoe), a kind of over-seventies club honour-
ing distinguished officials that originated in King T’aejo’s Office for
the Venerable Aged (Kirosŏ). Several well-preserved and colourful
examples of this art form date from the sixteenth century, and are the
forerunners of the ŭigwe books and screens seen in Picture Essay .
They clearly illustrate the size and range of musical ensembles and
show the perennial popularity of masked-dance entertainment, espe-
cially the Ch’ŏyong dance sequence.
Kyŏmjae was not the only artist renowned for painting in both
Chinese and Korean styles. Asked who was Korea’s greatest painter,
most Koreans would surely name Kim Hongdo (Tanwŏn, –post-
). Like Kyŏmjae, he was a member of the Tohwa-sŏ, until he so
impressed King Chŏngjo with the portrait he painted of him that he
was made a county magistrate. And for him, as for Kyŏmjae in similar
circumstances, that marked the beginning of a kind of enlightenment,
for although he was a first-rate painter of landscapes and flower-and-
bird studies in the best of Chinese traditions, of Daoist Immortals and
Buddhist deities (he is said to have provided the altar painting of
Buddha still to be seen at Yŏngju-sa), and of court receptions on the
grand scale, it was the people he met in the countryside doing ordinary

         -    ̆ ,    ‒     
 Chŏng Sŏn, Manp’okdong
Buddhists and Daoists in China and Korea identified particular moun-
tain areas in both countries as holy. In these remote, difficult areas they
built monasteries, temples and hermitages to be close to the abode of
the Immortals, and poets, philosophers and artists sought inspiration in
their beauty and solitude. The Diamond Mountains (Kŭmgang-san)
earned their name because their myriad vertical peaks evoked the image
of the diamond-hard Buddhist thunderbolt (vajra).
Artists attuned to the ideas of the Southerners’ faction in the mid-
Chosŏn period took the view that a picture should show the inner spirit
rather than the outer form of a subject, and tended to paint in an ideal-
ized style. Those of the Noron persuasion preferred realism. Chŏng Sŏn
(Kyŏmjae) could do both, and painted the Diamond Mountains many
times both from imagination and from life. The title of this album leaf,
which he wrote and signed above the centre at the left of the picture, lit-
erally means ‘Ten Thousand Waterfalls Ravine’, and is the name given
to a famous spot where many rivers and streams converge. Needle-sharp
peaks jostle for position in the distance, a feature of Kŭmgang scenery
that folk artists loved to exaggerate. The dark mass looming above the
lighter granite column in the centre of the picture takes its name from
the blue crane, which is said to live here. The word dong carries conno-
tations of habitation by fairy-like creatures, rather as ‘grottoes’ does in
English. Something has caught the attention of the two scholars stand-
ing with their servant on a sloping rock, and they point towards the
nearby grove of eight pine trees, but any conversation must be difficult
against the sound of the rushing streams pouring down into the
whirlpool to their right.
The poem in the top-right corner, chosen by Kyŏmjae to complement
the subject, is by the great Chinese artist Gu Kaizhi ( –?):

A thousand cliffs compete in elegance,

Innumerable streams strive to flow,
Grass and trees thrive luxuriantly,
Clouds well up in coloured splendour [trans. Roderick Whitfield]

Its calligraphic style perfectly matches the brushwork of the picture,

and creates a sense of an essentially vertical composition made up of
many horizontal strokes, the yin and the yang in harmony. T-shaped
trees and dotted clumps of vegetation are characteristic of Kyŏmjae’s
style, with rapid, rhythmic strokes conveying a strong sense of energy,
dark wash suggesting the great bulk of rock faces, and an overall bluish
wash adding mistiness to the scene.


Chŏng Sŏn, Manp’okdong, undated, ink and light colours on paper,  ×  cm.


jobs, like washing clothes, tiling a roof, ploughing a field or teaching a
class of schoolboys, whose pictures would cause him to be so honoured
by modern generations. Nor was it all work: he painted popular forms
of entertainment, too: a pair of wrestlers, a band of musicians and a
dancing boy, and a rather untidy scholar with pip’a lute and a somewhat
bemused expression. In Tanwŏn we see the sudden maturing of a
genre-painting tradition that had first appeared on the walls of tombs
in the Three Kingdoms period, visual evidence of a great artist’s pride
in being Korean.
Much the same may be said of his contemporary Sin Yunbŏk
(Hyewŏn, –c. ), from whose brush, incidentally, came the most
careful and detailed study to date of a kŏmun’go zither, being strung by
a courtesan. Hyewŏn’s fame rests more exclusively on his genre paint-
ings, especially those concerned with entertainment in its broadest
sense, from the whirling excitement of female sword dancers to a pair of
gentlemen dallying with kisaeng beside a lily pond, even to young monks
spying on girls bathing in a stream. On the whole, Tanwŏn found his
subjects among the yangban, and daringly poked fun at them, especial-
ly where sexual mores were concerned. The lifting of a corner of the
curtain around the personal life of the straight-laced Neo-Confucian
gentry delights us, who in today’s moral climate see nothing erotic in the
kisaeng leaning over the side of a boat, lifting her rear towards the gen-
tleman standing behind her. But eighteenth-century society, however
familiar it was with such behaviour, feigned shock to see it so advertised,
and Tanwŏn was expelled from the Tohwa-sŏ. The kind of occasions
the yangban preferred to be recorded were those that celebrated the aus-
picious events in a man’s life and career. Most important of these were
his first birthday, coming of age, marriage, passing the chinsa (doctorate)
degree, appointment to an official post and th birthday. These, along
with pictures of the subject with his children and grandchildren, or on
his wedding anniversary, often formed the topic of screen panels, and
were known as p’yŏngsaeng-do (‘whole life pictures’). A formal portrait
was needed for placing in a memorial hall alongside his ancestors’
tablets, but p’yŏngsaeng-do were not at all formal, and so many circum-
stantial details of surroundings, bystanders and the like went into them
that they may be classified as a type of genre painting. In them, for
example, we see how, for all their Sinicized cultural elitism, the yangban
enjoyed the acrobatics, masked drama and puppetry provided by kwang-
dae performers.

                       
 II

A Century of
Insecurity
  

The Hermit Kingdom, ‒:

Tradition at Work
This chapter illustrates aspects of the way of life that Korea’s
leaders were anxious to protect, as the century wore on and
unwelcome signs of challenge to their own interpretation and
guardianship of it appeared.

  

Chŏngjo had no time for Catholicism and no more had any of the next
three kings, Sunjo (r. –), Hŏnjong (r. –) and Ch’ŏlchong
(r. –). At the turn of the century several thousand Christian
converts in and around Seoul bore witness to six years of undercover
work by a Chinese missionary, Father Zhou Wenmu. It was an era when
ghastly prison conditions, excruciating torture and legal execution
ended the lives of people in many parts of the world, either for daring
to contradict the ideologies of the ruling class or for much lesser mis-
demeanours: think of France at the time, for example. The Korean
response to unorthodox and potentially disruptive beliefs was no
exception, and conditions in its jails were indescribably awful. A few
Catholics had already died for their faith before the first widespread
persecution took place in , when  martyrs suffered ritual exe-
cution as a warning to others. Zhou Wenmu was among them. The
twelve-year-old king Sunjo’s marriage in  brought some relief,
since his new wife’s clan, the Kims from Andong, had already been
touched by sirhak ideas, and to exploit this half-opening a French bishop
and two priests were moved from South-East Asia, the first Western
clergy assigned to Korea. By the time they slipped separately across
the frontier from Manchuria in , however, Sunjo had died, and
early in Hŏnjong’s reign the Chos of P’ungyang got the better of the
Andong Kims and revived the persecutions. In  all three
Frenchmen were executed, along with at least  Korean converts.
The establishment that hunted Catholics down was not concerned
about protecting their souls from heresy. Rather, it saw them as traitors.


They had (unsuccessfully) sought French military protection in ,
and their shocking behaviour in denouncing the Neo-Confucian ances-
tral rites as idolatrous, even smashing up the tablets honouring their
family spirits, was an affront to upper-class beliefs. This foreign ideol-
ogy that proclaimed its recognition of individualism and promised
salvation through self-denial and sacrifice threatened both the political
and the social order. (Way back, Buddhism had faced the same accusa-
tions from Confucians in China and Korea, but Buddhism now had a
long tradition behind it and was tolerated – outside Seoul at least – for
the sake of its communal roles and functions [Picture Essay ].)
The yangban class, the combined ‘two groups’ (Ch. liang ban) of
civil and military power, had taken shape in the late Koryŏ and early
Chosŏn period, and by mid-Chosŏn was synonymous with political and
social leadership of the country. It was distinguished by education in
the Chinese Classics, a lifestyle worthy of the Chinese literati and pride
in the genealogies of its member clans. To make sacrificial offerings
to their ancestors was an important duty for senior males, and the
Catholic stance seemed to represent defiance of their authority. Many
of them were rich landowners. They were exempt from regular mili-
tary and corvée duties and paid less tax than others. To their inferiors
they represented unimaginable privilege; they were ‘stars in heaven’.
They themselves, however, were only too conscious that posts could be
lost and shame and poverty encountered through political disfavour,
disputes over ethical standards, intrigue and slander, or downright
incompetence. At least they were spared the threat of rivalry from
beneath: upward mobility into their class was virtually impossible bar-
ring exceptional royal favour. Even the small but significant class of
chungin (‘middle men’) functionaries could not anticipate it. These
included the court’s architects, interpreters and artists, the magistrate’s
tax gatherers and accountants, the community’s doctors and astro-
nomers. The yangban depended on their skills. They did not hesitate to
take chungin girls into service, although any offspring resulting from
mixed unions were labelled sŏŏl, stigmatized and denied yangban rights
and privileges. Some chungin boasted family genealogies of their own
and had passed their own examinations (chapkwa), but the fact that their
education was in practical subjects rather than the classics demeaned
their status.
The bulk of the population were sangmin (‘common people’). They
were the food growers, the street traders, the miners, the builders, the
soldiers, those identified in Confucian theory as the foundation of the
state yet still to see much benefit from it. They were not, however, the
lowest members of society. Into the sub-class of ch’ŏnmin (‘base people’)

                   
fell public entertainers (like kwangdae), prostitutes, chair-carriers,
butchers, night-soil collectors, even shamans. And last of all came the
slaves. Korea had the highest percentage of slaves of any country in
East Asia: a census register surviving from  so defined a massive
three-quarters of the population of Seoul, over half its households.
(Don Clark has pointed out to me that the percentage outside Seoul,
where the figure was inflated by government slaves, was more likely
around .) Known as nobi, they or their ancestors had usually fallen
into this status either as captives in war or through felony, or even vol-
untarily because they had seen financial advantages in it. They had,
naturally, lost their freedom, and were hereditarily consigned either to
be distributed by the king as bounty for loyal service or to be bought
and sold as chattels. There were public slaves and private slaves,
fulfilling a wide variety of jobs in offices, post-stations, schools, yang-
ban households and farms. No wonder Chŏngjo’s aim of abolishing
slave status, implemented in the case of government slaves in , had
ruffled the feathers of the Dogmatists. Yet liable as they were to suffer
ill-treatment, slaves did sometimes manage to find opportunities for
self-advancement. Some had slaves of their own; some even owned
land. It was sometimes hard to spot the difference between slaves and
sangmin, and by the time the Kabo reforms officially liberated them in
 the enslaved residents of Seoul had fallen to around  per cent of
its inhabitants.
Neo-Confucian prejudice reinforced discrimination against
women. As in other pre-modern civilizations, the birth of a girl was
often, though not invariably, a cause of disappointment. The proper
place for a woman in any respectable Korean home was out of sight, in
the inner quarters (anch’ae). This is where she was consigned at the age
of ten or twelve, perhaps with some basic education, and prior to being
married off by arrangement. When this happened she left her natal
home and went to live with her new husband in his. She had learned
that she must be submissive to her father, her husband and her in-laws,
and only when she herself attained the status of a matriarch could she
look forward with any assurance to being treated with honour. Cases
did occur of women being loved and respected for what they were and
even making names for themselves; but it is notable that among the
renowned writers, artists and musicians of the Chosŏn dynasty very
few were women. A man’s principal wife (ch’ŏ) might take some satis-
faction from supervising the family finances and domestic arrange-
ments, managing children’s basic upbringing and servants’ behaviour,
and carrying out rituals to the household spirits; secondary wives
(ch’ŏp) could expect no such responsibilities. The world beyond the

  , ‒ 

 Detail from a nectar ritual painting

Detail from a wall-painting, , Yŏngam-sa, Seoul.

Ceremonies assisting the rebirth into the Western Paradise of souls

otherwise fated through bad karma or sudden and unfortunate death
to become wandering spirits were the Buddhist equivalent of Neo-
Confucian ancestor worship: there could be no greater proof of filial
piety than to aid the migration of a relative’s soul into Paradise. Large
crowds specially enjoyed the music, dancing and substantial banquets
sponsored by the rich that accompanied these ‘nectar rituals’ (nam-
jangsa). Early Chosŏn kings might have driven Buddhism from court
and capital, and yangban might further their family interests by observ-
ing Neo-Confucian etiquette, but outside Seoul Buddhism still crossed
social barriers, providing services for commoners and nobility alike.
Yŏngam Temple, lying just outside the West Gate of Seoul, was patron-
ized by local people and city residents.
Inside the main prayer hall of a temple, usually on its right wall in
the form of a large painted mural or hanging banner, might be seen a
‘sweet dew painting’ (kamno-jŏng). It was, says Kang Woobang, ‘the


most characteristically Korean and perhaps the most widely produced
type of religious painting’ in the eighteenth century, and examples con-
tinued to be produced throughout the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth. They show, at the top, the deities watching over the life of the
temple; in the centre, a hungry ghost or ghosts observing the perform-
ance of the rite; and at the bottom, scenes related to the life and death
of people deserving this particular form of salvation. They are full of
detail about social activities: a religious procession winds its way towards
the temple gate, conch shells tooting; stall-keepers haggle over prices in
the marketplace, voices raised; children watch acrobats tightrope walk-
ing; adults shout encouragement to a p’ansori singer; a shaman dances
herself into a trance; a magistrate supervises the beating of a criminal;
soldiers fight battles; a traveller is attacked by a tiger; a woman gives
birth; kisaeng entertain customers; a farmer ploughs a field. Whatever
the artistic quality of these Buddhist genre pictures, their value to the
social historian is never in doubt. Figures in Korean dress, rather than
the Chinese styles usually seen in literati painting, indicate a growing
awareness of Korea’s own cultural integrity.
The detail seen opposite comes from the lower section of a ‘sweet dew
picture’, and is painted in bold, primary colours with a kind of naif exu-
berance. Monks are chanting from sutra books; nuns dance to the clash
of cymbals and banging of drums; a line of men and women crosses from
left to right in the foreground, carrying baskets of what may be food
offerings for the temple; waving aloft at the very bottom of the picture
are the feet of an acrobat crossing a tightrope on his hands, apparently
unnoticed on the other side of a hedge by three men sitting deep in con-
versation and a group of farmers wearing straw hats.


home, that of work and socializing, was male territory, and even in rural
areas, where the nature of the village economy meant that women
played a fuller part in communal life, they had to acknowledge many
no-go areas. For instance, they were unable to play in the farmers’
bands that accompanied so many religious and social events in the
annual calendar.
Clothing was a matter of pride to people whatever their class.
Respectable women wore a long, high-waisted dress, a short tight jacket
with left side crossed over the right and tied with a tape below the
shoulder, thin under-trousers and soft shoes with turned-up toes. The
effect was colourful and elegant, and modern women in both the 
and  still like to dress up for special occasions in a version of this
hanbok costume. Girls were spared the cruel Chinese custom of foot-
binding, but opportunities for them to leave the home and encounter
the outside world were nonetheless few. Yangban women with occa-
sion to travel did so within a closely curtained box chair. Sangmin
wives who had to move around to follow their trade covered them-
selves with a changot, a long coat worn over the head that concealed
their features. For his everyday wear, a scholar put on loose trousers
tied at the ankles, a long collar-less white coat with wide sleeves, and
soft cloth boots; for formal duties and court appearances there was a
range of heavier, coloured gowns bearing symbols of rank. Korean
officials followed the Chinese practice of wearing ‘Mandarin squares’,
embroidered panels on the chest and back that indicated their status
in the civil or military hierarchy. What happened above the neck was
almost as important as what was worn below it. The capping of a
teenage boy as an adult was a vital rite of passage. After the ceremony
his hair remained uncut and piled up on his head in a topknot (sang-
tu), of which he was extremely proud. It was kept in place by a tight
headband of lacquered horsehair, surmounted by a tall hat of black-
lacquered horsehair or split bamboo (and eventually, or so he might
hope, an official’s winged cap).
For both women and men the style and decoration of headdress
constituted a social marker and there were numerous varieties, but for
ch’ŏnmin women in two ancient and largely hereditary professions dress
and headwear were particularly important. These were the kisaeng and
shamans, and they exercised a power far beyond their status. The
prime considerations for a kisaeng were sophistication and elegance.
She was a courtesan, trained to serve gentlemen at banquets and to
entertain them with the arts of conversation, poetry, music and dance,
and outdoors with horsemanship and archery skills. She might provide
sexual favours, but a kisaeng could not be hired like a prostitute. She

                   
became a highly valued personal companion, sometimes even a secondary
wife in a yangban household. Like her superiors she dressed well and
wore her long hair bound up in a complicated coiffeur.
The lowly status of the shaman was less ambiguous, yet she could
exploit her powers to just as good effect as the kisaeng. Strictly speak-
ing, the shaman should have been excluded from the Neo-Confucian
environment of the Chosŏn court, but queens and other palace women
made recurrent use of her, and her white cowl and rounded black felt
or tall red hat decorated with feathers were a familiar enough sight
within the palace walls. Like Buddhism, shamanism was patronized by
the upper classes and indispensable to the lower. The poor performed
their own worship of the household spirits, including those of the
kitchen, the privy, the roof and the courtyard, but they looked to the
shaman for assistance when their lives were plunged into crisis, as they
not infrequently were, by drought, disease and death. She lifted them,
too, out of their humdrum routine during the New Year and harvest
(ch’usŏk) celebrations, events in which the court and yangban joined
with equal enthusiasm. These and the whole raft of rituals connected
with folk religion around which much rural life revolved had changed
little since the Three Kingdoms period, and were an essential part of
the vibrant, colourful social tapestry. The pair of wooden posts (chang-
sŭng) that often stood on either side of the path at the entrance to a vil-
lage was symbolic of popular beliefs. Crudely carved and painted with
faces, they were its tutelary gods, one male, one female, companions in
a manner of speaking of the spirits who might inhabit an ancient tree,
a dangerous hillside pass or other sacred spots. Changsŭng can still
occasionally be seen, and a pair of Bronze Age standing stones found
at Hwangsŏngni suggests that their origins lie far back in time. The
most ubiquitous and prominent folk deity was the sansin (‘mountain
spirit’). Every mountain had one, who was prayed to by travellers,
women in childbirth, in fact anyone in need. He was often pictured as
a tiger or Daoist-style Immortal, and popular opinion sometimes asso-
ciated him loosely with the Tan’gun myth.
And if lives were lived in the shadow of shrines dedicated to
local gods, they were also in thrall to the lunar and solar calendars.
Observance of the New Year came to an end on taeborum-nal
(m/d). It was the end of a fortnight’s kite flying, and men – boys,
too – made a final show of outdoor energy by staging blazing torch
fights. Walking across a bridge on this night was said to give protection
against foot diseases in the coming year (though women had to wait
until the following night). Lanterns were strung up to celebrate Buddha’s
birthday on m/d. On tano (m/d), people would wash their hair,

  , ‒ 

put on summer clothes and follow a centuries-old tradition of giving
presents of fans in anticipation of the coming heat. (Earlier in the
dynasty large numbers of fans, no doubt beautifully crafted and hand-
painted, had been included in official gifts sent from the Korean court
to the Ryūkyū kingdom.) Men and boys had dangerous running stone
fights against those of neighbouring villages, supposedly to decide
which of them would enjoy the better harvest that year. (The Japanese
colonial government later put a stop to this custom.) On m/d books
and clothes were aired in the sun to counteract summer dampness,
while the double ninth (m/d) was the time to arrange outdoor par-
ties for old people in the pleasant autumn sun or to go viewing chrysan-
themums. Farming activities were planned according to climatic
expectations for  fortnightly periods (chŏlgi) through the year. So, the
fifteen days around  February were ipch’un (‘beginning of spring’);
those around  May were entitled soman (‘fattening grain’); on 
October hallo (‘cold dew’) could be expected; and doors should be
firmly fastened against a fortnight of taesŏl (‘great snow’) by 
December. On my first visit to South Korea in  I was told that I
couldn’t go swimming at the end of August because we were now past
ch’osŏ (‘the end of heat’). Since it had been a long hot summer and the
temperature outside was still over  º, I got an idea of how com-
partmentalized life must have been in traditional times.
Festivals were a chance for relaxation and entertainment.
Marketplaces resounded to laughter at the familiar butts of satirical
humour mocked in masked dance dramas; quieter audiences listened
attentively to a performance by the p’ansori singer. The origins of this
oral tradition, the nearest Korean equivalent to opera, are shrouded in
mystery, but written mention of it began to appear once members of
the literate classes showed an interest in it, perhaps under sirhak influ-
ence. One of the earliest references comes in a text by Yu Chinhan
(–), Kasa Ch’unhyangga ibaekku (‘The Song of Ch’unhyang’s
Two Hundred Words’, ). Titles of twelve p’ansori stories are
known, and of the five still extant and performed today Ch’unhyang
remains the most popular. The daughter of a kisaeng, Ch’unhyang
secretly marries the son of a nobleman before he is transferred to
Seoul. Despite all manner of improper propositions from the local
magistrate she remains faithful to her true love. He subsequently
returns as a government inspector, punishes the magistrate and rescues
his wife. Ch’unhyang’s honour and fidelity were, and still are, qualities
much admired in Confucian society. She is one of the nation’s greatest
lovers and its favourite fictional heroine. A shrine stands to her today in
Namwŏn, South Chŏlla, where she was supposedly born in , and

                   
the town holds a Ch’unhyang festival. The p’ansori singer, who may be
either male or female, uses a fan and a handkerchief as props and
employs a mixture of narrative and sung passages; the accompanist
plays either a puk or a changgo drum. For both of them a performance
is a considerable physical feat. The complete telling of a single story
might take as long as eight hours, though shortened versions are per-
missible for modern audiences. The sung parts are performed in an
unnaturally strong voice that requires years of arduous training. The
great female singer Kim Sohee (–) developed her technique
by practising for hours on end in front of a roaring waterfall. P’ansori
was on the kwangdae programme of popular entertainments, but as the
nineteenth century wore on it successfully crossed the class divide and
private performances were sponsored by yangban and rich merchant
families, until in the twentieth century it also took its place on the
indoor, Westernized stage.
Children, and adults too, would wander away from a seemingly
never-ending p’ansori performance in search of fun and games (nori).
Games, of course, are no respecters of local or national boundaries,
and Korean variants of worldwide favourites such as chess, backgam-
mon, dominoes and fives were played long before the early nineteenth
century. The popular East Asian board game of strategy known as go
in Japan is called paduk in Korea and was known in Silla times. The
game of pitch pot (t’uho), in which competitors aimed to throw arrows
or sticks into three bottles from an agreed distance, had been played
back in the Three Kingdoms period, and a set of equipment was
among the gifts sent to King Yejong by the Chinese court in . It
continued to be enjoyed both in and out of court, and was incorporat-
ed – in highly stylized fashion – into a court dance performed to the
present day. Both children and adults could play yut, a board game in
which the movement of the counters is determined according to how
four sticks or beans fall when thrown in the air. Children had fun spin-
ning tops and jumping on seesaws. For those who still needed to give
vent to their energy, tug-of-war contests (chultarigi), using enormously
thick ropes, were popular; strong men wrestled (Picture Essay ); and
for more personal excitement a session on a Korean swing (kunettwigi),
traditionally up to  metres high, should have been enough to satisfy
the most daring. Tests of strength such as these may have had ancient
military connections.
Playtime over, people would go home. China, Korea and Japan
have been called ‘three families under the same roof ’. Citizens of all
three would find plenty to object to in that description nowadays, but
as far as architecture was concerned it was certainly true that they all

  , ‒ 

 Kim Hongdo, Wrestling (ssirŭm)

Kim Hongdo, Wrestling, ink and light colours on paper,  × . cm;
Treasure no. .

This is one of a series of  delightful studies of ordinary men, women

and children at work and at play. We see them tiling a roof, drawing
water from a well, weaving, shoeing a horse, ploughing, threshing,
fishing, horse-riding, suckling a baby, making music and dancing, and
discussing a picture. We find them in a smithy, a village inn, on heavily
laden ferry boats, on country paths, at a village school, and taking an
archery lesson. We sense their concentration and evident satisfaction
(even devious enjoyment in the case of the gentleman spying from
behind his fan on four washerwomen working in a stream, their thin
under-trousers rolled up high above their knees). These little scenes


demonstrate Tanwŏn’s empathy for the strength of social gathering and
mutual assistance, his mastery of composition and his ability to suit style
to subject. He chooses brushwork of fine but firm outlines infilled with
thin ink wash, sometimes executed with precision but more often giving
the impression, like Western newspaper cartoons, of being dashed off.
The Ming artist Wu Wei (–) had used a similar technique for
his amusing Scenes in the Life of the People (British Museum), but there
is no evidence that Tanwŏn was aware of this work.
Wrestling was an ancient sport, one of a range of martial arts prac-
tised during the Chosŏn period. Comparison of Tanwŏn’s album leaf
with a Koguryŏ tomb mural at Kungnaesŏng, showing two men grap-
pling in combat, suggests that the objective and style of Korean
wrestling had changed little over the centuries. The contestants bal-
anced their weight on their forward leg, thrust their chin into their
opponent’s right shoulder, locked arms into his thigh strap and strove to
topple him into touching the ground. It was a slow business, encom-
passed by ritual and calculated to build up atmosphere. Disagreement
about the outcome of a bout was common. Tanwŏn’s picture is designed
like a wheel, the wrestlers at its hub, the excited spectators round the
rim. At the heart there is tension, on the periphery relaxation. The
wrestlers have taken off their shoes to give them more grip; some of the
spectators have taken off their hats to get more air, thereby revealing
their topknots. Cleverly, however, Tanwŏn desists from making the
wrestlers the only object of the viewer’s attention. Instead, he also draws
it to the rice-sweetmeat (yŏt) seller standing patiently on the edge of the
ring, ignored by the audience while the action goes on but confident of
more sales when it is over.


lived under similar roofs, of curved and decorated tiles mounted on
complicated wooden bracket support systems. Moreover, from the
Tang period onwards China influenced the style, layout and internal
decoration of Korean and Japanese buildings. The epitome of the
Korean craftsman’s admiration for the Chinese model was to be seen
in the palaces of Seoul and their furnishings. The early nineteenth-
century court used three of the four that survive today, Changdŏk,
Unhyŏng and Tŏksu, along with another, Kyŏnghŭi, which was demol-
ished by the Japanese in . (The palace most commonly associated
these days with the Chosŏn monarchy, Kyŏngbok, had been King
T’aejo’s residence and seat of government back in the fourteenth cen-
tury, but its post-Imjin rebuilding did not begin until .) What
modern tourists see as they wander round the sandy courtyards, stare
into the lofty audience halls, shadowy ceiling spaces and more intimate
residential apartments, and admire the stone platforms, great wooden
columns and intricately patterned windows, may bring back memories
of what they have already seen in Beijing. When, however, they admire
the sets of clay figurines (chapsang) lined up along the corner ridges of
the roofs, guarding the buildings against fire and evil spirits, and the
five-coloured paint system (tanch’ŏng) that protects and brightens so
much of the woodwork here and in other important buildings, they see
ancient crafts that Korean artisans had made their own. Xu Jing had
been impressed by tanch’ŏng in Kaesŏng back in the twelfth century.
Like the palaces, domestic houses were built on platforms raising
them above ground level. They were of timber-frame construction
with outer walls that often had to be buttressed with strong poles to
prevent collapse under the weight of heavy roofs, and non-load-bear-
ing walls infilled with wattle and plaster. Floors were either wooden,
which were cooler in summer, or of cement covered in tough waxed
paper, hiding the flues of the ondol heating system that Koreans had
enjoyed for more than , years. It gave them a warm surface on
which they sat, worked, ate and lay down to sleep between embroidered
quilts, as they still do in many a rural community. For the elite, living
conditions reflected a more genteel quality of life. They were the ones
whose houses boasted tiled roofs, sliding doors and lattice windows.
Male accommodation was generally on the south side of the com-
pound, kept separate from the women on the north by servants’ quar-
ters. Privacy was counted so essential that every family, rich or poor,
preferred to live behind a wall or fence, and later in the century the
American missionary Homer Hulbert said that large households had
so many compounds that they were ‘a veritable labyrinth of number-
less gates and alleys’. Today’s tourists can wander round a house inside

                   
the Changdŏk Palace in Seoul. It was built for King Sunjo in ,
when, sick and unhappy at widespread discontent among the sangmin,
he attempted to hand over the reins of government to his son, Prince
Ikchong. And in the folk village near Suwŏn they can look inside a
reconstructed Chosŏn scholar’s study typically furnished in Chinese
style. Maxims drawn from the Confucian Classics hang from the
walls, extolling virtues such as sincerity, loyalty, altruism and persist-
ence; screens keep draughts and casual observers at bay (Picture Essay
); books written in Chinese characters are laid on low tables; the writ-
ing desk stands ready with brush, inkstone, water dropper and a floral
arrangement. Koreans of all classes loved flowers. Not only did they
provide colour and scent and attract butterflies and insects to the gar-
den, but they were symbols, too, of hope and virtue, the peony repre-
senting prosperity, the chrysanthemum dignity, the orchid frugality,
and so on. And while the plants and trees growing in the thinking
man’s garden stimulated his mind, vegetables grew in the kitchen gar-
den to satisfy his palate. Strict Neo-Confucian households ate in
silence, the men in their rooms, the women in theirs. Meals usually
consisted of a large bowl of rice, with numerous side dishes of meat,
fish and vegetables, and a bowl of soup. A varied diet was eaten, and by
the mid-nineteenth century potatoes, sweet potatoes, chilli peppers
and tomatoes had been introduced from abroad.
Royalty and the aristocracy liked fine porcelain on their tables and
their writing desks. Early in the Chosŏn dynasty even Chinese emperors
had collected the beautiful pure white vessels that came from the kilns at
Kwangju, outside Seoul, and for Korean yangban white symbolized their
pride in the dynasty they served and the Neo-Confucian philosophy that
underpinned it. (Green, the colour of celadon, had been associated with
Buddhism and the unlamented Koryŏ era.) As the centuries passed the
taste for monochromes persisted and shades of whiteness varied, but no
attempt was made to match the spectacular colours of China’s mid-Qing
monochromes. The Korean upper classes preferred simplicity. When
decoration was applied, subjects were drawn from nature and the human
world and might be painted on with underglaze cobalt or iron oxide, pro-
ducing blue and red designs against a white background. The use of
inlay continued. But the emphasis was on restraint and balance rather
than the complex polychrome patterns being turned out by so many
Chinese and Japanese kilns. Where tableware was concerned, common-
ers, too, liked muted tones. Vessels were made of coarser clay; patterns
were all-over and made by stamping rather than the slow and laborious
craft of inlaying; and an overall white slip was incised. This kind of pot-
tery, known as punch’ŏng, had a rustic aesthetic of its own, one that

  , ‒ 

 An eight-panel screen
Literary and artistic appreciation were hallmarks of the scholar, and
respect for Chinese form and style influenced the standards and content
of much of his own output. But when it came to painting the screens
that furnished homes across the land – both upper and lower class –
literati and folk artists alike drew on themes from Korean minhwa (folk
art) as well as Chinese tradition. Among these were historical events
(Yi Sunsin’s naval victories being especially popular), hunting scenes,
paekchado (‘hundred-boys pictures’) and longevity symbols. One of the
most distinctive of these cultural bridges across the class barrier was
that known as ch’aekkori (‘books, etc.’). In Neo-Confucian vein, it
depicted the books and furniture in a scholar’s study, together with his
writing implements and indications of his cultured interests, such as
musical instruments, pieces of porcelain and selected antiques. His hat
and his pipe might also put in an appearance, and gradually the range of
items widened to include other domestic items. Dishes of fruit and veg-
etables, vases of flowers, goldfish bowls and incense burners, for exam-
ple, provided opportunities to incorporate ever-popular symbolic mean-
ings. Allusion and decorativeness actually took precedence over realism
in this form of art, for one of its intriguing, perhaps even charming,
characteristics is its skewed sense of perspective and proportion. This,
it has been suggested, may have stemmed from Chinese artists’ first
attempts to copy Western ideas of perspective introduced by Jesuit
painters to the Qing court in the eighteenth century. Ch’aekkori was one
of King Chŏngjo’s favourite types of painting.

An eight-panel screen with ch’aekkori decoration, th century, ink and colours
on paper,  ×  cm.


Japanese and Westerners such as Yanagi Soetsu and Bernard Leach
found attractive in the twentieth century and that enables it still to com-
mand high prices in international auction houses.
Commoners frequently had to put up with conditions that were, by
comparison with yangban homes, uncomfortable, cramped, dirty and
unhealthy. Under the thatched roofs of sangmin houses – breeding
grounds for lice – were perhaps only one or two rooms, standing on
floors of earth and stone. The American Horace Allen described them
as little better than ‘a collection of haystacks that have wintered out’.
His compatriot Lillias Underwood complained that ‘houses [were]
fearfully unsanitary, and many of them filthy and full of vermin. All
sewage flows out into unspeakable ditches on either side of the street.’
(None of which, of course, means that the slums of Seoul in the early
nineteenth century were any worse than those of Philadelphia or Paris,
or that the smoke-laden atmosphere resulting from countless wood-
burning stoves was necessarily dirtier than that polluted by the coal
fires and furnaces of Manchester or Moscow. As Mrs Underwood
pointed out later in the century, ‘Compared with the most destitute of
London or New York, there are few who go hungry in Seoul.’) Squalor
bred disease. Across East Asia much research had traditionally gone
into medicine. Herbalism and acupuncture could cope with a great
deal, and insam (ginseng) was taken to increase resistance, but when
epidemics of measles, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid and
cholera (a newcomer in  that caused consternation and immense
loss of life) periodically swept the land, people of all classes died. Both
poverty and disease were to blame as census figures showed the popu-
lation falling from . million in  to . million in .
Paintings brightened a place up, and folk artists copied the subjects
admired by the gentry. They used the same symbols and conveyed the
same messages: the Diamond Mountains as a haven of peace and beau-
ty, the lotus as a metaphor for purity, mandarin ducks as a celebration of
wedded bliss, carp on the bedroom wall as a fertility charm, the pine tree
as a reminder of respect due to the elderly. But in folk art cheerfulness
mattered more than exactitude, and panache was prized above refine-
ment and brightness over subtlety. Portraits too: sometimes even com-
moners liked to keep pictures of their immediate ancestors, carrying
them when they fled home in time of war. Because much Chosŏn paint-
ing is unsigned, the dividing line between literati and folk art is some-
times blurred, and the great treasurer of rural life and customs Zo Za-
yong (–) preferred to divide painting into ‘pure’ and ‘utilitari-
an’. So, series of linked pictures such as p’yŏngsaeng-do that adorned
screens and kept out draughts were utilitarian, whether painted for a

  , ‒ 

palace or a cottage. Even some paintings from the Tohwa-sŏ earned this
description, instead of the usual and flattering ‘literati art’.
Like painting, music and dance also crossed the social divide. A
song composed in  refers to the rich variety of instrumental and
vocal forms that entertained people in the capital. ‘When the opening
music is over’, it says, ‘a young kisaeng with beautiful eyebrows, cor-
recting her hairpin, is ready to sing traditional songs.’ She performs a
long programme including the difficult lyric songs kagok, kasa and sijo,
‘all good to hear’, and when she has finished, other kisaeng introduce a
sequence of slow and fast dances. It is a courtly scene, but there is every
reason to assume that those who heard and enjoyed it would have been
just as familiar with tunes played and sung outside the palace walls. A
wealth of folk songs (minyo) – some local, others putting a local inter-
pretation on tunes that somehow crossed regional boundaries of river
and mountain – lightened the peasant’s work load and accompanied his
relaxation, and could be spotted hidden away in the shaman’s chanting.
By the early nineteenth century they had been incorporated into the
sung tales of p’ansori and the free-wheeling form of instrumental
ensemble, sinawi, and before long would appear again in the solo
instrumental suite sanjo, a complicated sonata-like form that gave the
kayagŭm performer ample chance to show off his virtuoso skills. Court
music was an extension of the power of government, so its melodic
lines had to be followed exactly. In contrast, sinawi, p’ansori and sanjo
encouraged the display of individual improvisational techniques, and
yangban with sirhak-inspired pride in their native culture took to them,
either playing themselves or sponsoring performances.

  

In  Chŏng Yagyong (brush-name Tasan) might have felt relieved.
As a young man he had shown interest in the Catholic faith and per-
haps even received baptism, but as Chŏngjo’s favourite he had recant-
ed, and now, when others died in the persecutions, his sentence was
only to seventeen years in exile. His eldest brother, Yakchŏn, was also
banished, to the island of Hŭksan off the north-east coast. But
Yakchong, the middle one of the three, refused to apostatize and was
executed, as his two nephews would be in , and Tasan’s personal
relief was compromised by a lasting sense of shame and guilt. To a
yangban, moreover, concerned about public opinion and the effect of
disgrace on his family and his descendants, exile was not seen as a soft
touch. At its lightest it might mean exclusion from his native town or
the capital; in serious cases a miscreant was sent to a remote area or

                   
confined on a distant island such as Cheju, where as a last resort he
could be condemned to live imprisoned behind a thorn hedge. Some
exiles famously made the best of a bad job: Tasan accumulated a large
library and wrote copiously on the Chinese classics. In the productive
writing period of his later years he combined sirhak conviction with the
critical qualities he had absorbed from Chinese historical scholarship,
and his chip (‘collectaneous works’) cover such diverse topics as princi-
ples of government, civil engineering, farming techniques, horticul-
ture, sericulture, medicine and proverbs. He refers to his early Catholic
beliefs, but is tantalizingly vague about whether or not he returned to
the fold before his death, as Bishop Dallet claims in his Histoire de
l’église de Corée (). And while this prolific writer served out his
punishment in the obscure south-western district of Kangjin (where a
bronze statue to him now stands), brother Yakchŏn was compiling an
extensive scientific study of marine life on Hŭksan.
Another famous exile was the great artist, calligrapher and sirhak
historian Kim Chŏnghŭi (Ch’usa, –) (Picture Essay ).
Kim’s exceptional artistic talent was spotted as a boy by the Pukhak
official and calligrapher Pak Chega, who took him as a student. A visit
to Beijing in  introduced him to the self-expression of literati art,
the pleasures of epigraphy and the rigour of careful historical
research, giving him the experience and intellectual independence
that would make him a leading figure among fellow Pukhak artists on
his return. Although not renouncing Neo-Confucianism, he was crit-
ical of its narrow and introspective aspects, and found deep satisfac-
tion in Sŏn Buddhism. Working with contemporary calligraphers in
China also made him dissatisfied with his former brushwork, and
after intensive study of earlier Chinese masters he evolved a unique
style that has earned him the epithet ‘Korea’s most eminent calligra-
pher’. It is bold, unorthodox and intensely expressionistic, perfectly
complementing the quasi-naive simplicity of some of his painting. So
much did contemporaries appreciate the realism of his landscape and
Four Gentlemen (prunus, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum) paint-
ings that he has been blamed for a decline in genre painting. The pic-
ture for which he is best known today is of a single orchid bloom with
a few bent and broken leaves, a mixture of dark and light strokes
applied with a dry brush, surrounded by colophons in matching cal-
ligraphic style. Neither Ch’usa’s connection by marriage with the
royal family nor a distinguished government career was enough to
save him when his family sided with the P’ungyang Chos in their bit-
ter rivalry with the Andong Kims. He was banished to Cheju island.
Nearing the age of  he might justifiably have given way to depres-

  , ‒ 

 Yi Hanch’ŏl, Portrait of Kim Chŏnghŭi
Figure painting occurred less frequently in Korea than in China. Genre
scenes enlivened the walls of Koguryŏ tombs, but we do not encounter
them again until the nectar ritual paintings of the eighteenth century.
(Mural decorations in a Parhae tomb, however – that of Princess
Chŏnghyo, the daughter of King Mun [r.  –] – do depict por-
traits of her retainers in contemporary Tang style.) Buddhist figures
shine forth from illuminated manuscripts and hanging scrolls of the
Koryŏ period, and no doubt adorned temple walls and altars as well, but
by their very nature these were inclined to didacticism and stylization
rather than realism. Portraits of Buddhist monks were also respected. It
was against such a patchy background that the painting of human
beings, either as individuals or in social situations, at last gained a
measure of popularity during the Chosŏn period. Then, it was Neo-
Confucianism that provided the spur, and in formal portraiture we see
it reach its artistic apogee. King T’aejo made quite a habit of having
himself painted. King Yŏngjo, too, had his picture redone every ten
years. Early in the dynasty some officials revived the ancient Koguryŏ
practice of being painted with their wives, but this fashion died out
again, and thereafter the subjects were mostly individual royal and yang-
ban males. Monks now made unfashionable – though not altogether
unknown – subjects, and the question of painting non-royal women
scarcely arose.
Albums recording meetings of the Kirosŏ and Kiyonghoe might
depict the distinguished members honoured there, and portraits of
ancestors gazed down on their descendants as they carried out their
devotional rites. Such serious matters were normally translated into a
sombre, though not necessarily stern, expression. Unlike Chinese sub-
jects, who always looked straight ahead, most Korean sitters turned
their heads slightly to the right, revealing one ear instead of two. (In
contrast, the famous modern portraitist Chae Yŏng-shin [–]
almost always had his subjects adopt a full-frontal pose.) Formality of
approach and style did not mean standardization and impersonality,
especially when shading techniques developed in the eighteenth centu-
ry and introduced more three-dimensional effects. Artists attempted to
convey both appearance and character with accuracy, and devoted most
attention to the face. Bone structure and skin texture were carefully
observed. Hands were generally concealed, but the hairs of a man’s
beard, the warts on his face, the weave of his hat and the embroidery of
his official square of rank were picked out with precision. Several por-
traits of Kim Ch’ŏnghŭi survive. In this one his beard has already
turned white; another, remarkably similar, by Hŏ Yu shows him with


Yi Hanch’ŏl,
Portrait of Kim Chŏnghŭi,
th century.

bushier eyebrows and heavier cheeks. Both depict him as a considerate,

patient and even-tempered man, giving no hint of the trials of his later
years. Yi Hanch’ŏl was a professional painter, a member of the Tohwa-
sŏ, who painted the last kings of the Chŏson dynasty. Born in either
 or , he enjoyed a long life and died some time in the first
decade of the twentieth century.
Self-portraiture was uncommon before the twentieth century. The
poet-calligrapher Kim Sisŭp (–) did one; so did Yun Dusŏ
(–), who played no small part in the eighteenth-century move
to depict character; and a third was the ‘true-view’ artist Kang Sehwang.
But when Ko Hŭidong (–) studied in Japan and painted the
first portrait in oils – his own – he was severely criticized for rejecting
Neo-Confucian ideas of what portraiture should be.


sion at being imprisoned in a single room ‘no bigger than a rice meas-
uring bowl’, damaging his health. Instead, he found plenty to keep
himself busy and happy, reading, painting, answering correspondence
and teaching local children. Only in the bare trees of Winter Scene,
painted after the death of his wife, do we sense the grief afflicting
his soul. Even when King Hŏnjong pardoned him and he prepared
to return to Seoul after nine years away, his ordeal was still not over.
Hŏnjong’s unexpected death gave the Andong Kims the chance to
regain some of the power they had seen ebbing away, and they
accused Ch’usa of engineering opposition to the choice of Ch’ŏlchong
as his successor. He was exiled again, this time to the chilly north-
western province of Hamgyŏng, where he served another year before
finally being released. Stories like these, of the Chŏng brothers and of
Kim Chŏnghŭi, demonstrate the fate of sirhak modernization in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas individuals or groups of
like-minded scholars had for centuries published detailed and often
critical research studies, those who now saw the value to their coun-
try of broadening their terms of reference and pursuing more inno-
vative lines of enquiry came up against entrenched Neo-Confucian
suspicion of anything that threatened to re-shape the traditional
social order. There was as yet no concept of national development
that separated economic and social progress from either ancient polit-
ical philosophy or vested clan interest.
Arguments about the succession to the throne had caused trouble
throughout the Chosŏn dynasty, but if Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo had over-
come the worst manifestations of factional division, the pernicious
influence of clan rivalry at court had not been destroyed. Ancestry and
descent had been important in the acquisition of political power ever
since the Three Kingdoms period. The Koryŏ nobility perpetuated
itself through both patrilineal and matrilineal descent groups, and
inheritance might even skip a generation, but Chosŏn rules were
stricter. The state orthodoxy of Neo-Confucianism required the nobil-
ity to practise ancestor worship by laws and much high-level discussion
took place about the related principles of succession and inheritance. A
son was essential for continuation of the rituals honouring the ances-
tors, and if none was forthcoming adoption was resorted to. In a coun-
try where history and record-keeping had so long been respected, the
compilation of genealogies must have begun at an early stage. By the
fifteenth century they were appearing in print, and by the seventeenth
factionalism had highlighted their value. As yangban families exploited
them to the full, political supremacy became inseparable from lineage
considerations and machinations. Much of the tension at court stemmed

                   
from the ambitions of families that provided the king’s female consorts
and that expected to benefit as a result. Sedo-jŏngch’i (‘government by
the way of power’), implying the emasculation of royal authority by
a king’s affined families, was first linked with the name of Hong
Kugyŏng, a relative of Lady Hyegyŏng and tutor to the young
Chŏngjo. But with Chŏngjo’s death the Hongs were finished and the
P’ungyang Chos, Dogmatists, managed to reassert a hard political line.
The three kings of the period – were all nominated by dowager
queens, who according to an ancient privilege known as suryŏm
ch’ŏngjŏng (‘lowering curtain, hearing government’) were allowed to
exercise regency on behalf of a minor by listening to state business
from behind a screen. They used the privilege to advance the power
of their own clans. Sunjo was only ten in , when he was chosen
by Yŏngjo’s widow, Dowager Queen Chŏngsun. As a supporter of the
Dogmatists, she now enabled them to mount the comprehensive anti-
Catholic persecution they had striven for under Chŏngjo’s more benign
rule. But she died in , and it was Sunjo’s widow, Dowager Queen
Sunwŏn, who nominated both Hŏnjong and Ch’ŏlchong, the former at
the age of seven and the latter at eighteen. Sunwŏn came from the
Andong Kims, a traditionally powerful lineage that under Ch’ŏlchong
wrested authority back from the Chos.
Of course, lineage and family meant more than gaining political
advantage, settling an inheritance or even honouring ancestors. Filial
piety was concerned with serving the living as well as the dead, and sons
and daughters-in-law were legally obliged to pander to the wishes of
their older relatives. In return, grandfathers and fathers often had
strings that they could pull on behalf of their offspring. In East Asia a
feeling of shared responsibility has long been acknowledged, especially
for the elderly within a family and for poorer or stricken families with-
in a wider lineage, occupational or residential grouping. In traditional
China government took advantage of this by organizing families into
groups of ten for purposes of control and tax collection, and in mod-
ern China the Communist Party manipulated the tight-knit groups
in cooperatives and communes throughout the s to have people
spy on and denounce their neighbours. In Korea, Cho Kwangjo
(–), a staunch but somewhat idealistic scholar, introduced
village charters (hyangyak) to try and instil Neo-Confucian principles
into the pattern of peasants’ lives, nominating an ideologue and other
prominent members of the community to work alongside the local
magistrate in encouraging a sense of corporate responsibility and,
rather heavy-handedly, relaying politically approved instructions.
But a more spontaneous type of voluntary mutual-aid organization for

  , ‒ 

peasants or members of occupational groups appeared in the early six-
teenth century. This was known as kye. Members contributed to a com-
munal fund, saving for an agreed purpose such as the purchase of an
animal or piece of equipment, or borrowing from it at a known rate. On
occasion a disgruntled yangban might try and whip up political feeling
within a kye: the Tongin politician Chŏng Yŏrip (d. ), for example,
incited opposition to the Sŏin among kye in Chŏlla, and committed
suicide when his plot was discovered. In modern times, after war had
devastated agriculture in the , Kim Il Sung introduced mutual-aid
teams. Sogyŏri (‘cow exchange’) teams of three to five families shared
one animal and their labour, and labour teams (p’umasi) of up to ten
families marched off to work together. After a disastrous harvest in
 the drive towards advanced cooperatives was stepped up, until
by  the entire countryside, over a million households, had been
‘socialized’. The interest of the group, as defined by the prevailing
orthodoxy of the ruling Communist Party, was paramount and tri-
umphed over the freedom of the individual.
In December  Hong Kyŏngnae took advantage of kye co-
operatives in gathering support for the first peasant uprising of the new
century, the rebellion he launched in North P’yŏngan province. The
causes of discontent were various and familiar: poor local government,
onerous taxation, natural disasters, resentment against the politics of
the Andong Kims. To these we must add Hong’s personal unhappiness
as a minor yangban figure unable to gain the official status he thought
he deserved. Modern historians have devoted a lot of attention to this
rising, some recognizing frustration at the non-realization of hopes
raised by Chŏngjo’s plans for social and economic reform, and some
seeing it as the anticipation of late twentieth-century minjung (populist)
ambitions. Whether or not it is really accurate to call the rising a
peasant movement has been questioned, given the involvement of
yangban, rich farmers, merchants, even discontented military units.
Anders Karlsson sees it principally as a conflict between local society
and central power, with the rebel leadership taking advantage of the
mutual assistance and fund-raising functions of kye groups and the
organizational skills of the more formal association, the hyangyak.
Both, in his view, were capable of drawing together people of different
social standing. One of those who joined the protest was a local admin-
istrator, Kim Iksun, but his capture and execution ruined his family,
and his grandson Pyŏngnyŏn, now deprived of his inheritance, turned
itinerant poet. In time he became known as ‘Reed-hat Kim’ – Kim
Sakkat (–) – after the mourner’s hat (satkat) he took to wearing.
Verse is the form of literature primarily associated with the early nine-

                   
teenth century, especially the tightly regulated Chinese styles favoured
by the literati. Kim Sakkat’s poems, first collected and written down in
the s, were quite different. They shared the terseness, satire and
love of nature of the sijo, but in character they were quite different,
conveying folksy and often earthy material. He summed up his life of
suffering with these lines:

As my hair grew longer,

My fortunes travelled a rough road:
The family line in ruins,
The blue sea a mulberry grove.

The rebels briefly controlled a wide area north of the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn

river and held out against government counter-attack in the Chŏngju
fortress, but Hong Kyŏngnae was killed and the rising collapsed after
just four months. To say that it lit a fuse that would eventually culmi-
nate in the great Tonghak Rebellion of – might imply a causal
relationship involving the many other local risings that took place
throughout the century and even a defined nation-wide objective.
Neither was true, though outbreaks of violence continued through the
reigns of Hŏnjong and Ch’ŏlchong. Most serious were those in ,
when the three southern provinces (samnam) of Ch’unch’ŏng, Chŏlla
and Kyŏngsang, including Cheju island, all resounded to the sound of
battle against the land tax, the cloth tax and the rice-loan system
(hwan’gok). At the end of them, in , a fuse of a kind was lit, by the
execution of Ch’oe Cheu (–). Ch’oe, like Hong Xiuquan, the
leader of the great Taiping Rebellion that swept China from  to
, felt that social discrimination denied him the kind of job he
deserved, and had a vision encouraging him to begin a new religious
movement. Named Tonghak (‘Eastern Teaching’) and preaching Ch’oe’s
idea of Ch’ŏndo (‘Heaven’s Way’) it was an amalgam of Confucian,
Buddhist, shamanistic and – ironically, considering its anti-Western
leaning – Catholic ideas. It also denounced bureaucratic corruption
and spoke up for the impoverished and oppressed peasantry, and what
really tipped the scales against Ch’oe was his prediction that 
would bring it some new but unspecified success. The authorities, well
aware of the devastation brought to China by the Taipings, tried to pre-
empt anything of the sort in Korea by arresting him. And they seemed
to have succeeded, as Tonghak support faded away. But just as Hong
Xiuquan’s rebellion resulted in Western soldiery arriving to prop up
the government, so too would Ch’oe’s teachings reap a similar and
devastating harvest in the last decade of the century. The year , in

  , ‒ 

fact, was loaded with foreboding for Korea. It may have seemed to the
rulers of the ‘Hermit Kingdom’, as foreigners later began to call it, that
their efforts to outstare the novel ideas of the Realists and Catholics
were working, and that traditional beliefs, practices and standards were
safe. But Ch’oe Cheu’s death was not the only one that year that would
have unforeseeable results. On  January, King Ch’ŏlch’ŏng also went
to join his ancestors.

                   
  

Incursion, Modernization
and Reform, ‒:
Tradition at Bay
The first half of the nineteenth century had brought Korea a few
alarms, but nothing to shake its underlying confidence in the ideas
and lifestyle described in previous chapters. The  years covered
in this chapter, however – corresponding roughly to the reign of
just one king – comprised a period as confusing as it was unprece-
dented, as determinative as it was alarming. Suddenly, as the
distant world – dismissed and despised as barbarian – embroiled
eastern Asia in a bitter struggle for empire, Koreans found that
earlier assumptions and debate about matter and principle, the
nature of kingly rule, even the hierarchy of states, took on a dif-
ferent twist or were rendered outmoded; and social habits that had
contented the ancestors for centuries were called into question.
Ch’ŏlchong’s death was a turning point.

  

Women helped to shape the political fortunes of three countries
engaged in the East–West confrontation at the end of the nineteenth
century, which, given the patriarchal nature of British, Chinese and
Korean society, made their simultaneous appearance on the political
stage a curious irony. If Queen Victoria (‒) alone occupied a
throne as of right, China’s Empress Dowager Ci Xi (–) and
Korea’s Queen Min (–) shared no less responsibility than she
in the moves and counter-moves to create a new world order. While
Victoria’s appreciation of Korea and its civilization may have been lim-
ited, Queen Min was said to be ‘possessed of a very intelligent idea of
the great nations of the world and their governments’, and had a fair
idea of what the nations ruled by her fellow matriarchs could do to or
for her own. This was another, more particular, irony, for political con-
sciousness, still less participation, was no part of the future that had
been planned for her.


 When King Ch’ŏlchong died early, only one of his eleven children
was still living and she was a girl. The designation of his heir lay in the
hands of another woman, King Hŏnjong’s mother, the Dowager Queen
Cho, and Prince Yi Haŭng (–), a great-grandson of Prince
Sado, persuaded her to nominate his son. In , therefore, the eleven-
year-old became the new King Kojong, and effective power of regency
fell to his father, better known today by his princely title, the
Taewŏn’gun. Two years later he married Kojong to a niece of his wife,
a teenage girl from the Yŏhŭng Min clan with no sign of political
awareness or personal ambition. He counted on maintaining his personal
power for a long time to come, and in fact did so for almost a decade. By
the end of this time he had made rivals – outright enemies even – of both
his son and his daughter-in-law, Queen Min, and Korean politics and
the nation’s fortunes had entered a turbulent period.
The Taewŏn’gun cannot be faulted for his determination to clear
up the political mess that had long stifled efficient government and
reduced the country to poverty. As to how to achieve this, well, he was
scarcely a radical, or even a sirhak sympathizer, and his later reputation
as one of the dynasty’s greatest orchid painters suggests a solid appre-
ciation for tradition. If anything he was ultra-conservative, trying to
give the throne his son would inherit more authority than it had ever
had in Korea. But neither were the measures he introduced as reac-
tionary as the manner in which he had assumed power. He balanced
and neutralized the influence of the Andong Kim and P’ungyang Cho
clans by appointing men of genuine ability to top government posts,
though the sedo acquired by the Yŏhŭng Min by marrying into the royal
family would feature prominently in politics for the rest of the centu-
ry: the head of that clan, Min Sŭngho, quickly managed to get posts for
a considerable number of its members. The Taewŏn’gun sacked cor-
rupt officials and punished extortionate landlords. He replaced the mil-
itary cloth tax with a household tax, and imposed it on the yangban as
well as other classes. He closed down most of the sŏwŏn private acade-
mies, confiscated their lands and some of those belonging to royal
affine families, and tightened up on the tax liability of what land
remained in private hands. By restoring supreme civilian authority to
the State Council (Ŭijŏngbu), shutting down the Frontier Defence
Office (Pibyŏn-sa) – the sixteenth-century military command bureau
that had grown into the most important government organ – and re-
creating the old Three Armies Office (Samgunbu) to run all military
affairs, he separated civilian and military command in the biggest
shake-up the military system had undergone since the sixteenth century.
Such was his strength of character that he was ready to take on the

                   
most powerful vested-interest groups, thereby earning himself consid-
erable popularity across the country at large.
It all sounds reasonable and effective, but the Taewŏn’gun’s retire-
ment at the end of  represented a victory for his enemies. A junior
minister, Ch’oe Ikhyŏn, had impeached him on behalf of those who
had lost out as a result of his new measures. Somewhat disingenuously,
the critics cited as unfair the sale of government offices, the setting of
new taxes on salt, fishing and the movement of goods, and the minting
of devalued coinage. For much of the growing financial hardship they
blamed one undertaking, the reconstruction of the Kyŏngbŏk Palace.
This was the Taewŏn’gun’s pet project and it was, it is true, ruinously
expensive. But King T’aejo had built ‘Shining Blessings’ as his resi-
dence and the first seat of Chosŏn government in the s and to the
Taewŏn’gun, if not to every taxpayer, the restoration of this languish-
ing symbol of early dynastic grandeur was worthy of sacrifice. (President
Kim Young Sam felt the same when he too announced a grand restora-
tion of the palace in , some ninety years after the Japanese had
once again ruined most of its splendid halls, pavilions and gates.)
Perhaps the Taewŏn’gun would have got away with it had not his cred-
ibility been damaged by his apparent inability to deal with the foreign
threat, a fateful story told in the next section. As it was, Queen Min –
already showing that she was no pushover – pressurized the State
Council to put the -year-old king in charge. The Taewŏn’gun with-
drew in dudgeon to his country estate and his supporters lost their jobs,
but, in the manner of tit-for-tat revenge with which we are familiar
today, a parcel bomb sent to Min Sŭngho’s home killed him and his
son. The Taewŏn’gun was assumed to be behind the outrage.
King Kojong, it turned out, lacked the acumen and forcefulness to
handle the conflicting forces within his own political establishment, let
alone those of rivalrous foreign powers. In particular, arguments about
the need for modernization eddied around him and he was washed back
and forth, not averse to change but incapable of understanding or
managing its implications. During the s he gradually fell under
the spell of a group of scholar-officials, including Kim Okkyun
(–), Pak Yŏnghyo (–) and Sŏ Chaep’il (–),
who formed the Kaehwadang (‘Progressive Party’). Looked at in retro-
spect the innovations they managed to implement were modest: they
included the setting up of a government Information Office, the open-
ing of a Post Office and the creation of a modern army unit (quickly
rescinded by the Min clan). Where should a Korean government bent
on modernization – even though this one fell far short of such a
description – look for guidance? America’s long-term intentions were

         ,                      
as yet unknown but might provide examples that Korea could turn to
advantage. America’s recent converts in Meiji Japan were viewed with
greater suspicion, although the Kaehwadang saw Japan as a possible
model for gradual reform in Korea and sent students to study there.
Queen Min, meanwhile, took her chances to influence policy, and sided
with the conservative Sadaedang (‘Serve the Great Party’), rivals of the
Kaehwadang. Although not hostile to all thought of reform, when it
came to international allegiance they supported the Chinese stance
rather than the Japanese. Sino-Japanese rivalry was laid bare in July
, the Imo year, when army units in Seoul mutinied over lack of
pay. With Japanese support the Taewŏn’gun took advantage of the
turmoil to stage a coup against his daughter-in-law. Many of her sup-
porters in the palace were killed and she herself escaped from Seoul in
disguise. Kojong asked his father to take charge, but the Chinese
government also moved fast. Stung by the inroads of Western imperi-
alism into the Middle Kingdom, it now embarked on a face-saving
attempt to rescue a little traditional influence of its own by reasserting
its supposed droits de seigneur in Korea. Three thousand of its soldiers
arrived. The Taewŏn’gun was taken prisoner and hauled off to China.
Queen Min returned to the palace, and in September Kojong, with a
public apology for the upheaval, promised the country a fresh start.
But the cycle of tumult and counter-attack was far from over. On
 December  (the Kapsin year), Hong Yŏngsik, director of the new
Post Office, was hosting a dinner to celebrate its opening. As the distin-
guished guests were enjoying their meal a fire broke out, and amid the
confusion men rushed in with swords, killed Hong and badly injured
Min Yŏngik (–), the head of the Min clan and the queen’s
nephew. He escaped, but uproar engulfed the capital. King Kojong
found himself in the Japanese legation, which had advance warning
of the plot and approved the move against the pro-Chinese leader-
ship. Some say he fled there, others that Japanese guards took him
there. Whichever, it was the very next day he announced a new, reform-
orientated government. Straight away Chinese troops intervened to
ensure that it was virtually still-born. As they returned Kojong to his
palace, where their own commander Yuan Shikai and the Min clan
could keep an eye on him, Kim Okkyun, Sŏ Chaep’il and other leaders
of the Kapsin plot fled to Japan. Korean optimism rose in April 
as Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi signed a treaty in Tianjin pledging
to remove their armies from the peninsula except in the event of trou-
ble. Nine years later, that reservation would prove to be crucial. For the
time being it was agreed that the Taewŏn’gun should be returned to
Korea, where both sides hoped he would persuade Kojong and Queen

                   
Min to stop the growth of Russian influence. The ex-regent, once so
dedicated to Korean isolationism, then linked with pro-Japanese
atrocity in the sorry story of the Imo Incident, returned from exile
something of a convert to the Beijing cause (even to its clothing as well:
he is credited with introducing Korean men to the Manchu style of
loose-fitting, collarless jacket, magoja, that became a popular form of
casual wear); and as Kojong now deferred to his father, the Qing court
could feel fairly reassured that the correct diplomatic hierarchy was
being restored across East Asia. True, its plan that Yuan Shikai, boast-
ing the new title Resident General it awarded him, should depose
Kojong and put the Taewŏn’gun on the throne came to naught, but
China’s influence in Seoul was nevertheless paramount. The  chargé
d’affaires George Foulk called Yuan ‘the most important man in
Korea’. Just how powerful, in fact, he was quickly to discover: Yuan
had him recalled to America after less than three years in Seoul for
urging the government to buy -built steamers. The Korean capital
was turning into a nest of international suspicion, accusation, intrigue
and rivalry. Their fortune-tellers could have told its leaders they were
heading for two major wars, neither of their own making.
Suspicion of Western religion had been a factor in the appearance
of Ch’oe Cheu’s Tonghak movement in the early s. The age-old
theme of reaction to peasant hardship joined with new, but still limit-
ed, expressions of anti-foreignism, and also drew on a rising nativist
belief in a single supreme deity, Hanŭnim, as a counter to the Christian
God. Ch’oe’s execution in  failed to eradicate the organization,
which expanded under his successor Ch’oe Sihyŏng (–), and
when over-taxation and oppressive local officialdom combined to exac-
erbate intolerable rural conditions in the Chŏlla and Ch’ungch’ŏng
provinces, dissidents took up arms on  March . A nationalist
element among them, fearful of what modernization would mean to
traditional livelihoods, targeted the Japanese, whose growing commu-
nities of merchants, craftsmen and fishermen provided unequal and
often underhand competition. Government forces failed to suppress
the rebels, and when Chŏnju fell on  May, Seoul called a truce and
appealed to Beijing for assistance. Li Hongzhang, following advice
from Yuan Shikai, dispatched , Chinese troops, and in accordance
with the Tianjin Treaty informed Tokyo that he was doing so ‘to
restore peace to our tributary state’. It is also possible that he had suc-
cumbed to Japanese persuasion, perhaps even fallen into a trap, for Itō
Hirobumi’s government now lost no time in ordering , of its own
soldiers to Korea. In fact, any intervention proved to be uncalled for.
The Tonghak rebels quickly dispersed, issuing a list of demands that

         ,                      
included the abolition of slavery, punishment of corrupt officials and
appointment of future officials on merit. Hilary Conroy calls theirs ‘a
rising against the government for reactionary rather than progressive
reasons’. Their aspirations were, it is true, utopian rather than mod-
ernizing, as peasant rebellions generally were, and Kojong and his gov-
ernment probably anticipated the restoration of the status quo with
some satisfaction. They could scarcely have been more mistaken.
The Japanese minister Ōtori Keisuke and Yuan Shikai agreed to
withdraw their troops, but suspicions were aroused as more and more
Japanese poured ashore at Chemulp’o. On  March  Japan had
been shocked by the assassination of Kim Okkyun by two of his com-
patriots. He had lived there for ten years after the Kapsin debacle and
the Japanese press proclaimed him a martyr to the cause of moderniza-
tion. Sensing a chance to get its feet under the mainland table, Tokyo
took up the Korean reformist cause with a vengeance. On  June the
cabinet approved its own list of proposals that would begin the process
of transforming the Seoul government, updating its financial, military,
law-enforcement and educational systems, and putting Japan’s position
in Korea on an equal footing with China’s. Ōtori presented them to the
Korean government, which rejected them. On  July , Chinese
reinforcements arrived. A week later Japanese soldiers entered the
Kyŏngbok Palace, and as the king ordered its Chinese guards to end
their brave but unequal resistance, quickly occupied the remainder of
the capital. Ōtori, counting on the Taewŏn’gun for collaboration
because of his antipathy for Queen Min and her clan, had him brought
in to give advice. (The Western residents’ new periodical, The Korean
Repository, called the ex-regent ‘a kind of storm petrel, making his
appearance and getting to the front only when there has been trouble
and disorder in the country’.) The old man showed little hesitation in
relieving his son of the reins of government, but less readiness to go
along with a reform agenda. His reported association with the Tonghak
might have suggested that this time, unlike , he would not neces-
sarily see things Japan’s way, even though its foreign minister Mutsu
repeatedly stressed the Korean right to independence.
On  July, as three British steamers ferried more Chinese soldiers
from Weihaiwei towards Chemulp’o, one of them was sunk by the
Japanese navy and  men lost. Itō’s cabinet had evidently approved
hostilities with China a fortnight earlier, and on  August the two coun-
tries mutually declared war. The Chinese Northern fleet was twice as
large as the Japanese, but on  September twelve of its newest war-
ships were humiliatingly defeated by a similar number of Japanese ves-
sels off the mouth of the Yalu river. On land, the Japanese captured

                   
P’yŏngyang and forced Chinese armies back into Manchuria. The fol-
lowing month they took Dalian and Lushun (Port Arthur), and in
February  they captured Weihaiwei, where they destroyed the
remainder of the Chinese fleet. The Chinese had no option but to seek
an armistice, and by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended hostili-
ties on  April , they surrendered the Liaodong peninsula,
Taiwan and the Pescador islands. Furthermore, by conceding recogni-
tion of the independence of Korea, China closed its age-old claim to
suzerainty over the peninsula. Japan was now free to concentrate on
extending its influence and authority there. It did not immediately,
however, have everything its own way. International pressure con-
demned the fruits of its victory as ill-gotten gains, and the so-called
Triple Intervention of Russia, France and Germany forced it to return
Liaodong to China.
Japan had also hypocritically asserted Korean independence when
it signed an agreement with the Advisory Council set up in Seoul under
Kim Hongjip (–) and Yu Kilchun (–) in July ,
the Kabo year. Over the next three months the Council passed  acts,
the first phase of the Kabo reforms. One of them formally abolished
slavery (though it would take years to eradicate completely such a deep-
rooted institution); another ended discrimination against sŏŏl. The sec-
ond phase, from December  to  July , coincided with the
service of Count Inoue Kaoru as Japanese minister in Seoul. Inoue,
who arrived to replace Ōtori on  November, knew Korean politics
well. One of his first moves was to sideline the Taewŏn’gun, and his
hand was clearly to be seen behind the oath that Kojong made at the
royal ancestral temple on  January . Having reported to his ances-
tors that ‘a neighbouring Power and the unanimous judgement of all
our officers unite in affirming that only as an independent ruler can We
make our country strong’, the king went on to enumerate fourteen new
laws, the third of which emphasized his personal responsibility for
deciding matters of state and affirmed that ‘the Queen and members of
the Royal Family shall not be allowed to interfere’. Far from really
confirming Korea’s independence, the measures opened the gate for
further Japanese manipulation. A new cabinet (naegak) under Kim
Hongjip and Pak Yŏnghyo replaced the old State Council, and in
March it approved  Articles of Reform presented by Inoue that put
quasi-constitutional limitations on the formerly absolutist monarchy.
The first spelled out in plain language that neither the Taewŏn’gun nor
Queen Min was entitled to appoint or demote government officers;
others recognized that the army must be reorganized and better trained
and the law code updated, ‘introducing such foreign laws as are adapted

         ,                      
to the national needs’. Foreign advisers were introduced to every
government department except the foreign ministry. On  April the
Taewŏn’gun’s -year-old grandson Prince Yi Chunyong was arrested
for allegedly conspiring to murder the king and sent into exile on
Kyodong island, off Kanghwa. (A single-roomed house was specially
built for him and he served only a small part of his ten-year sentence.
The brains behind the plot may have been the Taewŏn’gun himself.) In
June the Taewŏn’gun was intercepted on his way to visit the prince
and escorted by the police to his summer villa, where he now stayed in
permanent retirement. Meanwhile Inoue, suffering from rheumatism,
returned to Tokyo on leave, to be replaced by Miura Gorō.
The third phase of the reforms began with disaster and ended with
drama. In the early hours of  October  a band of Japanese and
Korean cut-throats infiltrated Queen Min’s private quarters in the
Kyŏngbok Palace and killed her and her ladies-in-waiting. Shock and
undisguised grief poured out, and sincere tributes to Her Majesty came
from home and abroad. Even the Japan Daily Advertiser called her ‘a
woman of remarkable character . . . a personality even more noteworthy
than her neighbor [the Empress Dowager] of Peking’. She possessed, it
said, such ‘powers of mind and will as would have rendered her a strik-
ing figure in any station and in any age’, and both her life and the nature
of her death turned her into a lasting nationalist icon. (In – she
toured the world as the subject of Korea’s first Western-style musical
extravaganza, The Last Empress.) Ultimate responsibility for her murder
probably belonged to Miura, acting on pre-planned instructions from
Tokyo and possibly with the Taewŏn’gun’s connivance. Korean fury was
not assuaged when he was recalled, tried and acquitted. Piling insult
upon assault, another pro-Japanese cabinet was now nominated and in
December introduced still more reforms. One of the most ill-considered
of these was the order that men should cut off their topknots. Turmoil
ensued, for Korean males treasured this ‘glory of their manhood’ above
all else. Rioters murdered the prime minister, Kim Hongjip, and the
home minister, Yu Kilchun, escaped to Japan. In the confusion Kojong
fled with his son from the Kyŏngbok Palace on  February  and
sought sanctuary in the Russian embassy. Another new cabinet was
sworn in. This one was sympathetic to Russian interests, and for the new
foreign minister, Yi Wanyong (–), it marked an important step
up what would prove to be a significant career ladder.
Most of the Kabo reforms, though welcomed by the foreign com-
munity, were either rescinded or quickly lapsed. Rumours implicated
the Japanese in the plot to install Yi Chunyong as king, and guerrilla
bands turned on Japanese army detachments, reviving the name ŭibyŏng

                   
and memories of successes against the odds in the s. The current
of public and international opinion in – suggested that Japan
might have done its reputation serious harm. Positive expressions of
Korean nationalism, not all of which stemmed from negative sentiment
towards Japan, or took reactionary form, included the formation of a
new club in July  dedicated to social and political reform. Its
founders included Sŏ Chaep’il, Yun Ch’iho (–) and Yi Sŭngman
(Syngman Rhee, –). Yi Wanyong took the chair. Although
primarily a yangban venture, the Independence Club (Tongnip
hyŏphoe), as it was called, was openly supported by the Ch’angyang
women’s organization and counted democratization among its goals. Its
dedication to self-strengthening was recognition that it accepted the
need for foreign advice on modernization, although it was equally deter-
mined to remove what is nowadays termed foreign imperialism from its
shores. It built a hall (Tongnipgwan) for the weekly meetings of the
Paejae Debating Society, which discussed topics ranging from educa-
tion to industry; collected funds for the erection of the Independence
Gate (Picture Essay ); promoted the use of the national flag and
national anthem; and published a han’gŭl newspaper, the Tongnip
Sinmun (‘Independent News’). The king was a supporter, and in turn
the Club approved in October  when, having reluctantly left the
Russian embassy on  February and moved into the newly renovated
Tŏksu Palace nearby, he put himself on a par with the rulers of China
and Japan by proclaiming himself emperor (hwangje). At the same time
he upgraded his country’s official title to that of Great Han Empire
(Taehan-cheguk) (Picture Essay ). The ceremonies took place at the
Altar of Heaven, on the site of today’s Seoul Westin Chosun hotel,
where one pavilion from the former complex still stands.
‘The general opinion among both Koreans and foreigners’, the edi-
tor of The Korean Repository had written in , ‘is that the King is
one of the most urbane and gracious sovereigns that ever sat on the
throne of Chosŏn.’ True, His Majesty had taken unprecedented steps
to meet and learn from foreign advisers, and he got on well with them.
They felt flattered. Whatever his personal qualities, however, some saw
through him as a ruler. Isabella Bird Bishop, who liked him and was
even allowed to take a photograph of him for Queen Victoria, felt that
he had ‘not the capacity for getting a general grip of affairs’. ‘His weak-
ness of character is fatal’, she wrote, accusing him of ‘[making] havoc
of reigning’ once he had found safety in the Russian embassy. No one,
apart from the Russians, was happy while he was there. The Japanese,
of course, were particularly alarmed, especially since Russian troops
were training the Korean army, and in May  they pressured

         ,                      
 Independence Gate
The Independence Gate was the brainchild of Sŏ Chaep’il and was built
to his design. Just outside the West Gate (Sodae-mun) of Seoul stood
the Yŏng’ŭn-mun (‘Welcoming Favours Gate’), a complex where arriv-
ing Chinese envoys were given a ritual greeting. It had been erected by
King Sejong in  and extended about  years later. Effectively
condemned by Kojong’s declaration of independence in , it began
to be dismantled the following year. On  November  foreign
diplomats were among the large crowd that watched as the foundation
stone of its replacement was laid. The ceremony included demonstra-
tions of drill by boys of the Royal English School and songs sung by
those from Paejae School. The new gate now celebrated the liberation
from Chinese vassaldom gained at Shimonoseki, and might be inter-
preted as a thank-offering to Japan. That, at least, was how it managed
to escape damage through the colonial period, and even came to be
repaired by the Government-General when, in contrast, the nearby

Independence Gate (Tongnim-mun), height . m.


Independence Hall was destroyed. On one side it bore an inscription in
Chinese characters (the script in which literate people still communi-
cated) and on the other the same text in han’gŭl and the national flag,
taegukki, which the Independence Club was anxious to promote.
Modelled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, this is one of the few
examples of novel, Western-style architecture from the late Chosŏn still
to be seen in Seoul. (Others include the spire rising over the red brick
neo-Gothic of Myŏngdong Cathedral [], and the white stone neo-
Renaissance building in the corner of the Tŏksu Palace [], designed
by J. R. Harding and now used as a branch of the National Museum for
Contemporary Art.) A contemporary called the gate ‘probably the finest
piece of masonry in Korea’. In  a road-building scheme caused it to
be moved to a new location in the Sodaemun Independence Park.


 A Ŭigwe screen

The Chosŏn court was ruled by study, protocol and ritual. Hours were
spent every day in analysis of the Confucian Classics, histories of China
and Korea, and the analysis of books on philosophy and politics that
would assist current rulers in their search for moralistic programmes of
government. Scholars lectured princes and princes lectured bureaucrats
on the lessons to be learnt from past experience. Still more time was
passed in the punctilious preparation for, and conduct of, rites and cere-
monies intended to please Heaven, deities and ancestors. Precedent was
everything. Filial piety dictated that what was good enough for the
founders of the dynasty must be perpetuated. So rubrics (ŭigwe) for
today’s liturgy and protocol had to be written down in detailed compen-
dia for the guidance of future generations, information provided about
the participants, their implements, instruments and costumes, and illus-
trations added to aid comprehension. Akhak kweibŏm was an early
Chosŏn example of this. Among the most detailed and best known are
the nine-volume set of instructions for the construction of Hwasŏng,
with an accompanying eight-panel painted screen and a long handscroll
depicting Chŏngjo’s excursion there in , the occasion of his mother’s
th birthday. Among the artists who worked on the latter was the famous

Detail from an eight-panelled screen, Imin chinch’ando pyŏng, ink and colour on
paper, .


genre painter Kim Tŭksin (Kungjae, –). The importance of
accuracy meant that responsibility for artwork was given to the Tohwa-sŏ,
which came under the Ministry of Rites. Fifteen books of ŭigwe survive,
covering the period from  to .
Rites fell into five categories, those of worship and sacrifice, celebra-
tion and congratulation, greeting, military affairs and mourning. All but
the last were accompanied by music and dance, and were arranged by
the Court Music Office (Changagwŏn). The ceremonies themselves, and
the feasting and entertainment that followed, involved considerable
amounts of drink and spanned several days and nights. Military musi-
cians in yellow robes played for processions, and those who accompanied
ritual and entertainment wore red. Banquets for the king and his offi-
cials were ‘outer’, those for the dowager queen, the queen consort and
other royal women ‘inner’. Dancers were of both sexes, though it was
only King Chŏngjo who first allowed men to perform at inner banquets.
Many of the musicians were blind, though not all, as the hereditary sta-
tus of court musician before the twentieth century demonstrates.
Aak and tangak dances alike were slow and stately. (This was not, of
course, a characteristic of Korean dances alone, or one denying the pos-
sibility of genuine enjoyment: consider Thomas Morley’s description of
the pavane as ‘a kind of staid music ordained for grave dancing’ [],
and those elegant dances so seriously and so pleasurably performed in
the ballrooms of eighteenth-century European houses.) The regular
recurrence of the boat dance, fan dance, sword dance, ball-throwing
dance and four fairies’ dance, not to mention the ever-popular Ch’ŏyong
dance, Ch’ŏyongmu, points to the underlying conservatism of both rites
and entertainment. But change within tradition was not impossible:
Crown Prince Ikchong substantially revised the choreography in the late
s, dispensing with singers, and the screen depicted here shows some
of the modifications to instrumentation that had followed the declara-
tion of independence in . Despite modernization, perfect rites had
to be maintained. Nineteenth-century orchestras were rather larger than
their predecessors in the eighteenth century: the two orchestras playing
in  numbered  men. Wind players (of p’iri and taegŭm) were in
the majority, with kŏmun’go and kayagŭm predominant among the
strings and the grand sets of bells and chimes first witnessed in  still
evident. The huge double-headed kŏn’go drum, . metres long and sur-
mounted by an ornate wooden pagoda, can be seen in the foreground of
the three panels opposite and imposed its authority on the performance.
The screen belongs to the National Center for Korean Traditional
Performing Arts.


Moscow into signing a Protocol that, despite reiterating Korean inde-
pendence, also acknowledged each country’s right to station equal
numbers of troops and to further its interests in the kingdom. The
Independence Club’s concern at this was widely shared.
Isabella Bird Bishop left Korea in  ‘with great regret . . . with
Russia and Japan facing each other across her destinies’. Russia had
been extending its power in Manchuria during the s, hence its con-
cern when the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded the Liaodong peninsula
to Japan. In  the Russo-Chinese Bank won approval to build the
Chinese Eastern Railway () across Manchuria as part of the Trans-
Siberian Railway. It also began to build the South Manchurian Railway
(), linking the  with ice-free Dalian (Port Arthur) and, via a
branch line, the Korean border town of Sinŭiju. As the imperialist
powers carved up China into spheres of influence, Russia seized on
Manchuria as a base for industrial expansion, and in March 
acquired a -year lease on Dalian and territory at the end of the
Liaodong peninsula. Although Japan’s equivalent region of para-
mountcy was far away in south-east China, facing Taiwan, Tokyo,
which had its own eye on the rich natural resources of Manchuria,
could not fail to view growing Russian influence on both sides of the
Korean threshold with concern. The Protocol was not enough, and on
 April  the foreign minister, Nichi Tokujirō, signed an agreement
with the Russian minister to Japan undertaking that neither country
would provide Korea with financial or military aid, and that Russia
would not interfere with Japanese business or industrialization projects
in Korea. A victory for Japan, then, and in October it was followed by
another. Kojong and the Independence Club, which had more than
, members as the Taehan Empire was inaugurated, pressed their
luck too far by trying to introduce  of them into the king’s Privy
Council. Fighting broke out on the streets of Seoul; the king lost his
nerve and closed the Club down; its members were tortured and impris-
oned (thus disproving one of Mrs Bishop’s assertions, that ‘brutal
punishments and torture are done away with’). It was another instance
of Kojong’s besetting sin, his habit of backtracking instead of sticking
up for his convictions.
In  the Boxer Rising brought Russian troops into Manchuria to
protect their interests. The following year Russia obtained a concession
to develop timber resources at Andong, on the Manchurian-Korean
border, and by now it was not only Japan that was troubled by the bear’s
growing power across the region. In April  Great Britain signed an
alliance with Japan in which each country acknowledged the other’s
special treaty rights in China and Korea respectively, and promised

                   
assistance if they were threatened by conflict. A year later Russia
reneged on a deal with China to withdraw its troops from Manchuria,
and tried on the contrary to acquire and build on land at Yŏngamp’o,
at the mouth of the Yalu. When negotiations between Tokyo and St
Petersburg failed to resolve their differences in late , the count-
down to war had really begun, and the Japanese extracted permission
from Kojong to disperse their troops across Korea for its supposed pro-
tection. In January  Kojong proclaimed Korea’s neutrality in the
dispute. On  February Japanese ships attacked Russian warships in
Dalian and Chemulp’o (Inch’ŏn) without warning; next day its soldiers
marched into Seoul; Tokyo’s declaration of war followed. The land
campaign was fierce: Japanese casualties – , dead and ,
wounded – were far greater than in the Sino-Japanese war. It was, how-
ever, inconclusive and mercifully brief: by March the two armies had
fought themselves to a standstill around Shenyang. Two months later 
ships of the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in Korean waters, ending a long
journey that proved to be not only fruitless but disastrous. To the utter
amazement of the Western world, all but three of the vessels were
destroyed as the Japanese fleet attacked them off Tsushima.
If the war was virtually over, Tokyo was already planning the next,
diplomatic, stage of its offensive to redraw the map of north-east Asia.
In April  it concluded a fresh treaty with Great Britain, which again
recognized Japan’s privileged status on the peninsula and this time failed
to refer to Korean independence. A memorandum following a meeting
on  July between the  secretary of state, William Taft, and the
Japanese prime minister, Katsura Tarō, showed that Taft saw a Japanese
protectorate as holding out the best chance of peace in the region. In
August the Korean government accepted a demand for Japanese-
nominated foreign advisers to take up posts in ministries concerned with
finance and foreign affairs, and very soon they were introduced into the
defence, education, police and even royal household ministries too. So
by the time that the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was signed
in September , the Japanese could be sure that world opinion was
running their way. It gave them the former Russian concessions in
Lushun and Dalian, development rights in Manchuria and possession of
the . Two months later armed Japanese soldiers shut up Emperor
Kojong in the Tŏksu Palace and forced the foreign minister Pak Chesun
to sign a treaty with the Japanese minister Hayashi Gonsuke on 
November. As heinous crimes go it may not have ranked with their
assassination of Queen Min ten years before, but its implications were
immense. The Protectorate established by the treaty afforded Japan
almost unlimited powers over the Korean people.

         ,                      
 Another triple intervention, that of the imperialist nations into
Korea’s understanding of sovereignty, reform and modernization, had
helped explain the country’s hastening collapse through the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. Put another way, Korea had long
been accustomed to enjoying de facto independence in return for
observing Chinese and Japanese customs of ritual diplomacy and trade.
It did not appreciate the sudden revival of either Chinese claims to
suzerainty or Japanese assumptions of tutelage rights. Left to them-
selves, Koreans might have embraced change in time (think, for exam-
ple, of Yŏngjo’s dreams of ending slavery). But the sirhak persuasion,
though well intentioned, was too gradualist and unfocused when com-
pared with the determined Meiji transformation of Japan and Japanese
modernizers’ vision of what they could do, given the chance, with a
reorganized Korean economy. In that contrast the heart of the issue is
laid bare: committed leadership was vital in the handling of modern-
ization, and modernization was the burning issue in the understanding
and manipulation of nationalism. Korea’s leaders could not agree on
the best way forward. In both court and government advocates of self-
strengthening were to be found. Late in the century, some began to
accept the need for political reform. But consensus was impossible, not
least because the strongest supporters of change were pro-Japanese, or
at least associated with foreigners who themselves seemed to accept
Japanese ideas on Korean development.

  

Korea knew of old how it stood – or according to its own perspective
expected to stand – in relation to its regional neighbours. In diplomatic
terms, that meant China first, Korea second, Japan third, and the
Ryūkyūs fourth; in non-tributary, commercial terms, the playing field
was more level. It even had a fair idea of what to expect of imperial
Russia, given past experience of its predecessors in Manchuria. The
Imjin Waeran and Manchu conquests had given Korea’s world a severe
shaking, but it had quickly recovered its familiar, and fairly comfortable,
size and shape. Sirhak and Catholicism had scratched its surface a little
in the first half of the nineteenth century, but nothing had forewarned
the inhabitants of the Hermit Kingdom of its impending total fracture
in the second half of the nineteenth century. How did such a cataclysm
come about and who was to blame: was it failure on the part of Korea’s
own leaders, or did the impact of Western imperialism on China and
Japan make it inevitable?

                   
 Europeans had set foot on Korean soil well before the mid-
nineteenth century. The first was Gregorio de Cespedes, a Spanish
missionary from Omura who landed on  December  to minister
to Konishi Yukinaga’s Catholic troops. A Dutch pirate, Jan Weltevree,
was next, abandoned by his Chinese ship near Kyŏngju in  and
making his home there. And in  thirty-six Dutchmen, including
Hendrik Hamel, were shipwrecked on Cheju island. On their return to
Holland in  Hamel published the story of their adventures, which
included a period of service as musketeers in the royal guard at Seoul.
It was the first account of Korea in any Western language, and was
translated into French and English. In  a British sloop, 
Providence, landed Captain William Broughton and a party of men near
Pusan. In  the Prussian Protestant missionary Karl Gützlaff sailed
along the west coast of Korea on an East India Company vessel, Lord
Amherst, and spent a month there, meeting officials and villagers. He
gained some idea of the flexibility permitted within the country’s
tributary relationship with China, and formed a favourable impression
of the prospects for commerce. But before it could take advantage the
Honourable Company lost its monopoly in the East, and with the
advent of free trade the Western nations became deeply embroiled in
competition for commercial, diplomatic and missionary influence in
China and Japan. Korea did not really impinge on their notice until ,
when ominous events occurred.
As regent, the Taewŏn’gun endeavoured to protect Korea’s inter-
national isolation. It is easy to understand why he would hesitate to
upset the status quo: pre-Meiji Japan seemed content with the existing
pattern for exchanging diplomatic and cultural missions, and since the
late s China’s attention had been distracted by problems around its
coasts. Word would certainly have reached him about the dire conse-
quences of the ‘Opium Wars’ and the Anglo-French destruction of
Beijing’s wonderful Summer Palace in , and if Western bees were
beginning to swarm round the honeypot of northern China, they
should be discouraged from buzzing around Korea too. After a number
of inconsequential foreign efforts to trade during the s, ’s and
’s, an American merchant ship, the General Sherman, sailed from
China in August  and entered the Taedong river, heading towards
P’yŏngyang. It ran aground and local people killed all on board, not
without some degree of provocation. And as they died, a wider tragedy
was engulfing Catholics across the kingdom. Since  three French
bishops, Ferréol (d. ), Berneux and Daveluy, had worked quietly
and unopposed in and around Seoul. The Taewŏn’gun’s wife was a
convert, but more important to the Great Prince was the fact that he

         ,                      
owed a favour to the anti-Christian family of Dowager Queen Cho, and
a misunderstanding over a meeting he called with Berneux was the
innocent signal for the start of the worst anti-Christian persecution in
Korean history. Nine French missionary priests, including the two sur-
viving bishops, were executed in , and over the next two years per-
haps , out of an estimated total of , Catholics were martyred.
The French Asiatic Fleet in northern China was ordered to take
revenge, and in October of that fateful year seven of Admiral Roze’s
ships inflicted heavy damage on Kanghwa island, though they made lit-
tle progress towards their main target of Seoul. Almost five years later,
in , the American authorities in China, having failed to get com-
pensation for the loss of the General Sherman, dispatched a punitive
expedition of their own under Admiral John Rodgers. Once more poor
Kanghwa suffered badly, despite better protection by cannonry in the
aftermath of the French expedition. When the five American ships
sailed up the Han river towards Seoul, the intensity of the resistance
forced them back. Isolationism was standing firm, just.
The new Meiji government of Japan, however, instituted in ,
was determined to put an end to it, and in September  the warship
Unyō provoked incidents on and around Kanghwa and Tongnae to give
the Japanese an excuse. A strong naval force carried General Kuroda
Kiyotaka to Kanghwa to open negotiations, and there in February 
Korea signed its first international treaty of modern times. It gave the
Japanese diplomatic representation, extraterritoriality, entry to Korean
ports, the right to use their own currency there and exemption from
import taxes. Kojong saw advantages in opening up his country to foreign
influence, and later that year dispatched Kim Kisu on an investigative
mission to Japan, the first of several that would study examples of Meiji
modernization at first hand. Kim’s report was lukewarm, but in  a
group led by Kim Hongjip returned with a strongly worded memoran-
dum from a Chinese counsellor in Tokyo, Huang Zunxian, arguing that
for its survival and progress Korea must align itself with China, Japan and
the United States and copy the Meiji model. In January  Kojong
authorized the creation of a foreign ministry, the T’ongni-gimu Amun,
with twelve departments handling not only diplomatic relations but also
such things as foreign trade, foreign-language teaching and shipbuilding.
The following month twelve senior officials led a -man delegation to
Japan to investigate industry, commerce, law, military affairs, education
and medicine. Five years on from the Treaty of Kanghwa sirhak sympa-
thizers were entitled to feel encouraged, but strict Confucian defenders of
tradition were by no means beaten, and the battle for influence over the
king intensified. This was the background against which the Kaehwadang

                   
and the Sadaedang adopted their respective positions, and into which the
Taewŏn’gun again intruded, plotting against his son and Queen Min.
A flurry of treaties now followed. In May  Commodore Robert
Shufeldt signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce giving Americans
diplomatic and commercial opportunities in Korea and inflaming anti-
foreign feeling. It contributed to the Imo Incident in July and was not
appeased by the consequent Chemulp’o Treaty with Japan, settled on
 August. Korea agreed, inter alia, to pay , yen compensation for
twelve Japanese soldiers killed, , yen for damage to Japanese
property and the cost of military expenses, and to accept the stationing
of Japanese soldiers at the Seoul legation. (In November , shortly
before the Kapsin coup, Japan wrote off nearly  per cent of this debt,
but a similar rate of compensation was demanded in respect of
Japanese killed during the Tonghak rebellion, a claim strongly
denounced by The Independent News in May .) Kaehwadang mem-
bers Pak Yŏnghyo, Kim Okkyun and Sŏ Kwangbŏm (‒) were
sent to Tokyo with an apology, but Japanese satisfaction was dampened
the same month by a trade agreement signed with China. Li Hongzhang
posted Ma Jianzhong and Paul-Georg von Möllendorff to the Korean
court as counsellors. The Prussian, the first Westerner to be accredited
to the Korean court, was ‘stared at by a crowd of thousands’ as he
arrived on  December . He was quick to assist Kojong with the
signing of treaties with Great Britain and Germany in  and Italy
and Russia in .
Min Yŏngik spent nearly five months of  in the United States,
presenting a request from Kojong for American advisers and returning
to Korea via European capitals. What the king had in mind was princi-
pally military advice. What he got was no more than the posting of a
single naval attaché, George Foulk, from Yokohama. Foulk, however,
was a man of wide interests and many accomplishments. He helped
with agricultural and mining developments, promoted new furniture
design and even found to his surprise that he liked Korean music.
Meanwhile the course set by the would-be modernizers was leading
into choppy waters. The Kapsin coup attempt reflected their impa-
tience for Japanese-style reforms, but its aftermath only whipped the
storm up further. The Treaty of Seoul (Hansŏng) obligated Seoul to
pay further compensation of , yen for damage to property and
Japanese victims, and the Li-Itō agreement in April  left Chinese
claims to suzerainty over Korea unimpaired. When, nevertheless,
Seoul appointed a minister of its own to Japan in  without inform-
ing Beijing, Korea sailed into the thick of Sino-Japanese rivalry as well
as its own political maelstrom.

         ,                      
 To make matters worse, Anglo-Russian rivalry now also appeared
on the Korean horizon. London was worried that von Möllendorff
might persuade King Kojong to favour Russia as a counter to Japan.
Russia was already threatening British interests in Afghanistan, and
might also compete with British commercial interests in north-east
China and Korea, modest though the latter still were. In , there-
fore, three British naval craft landed sailors on the small group of
Kŏmun-do islands off Korea’s south-west coast, which London
believed would deter any similar Russian moves off the north-east
coast. In fact, despite the presence of an able minister, Karl Waeber,
in Seoul, Russian plans were not yet as advanced as the British feared,
and by February  the futile occupation was over. Von Möllendorff
may (or may not) have been misjudged. He served Kojong well over
the Western treaties, set up the T’ongni-gimu Amun’s English
Interpreters’ School, and advised on the creation of a Maritime
Customs Service (). Li Hongzhang thought that he was over-
encouraging Korean dreams of independence, while George Foulk, as
acting  envoy, shared Britain’s concern over Russia and was instru-
mental in having the Prussian recalled to China in . The antipathy
between Foulk and von Möllendorff was not the only personality clash
to disturb the foreign community. Men, and occasionally women, who
represented their governments, mission boards or merchant companies
in this newly opening land, or who blazed their own trails to get there,
were frequently forceful characters, and amid novel, difficult and
sometimes dangerous circumstances animosities were bound to occur.
Foulk also distrusted Yuan Shikai’s personal ambition, but when Yuan
complained about Foulk’s anti-Chineseness, the State Department
withdrew him in : Washington was more sensitive to its relations
with China and Japan than with Korea, which in terms of internation-
al priorities was not of front-rank importance. King Kojong, even so,
regarded the United States as an essential guide to modernizing his
country, and sent young men to study there in .
Japan’s view of itself as the entitled regional leader remained
unshaken. The Tonghak Rebellion and Sino-Japanese war enhanced its
position in Korea and its continental ambitions. It could scarcely have
predicted the sudden propulsion of Russia into a lead part in the inter-
national drama as an aftermath of the Kabo reforms and Queen Min’s
murder, but within ten years it managed to turn even this to its advan-
tage. It is easy for today’s historians to pick Japan’s motives through the
period  to  to pieces, and to see its policies in Korea as imita-
tion of Western imperialism in China. But we should not forget that
the West had little idea at the time of Japan’s strength and was shocked

                   
by the ease of its success over much larger neighbours. It acknowledged
Tokyo’s order that Westerners in Korea were not to be victimized,
and largely accepted Japan’s claim to be acting in the interest of Korean
independence. China, of course, was under no illusions about the threat
it posed in Korea, that is to say the threat to China’s own interests –
it was not in the least bothered about the Koreans and their fate. But
without the benefit of hindsight, Westerners in Korea, especially those
with the country’s modernization and improvement at heart, did not
subscribe to today’s critical view of imperialism in action. They har-
boured no long-term suspicions and generally got on well with their
neighbours from the Land of the Rising Sun, despite Count Inoue’s
later admission that his compatriots were arrogant, uncooperative and
violent towards Koreans. (The foreign diplomatic community appreci-
ated his urbane and courteous manner, and when he left in October
 King Kojong apologized for not being able to confer a decoration
on him.) The Korean Repository for May  declared: ‘Korea is inde-
pendent. But she is ignorant of the duties and responsibilities of this
independence. She must have a teacher, a guide, a reformer. Japan has
taken her hand. She did not wait to be invited. The country must follow.
The country will follow.’
Even Koreans with later reputations as strong nationalists were not
yet sure which way to turn. Yun Ch’iho and Sŏ Chaep’il had both been
fired with enthusiasm for ideas of modernization and reform after vis-
iting Japan as young men. Both fled there in , and went on to gain
university educations in America before returning to Korea in the
s. Yun had also spent time in China, where he was baptized a
Methodist. Though profoundly ashamed of his own country’s back-
wardness and traditional dependence on China and impressed by
Japan’s progressiveness, he wrote during the Sino-Japanese war: ‘For
the good of the East, may Japan succeed.’ He was under no illusions
about its self-interest, however, and as one of the founders of the
Independence Club, opted for the West and Christian civilization as a
preferable model for Korea’s modernization and emancipation. Sŏ also
took the social Darwinist view that Western civilization was essential to
the survival of a backward Korea, and that Japan would be the Asian
filter through which Korea would receive and understand it best.
Korea’s future, he believed, might have to be tied for some time to
Japanese tutelage, even if a cautious eye would have to be kept on its
political goals. He envisaged the economic revival of north-east Asia
based on Korea as a supplier of raw materials to Japan as a manufactur-
er. Japan had, after all, cornered the market for such diverse and pop-
ular items as silk handkerchiefs, toothbrushes and safety matches. And

         ,                      
at least Japan was an Asian neighbour, unlike Russia, whose motives he
also began to suspect. Soon, even Emperor Kojong himself wearied of
these opinions, and six months before the Independence Club’s violent
closure in November  Sŏ returned under pressure to the United
States, handing over editorship of the Tongnip Sinmun to Yun Ch’iho
until it ceased publication on  December . Other Korean-lan-
guage papers arose to take up its theme of nationalism, while the drive
for modernization continued and the Japanese increased their power
commensurately. They acquired a lucrative ginseng monopoly, started
a steamship line, and after buying Korea’s first railway (the -mile line
from Seoul to Chemulp’o; the journey took two-and-a-half hours)
from the American company that built it, then tried to take up parts of
Seoul’s new electric tramway system where it crossed the track.
According to Kojong’s American adviser William Sands, ‘Japan had a
definite policy and . . . nothing should stand in the way of it. If it was
a concession or a company or any other business entity it must be
acquired or controlled by Japanese capital.’ Some Koreans, of course,
found opportunities to benefit, for some were less than scrupulous
about working with or for the Japanese, and as official corruption
increased, the peasantry felt the predictable burden of excessive taxa-
tion. The Tonghak leader Son Pyŏnghŭi (–) supported an
uprising in  and was exiled to Japan, where he changed the orga-
nization’s title to Ch’ŏndo-gyo (‘Heavenly Way Teaching’), the name
under which it continues to the present day. He at least saw the link
between Japanese policy and the suffering of Korea’s lower classes. For
others, disillusionment with Japan’s motives still lay in the future.
Early in  even such ardent later nationalists as Yi Sŭngman and An
Chunggŭn welcomed Japan’s victory over Russia.

   

Lucius Foote arrived in Seoul in May  to set up the American
legation, the first for a Western nation, and on  September  the
-year-old Horace Allen joined him as its physician. Coming from
Shanghai, Allen was unimpressed by his first sight of the capital city.
The great city gates, the extensive royal palaces and the Japanese lega-
tion opened after the Kanghwa Treaty were all impressive in their
way, but virtually everything else was single-storeyed and most of the
constructions were thatched. Trees and flowering shrubs brightened
Allen’s first September impressions, but wood-burning stoves soon
draped a pall of smoke over winter streets; the stink and sound of open
drains and disease pervaded narrow alleys; and the tolling of the cur-

                   
few bell shut people up through the hours of darkness. Little did Allen,
the first Western doctor and first Protestant missionary in Korea, imag-
ine how he would grow to love this country and its people; what recog-
nition he would receive from King Kojong; or how much he would
contribute to its modernization and changing cultural outlook. On
 December, summoned to the scene of carnage at the Post Office, he
must have wondered just what he had come to. He could do nothing for
Hŏng Yŏngsik, but it was his skill that saved Min Yŏngik’s life, and
Kojong was quick to show his gratitude. He awarded foreigners land
for the establishment of their own quarter, and authorized the found-
ing of a Western-style teaching hospital, the Kwanghye-wŏn. It was the
breakthrough the foreigners needed to launch their work. Their quar-
ter, Chong-dong, was situated close to the Tŏksu Palace. At first they
bought or rented Korean property. Then, as time passed, they built
their own churches and chapels, their legations, shops, houses and
social meeting places. There the Methodist missionary Mary Scranton
bought ‘nineteen straw huts and unsightly strips of unoccupied land’
in  for the first girls’ school in Korea, forerunner of today’s Ewha
University. Protestant missionaries formed the biggest occupational
group among the Westerners, but the most conspicuous sign of the
Christian presence in Seoul, the red-brick, Gothic-style Catholic
cathedral soaring high over the city, was not in Chong-dong but on a
hilltop in Myŏng-dong. Also outside the Chong-dong community, near
the South Gate, lay the Japanese enclave. The Japanese minister ‘lived
in his citadel as in a feudal castle’, wrote Sands, protected by a ‘minia-
ture army’ of artillery, cavalry and infantry. There were , Japanese
in Seoul in , fewer than the Chinese who spread across the whole
city, but considerably more than the  or so Westerners, of whom the
British were the largest contingent.
Foreigners worked for the court and government in a range of
capacities. The king appointed Horace Allen as his physician; Queen
Min did the same for Annie Ellers Bunker and Lillias Underwood
(though she did not dispense with the services of her favourite shaman,
Chillyŏng-gun). The Irishman John MacLeavey Brown joined the
Maritime Customs Service in . As chief financial adviser to the
government after  he had the main streets of Seoul (Picture Essay
) widened and cleaned up. The Englishman William Hutchinson was
appointed to run the Royal English School when Kojong reformed it in
, struggling to gain yangban acceptance of Western learning as a
training for future officials instead of traditional Chinese classicism.
American William Dye, one of those involved in spiriting Kojong from
his palace to the Russian embassy in , trained soldiers at the newly

         ,                      
 Map of Seoul
The Korean branch of the Royal Asiatic Society was formed in  by
a group of Westerners, among whom were the missionaries James Scarth
Gale and Homer Hulbert and the international diplomat J. MacLeavey
Brown. It announced its presence by publishing its Transactions.
(Produced regularly to the present day except for the years –,
– and –, this series remains a major source of information on
Korean culture.) Among its first activities was the preparation of a map
of Seoul, drawn in the manner of Korean maps of the capital dating
back to the late eighteenth century. In keeping with Korean custom it
adopted – though not consistently – an itinerant perspective, sometimes
presenting the viewer with buildings and text on their side and upside
down. Place and street names were shown in characters and han’gŭl, but
not in any romanized form. The letters and numbers of a grid appeared
round the edges, though grid lines were not drawn across the face of the
map and the copy of the Transactions that printed the map contained no
descriptive article that would have rendered grid references useful.
Cartography had a long history in Korea. Old maps, like their
Chinese counterparts, emphasized the situation of mountains and
rivers, as much for their p’ungsu (Ch. fengshui) importance as for naviga-
tional assistance. Maps were also valued for administrative and military
purposes, and under the Chosŏn government their compilation was the
responsibility of the Tohwa-sŏ. Sirhak scholars were aware of the
advances in cartography introduced to China by Jesuit missionaries, and
their efforts to improve their accuracy and content culminated in the
work of the greatest of all Korean mapmakers, Kim Chŏngho (d. ).
From  foreigners used a version of his  map of Seoul, and this
was the basis of the  map, which added much more information
about roads, buildings and names.
There were eight gates in the walls of Seoul, plus a water gate. Their
official names, appearing on maps and in formal documents, were ornate,
but commonly they were known simply as the Great East Gate, Great
South Gate, Little West Gate, etc. Attempts have been made in modern
times to reintroduce the official names for the two that survive in today’s
metropolis, the East and South gates. The North Gate, Sukch’ong-mun,
was located south-east of Pugak-san, the mountain that looked down
protectively on the Kyŏngbok Palace. Because of p’ungsu problems it was
rarely used, and after  it remained permanently shut. The South
Gate, the main entrance to the old city, was actually in the south-west
corner, to one side of the ‘southern mountain’, Namsan. Today its only
function, as it stands lonely and surrounded by skyscrapers, is as a traffic
island. Just inside the West Gate (seen near the bottom left of this pic-


 Map of Seoul (detail), .

ture) lay the Kyŏnghŭi Palace, built as a detached palace in  and
pulled down during the Japanese colonial period. Foreigners called it the
Mulberry Palace, after the trees planted there by one of their number in
 as part of a sericulture experiment. Outside it, and a little to the
north, the Independence Gate can be seen straddling the road. Below, on
its side, stands the Independence Club’s debating hall.


established Military Academy until the Japanese had him dismissed. By
the beginning of the twentieth century Seoul had electric lighting,
tramcars, a railway, a telegraph, running water, modern hospitals and
schools, orphanages, a , and Korean- and English-language jour-
nals. It had been introduced to concepts of democracy and Protestant
interpretations of the Christian message. (Koreans failed to understand
the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism, regarding
them as separate religions. Catholics concentrated on doctrinal teaching
rather than the good works of modernization and social welfare, and
many Koreans still associated them with the controversy over Neo-
Confucian rites.) But even in the cities change came slowly and in the
countryside it was scarcely noticeable. In Seoul, for example, tradition-
al medicine, with centuries of empirical expertise in herbalism and
acupuncture, was not simply going to roll over in the face of novel and
expensive Western medical prescriptions. Western medicine was an off-
shoot of Protestant Christianity, and public opinion was wary of mis-
sionaries’ motives. That said, their sacrificial work on behalf of the
needy, especially at times of epidemic and natural disaster, and their
contributions to modern education gradually made the public tolerant
of their presence and eccentric ways. Baptizing converts mattered to
them, naturally, but was not immediately their primary target, and a
degree of vagueness surrounds the figures given by different sources
for their success. Horace Allen baptized only about forty in his first
four years. Lillias Underwood wrote of a hundred Methodists and
Presbyterians in , but according to the Korea Review the number of
baptized converts had risen to nearly , by .
The coming of the West was not in itself the panacea that trans-
formed Korea. Certainly, Westerners were the agents of a great deal
of change. But much of Korea’s progress was the result of its own
people’s positive outlook. They looked with grudging admiration at
Japan’s leap forward, and while eschewing the totality of the Meiji con-
version, they knew how greatly it contrasted with China’s dithering
response to Western offers of help. Like the Chinese, they reacted with
a debate about modernization and reform and with a Self-Strength-
ening Movement (chagang undong), and, softened up perhaps by earlier
sirhak arguments, they were prepared to relax the narrow introspection
of Chinese classicism to reap the consequent benefits. Of course, the
scale of mobilizing change was vastly different in Korea than in China,
and in the face of events from  onwards it was easier to concentrate
the creative energy of nationalism in a more focused way, an anti-
Japanese way. It was not so much that the West was liked, rather that it
offered the same advantages as Japan but in a less aggressive manner.

                   
 When it came to art, it was too soon for Western styles to make
much impact on Korean culture in the nineteenth century. At least the
Japanese had the advantage of being part of the shared orientalist tra-
dition, and it would – ironically – be they who were the catalysts for the
most sweeping changes in Korean cultural habits, by introducing
Korean painters to the new waves sweeping through European and
American art. That would not take place until the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Kim Chunggun (Kisan) achieved some renown among
Westerners in the last years of the century by selling them simple pic-
tures of Korean occupations and amusements, an unlikely interpreta-
tion of genre painting that has earned him a valued place in several
European and American museums (Picture Essay ). Westerners
introduced novel concepts in the form of oil painting, newspapers and
hymn singing – the last especially via Ewha and Paejae schools. But the
overwhelming preference among Korean artists swung in favour of tra-
ditional Chinese subjects and styles. Top-quality genre painting and
t’aenghwa (Buddhist painting) were in decline; landscapes, flowers,
birds, animals and bamboo ruled. Painters even deserted the True View
to return to the expressionism of the Chinese Southern style. The
porcelain industry, on the other hand, had never chosen to follow the
mid-Qing path by developing its range of colours, decorative patterns
or technical innovations such as overglaze enamels. The yangban still
preferred the monochromes, plain lines and simple textures that had so
distinguished early Chosŏn porcelain and punch’ŏng. Potters had intro-
duced variety in the form of blue and white ware and through the
greater use of decorative inlay, but the refinement that had accompa-
nied early Chosŏn products was no longer startling in its originality or
perfection. Ceramics suffered the characteristic heaviness of fin-de-siècle
art. Nor had Korean metalworkers found the highly coloured cloisonné
enamels so admired in China to their taste, or that of their customers.
The single most important cultural development of the late Chosŏn era
was musical, the growth of instrumental sanjo. Even that, really,
belonged to the realm of folk rather than high art, though its evolution
and popularization were undoubtedly assisted by the fact that the yang-
ban enjoyed it.
The pages of The Korean Repository show that Western residents in
Seoul were aware of and took an interest in the great arts of the past. But
on the market stalls they fell for the bright folk paintings, wood carvings,
embroidered textiles, intricate knots and tassels, stitched wrapping
cloths, shining brasswork, coloured fans and bamboo items such as pipes,
brushpots and woven mats. To be sure, the late nineteenth century was
not a great period for high art, and if Western writers today tend to pass

         ,                      
 Kisan, Chess Players

Kisan, Chess Players, ink and colour on paper, late th century.

On my early visits to Seoul in the s I quickly noted that in middle-

class, Westernized company it was impolite to smoke in the presence of
elders and social superiors. And when I was asked if I smoked and
answered in the negative, I was somewhat nonplussed to get the reply,
‘Oh, so you’re a Christian then?’ Both reasons for my surprise – the con-
ventions associated with the habit and the apparent link between the
habit and a matter of personal faith – have historical explanations,
though an element of uncertainty hangs over both. Tobacco is said to
have arrived in Korea in  from Japan, where European merchants
had introduced it. Five years later the king, Kwanghae, had himself
become an addict and issued an embargo on a habit that was presumably
cloaking and choking with smoke those who felt their dignity compro-
mised by it. The habit of smoking, however, quickly became widespread
among men and women, and by the early eighteenth century tobacco
was grown as a valuable cash crop. Smoking was a popular social activity,
especially among the yangban. Seniority and superiority were under-
lined by the length and quality of the pipe (see Picture Essay ), and a
scholar might expect to have his servant light his pipe for him. He might
also use his pipe as a conversational aid to emphasize a point in his argu-
ment. Many of Kisan’s late nineteenth-century genre paintings show


gentlemen playing board games, watching musical performances and
entertaining kisaeng, pipe in hand or laid on the ground beside them.
But working men also smoked long pipes, and other pictures show them,
the end of their pipe supported by a loop of cord or leather hung from
the ceiling, with both hands free to get on with their job. To many of the
early Protestant missionaries, smoking tobacco came into the same cat-
egory as taking opium, drinking alcohol, gambling and taking concu-
bines, and they had considerable success in commanding their converts
to give up the habit. Some were already concerned at the economic
effects of smoking on the individual and the country as a whole; others,
we must suspect, simply added it to their list of activities banned as a
means of ‘improving’ a backward race.
Korean chess commemorates the battles between Liu Bang and
Xiang Yu that resulted in the founding of China’s Han dynasty. The
board is marked with ten horizontal and nine vertical lines, and the 
pieces stand on their intersections. They are flat, and inscribed with the
names ‘general’, ‘aide’, ‘horseman’, ‘elephant’, ‘chariot’ and ‘catapult’.
Players move them along the lines, trying to checkmate their opponent’s
general within his base camp.
Chess (Kor. changgi) must not be confused with the pebble game
paduk (Jap. go). This is also about capturing territory, but the paduk
board has nineteen lines in each direction and the pieces are flat black
and white stones,  against . It is a more intellectual struggle, and
its aficionados tend to think themselves superior to chess players.


rather quickly over its output in the literati tradition, those with a feeling
for the spirit and passion of its folk artists, like those early expatriates,
find plenty to enthuse over. Nor, to be honest, was this an exceptional
period for folk art, either in quality or variety, but it was the age to which
many museum collections around the world now turn to illustrate what
cultural identity meant to the majority of Koreans, for the artefacts they
display frequently come from collections made by foreigners who saw it
at first hand, and who bought up the evidence for it. They took photo-
graphs, too. The first to do so was an enterprising Venetian, Felice Beato,
who sailed with Admiral Rodgers in  and returned with dramatic
pictures of the fierce fighting on – June. Mrs Bishop was an invet-
erate photographer as well as an incisive observer of politics and society.
She, and missionaries such as the Presbyterian Horace Underwood, laid
the foundations of photographic archives that are widely used today.

                   
 III

A Century of
Suffering
  

Culture under Threat, ‒:

The Colonial Era:
This chapter looks at the only period when the whole of Korea
has been under foreign occupation. It was a time of intense suffer-
ing and one that still prompts feelings of shame and anger among
Koreans. Yet Japanese modernization brought benefits, and the
resistance movement also spawned elements of progress, especially
in cultural spheres.

  

From Protectorate to Annexation, ‒

Five years after the Protectorate Treaty in , the Treaty of
Annexation turned Korea into a fully fledged Japanese colony. Twenty-
one years after that, in , Japan would take over Manchuria too,
with such unwarranted ease that deconstructionist historians like to see
therein the origins of World War Two. In the example set by the
League of Nations’ failure to act against militarism they certainly have
a point. But the international community had already given implicit
encouragement to Japanese expansionism. Where was the condemna-
tion of the annexation in , and who, other than Christian mission-
aries, showed solidarity with Koreans in their suffering under the
oppressive colonial rule that followed? Why would the Hague Peace
Conference in  not denounce the Japanese imposition of the
Protectorate, as Emperor Kojong begged it to do, thereby saving him
from enforced abdication? Was it that Western nations were too
stunned by Japan’s recent defeat of imperial Russia? Had the Japanese
prime minister Katsura Tarō really laid to rest all doubts about
Japanese ambitions at his meeting with Secretary of State Taft on 
July ? If we like to imagine that today’s response to a Japanese
seizure of Korea would be different, we have to remember that, in
those far-off times, when imperialism and colonialism were widely
accepted as semi-philanthropic in their intent, President Roosevelt was
probably quite sincere in viewing regional progress under Japanese


direction as the best bet for peace in the Pacific. And neither he nor the
Japanese were impressed by the image of backwardness and division
that Korea had created for itself in the late nineteenth century.
The Protectorate Treaty was the brainchild of the great Meiji states-
man Itō Hirobumi. The Hwangsŏng Sinmun (‘Capital News’) had wel-
comed him on a visit to Seoul in March , proclaiming that ‘Korea
and Japan must from this day onward unite their hearts and combine
their strength’. On  November  he was back, and Homer Hulbert’s
Korea Review greeted his appointment as the first Japanese resident-gen-
eral (Tōkan) in December  by writing: ‘His early return will not only
be pleasing to the Korean emperor, but very many of the common peo-
ple will expect much better treatment from officials and citizen represen-
tatives of Japan than they would otherwise hope to have.’ However,
Hwangsŏng Sinmun quickly changed its tune: ‘This treaty . . . destroys
our nation’, it lamented, and by November  the Korea Review also
was complaining: ‘Korea is being treated as conquered territory. In spite
of rights that are centuries old Koreans are being treated precisely as the
Ainus or Formosans would be if they were here.’ Prince Yonghwan,
nephew of Queen Min and a passionately nationalistic former prime
minister, who had done his best to resist the treaty, committed suicide on
 November . An immense crowd watched his funeral procession
and shops stayed closed for days. In a farewell note to the Korean people
he wrote: ‘It pains me to think that my twenty million compatriots shall
perish in the coming struggle for existence.’ He was spared the ignominy
of witnessing Itō take up his new post in February .
Itō’s responsibility, according to the treaty, was to direct Korea’s
diplomatic and commercial affairs, and nominally he was answerable to
its emperor. The resident-general has been described as a sort of ‘super-
ambassador’. The Japanese government sent an American citizen,
Durham Stevens, to advise the Koreans on foreign affairs, but he worked
secretly for Itō, and in  two Korean Christians assassinated him in
San Francisco as he tried to argue the case for Japanese policy in Korea.
By that time the tentacles of Japanese interest were reaching into all areas
of Korean life, and even the ability to control domestic affairs was spi-
ralling beyond Korean reach. The pretence that Japan was defending
Korea’s independence quickly disappeared, and when Kojong sent
envoys to The Hague Peace Conference and Washington in June 
vainly appealing against the Protectorate, the cabinet in Tokyo made its
next fateful move. On  June Kojong was forced to abdicate, and no
sooner was Crown Prince Yi Ch’ŏk enthroned as the puppet emperor
Sunjong than his younger brother, ten-year-old Yi Ŭn was hauled off
hostage-wise to Japan for his education. Koreans with long memories

                  
might have recalled that back in the Unified Silla period this had been a
common feature of ‘serving the great’, though the ‘great’ had at least
then been the respected China, not the hated Japan. On  July the prime
minister, Yi Wanyong, signed a new treaty legalizing the resident-gener-
al’s authority over virtually all matters of government.
Japanese officials now took effective control of the country. The
Korean army of almost , soldiers was disbanded and Japanese
military police (Kempeitai) harshly enforced the law, supported by
Japanese courts. Many former soldiers joined ŭibyŏng, partisan guerrilla
forces in Korea and Manchuria, whose mainly peasant members wel-
comed the new recruits. Their name, ‘righteous armies’, was an inspi-
rational reminder of the irregular forces that had so harassed the
Japanese back in the s. But the authorities could count on support
from the growing number of Japanese immigrants, who by 
totalled ,, and from compliant Koreans. Among numerous
groups spawned by the Self-Strengthening Movement there were
those that believed that Koreans must make political and economic
progress by their own efforts, but others, despairing of ‘backwardness’
and ‘incompetence’, felt that advantage should be taken of Japanese
assistance. These roughly equated with the Sinminhoe (‘New People’s
Association’), established in  by An Ch’angho, and the Ilchinhoe
(‘United Progress Society’). Later Koreans over-simplistically lauded
or condemned their members as nationalists and collaborators respec-
tively. Sinminhoe was instrumental in launching Korea’s first joint
stock company, the P’yŏngyang Porcelain Company, in . With its
encouragement, patriotic Koreans reacted against Japanese control of
education and the press by opening new schools, printing new papers
and pro-Korean books, and forming patriotic societies that functioned
until the authorities closed them down. Ilchinhoe faced no such risk.
Founded on the eve of the Protectorate in , it went so far as to call
for unification with Japan in , and on Annexation its , or so
members made it the largest political party. The Japanese undertook a
much-needed modernization programme. They encouraged industrial
development and the building of roads and railways. They directed the
running of financial and postal services. Telegraph and telephone sys-
tems were extended and harbour facilities improved. Exploitation of
natural resources – gold, copper, coal and iron – was made a priority.
The Oriental Development Company, a bond-issuing stock company
backed by the Japanese government, opened in Seoul on  January
 with the aim of modernizing agriculture and opening up new
lands for use by Japanese and Korean farmers. New water-supply
works were installed in Pusan, P’yŏngyang and Inch’ŏn. Particular

               ,     ‒   
emphasis was put on sanitation and programmes to combat endemic
diseases, including cholera and smallpox.
If their governments saw no reason to distrust developments in
Korea, few of the Westerners who lived and worked there did so either.
By  the largest national cohorts were the  Americans and 
British. They rarely thought of Korea as their permanent home, even
though they knew that the hazards of travel, disease, lawlessness and pri-
vation reduced their chances of seeing their homelands again. Generally,
the largest occupational group, the missionaries, saw Japanese ideas of
efficiency and modernization as cause for optimism, though some were
wary of the sudden revival in folk religion. The operators of two
American and one French gold mine at Unsan and Taeyudong were
relieved to be allowed to continue their operations, and would go on ill-
treating their workers appallingly for the next thirty-plus years. Durham
Stevens was posthumously awarded the Japanese Medal of the Order of
the Rising Sun with Grand Seal, and has been excoriated by Koreans
ever since. But two foreigners whose reputations remain untarnished to
the present day among patriots are Homer Hulbert and Ernest Bethell.
Hulbert, a Methodist missionary, had been in Korea since . He was
not blind to its needs, but after  his initial support for Japanese influ-
ence changed to strong condemnation, and he pleaded the cause of
Korean independence in The Hague and Washington so outspokenly
that he was unable to return to the suffering land. The English journal-
ist Ernest Bethell stayed on in Korea after covering the Russo-Japanese
War. The two newspapers he founded, one in English and one in han’gŭl,
were critical of Japanese intentions, and twice the authorities had
him tried. When he died in May  his collaborator Yang Kit’ak
(–) continued the Taehan Maeil Sinbo (‘Korean Daily News’)
until the new Government-General bought it in  and published it as
Maeil Sinbo.

Annexation: Japan sets course, ‒

In the third week of August , Japanese soldiers once more sur-
rounded the Korean emperor in his palace. Again they forced imperial
acquiescence to a treaty surrendering his country’s independence. He
did not, however, have to sign it himself, for his own prime minister, Yi
Wanyong, had already done so. The Treaty of Annexation renamed
Korea Chōsen, Seoul Keijō and P’yŏngyang Heijō. At the head of the
Government-General (Sōtokufu) was to be a governor-general,
appointed by the Japanese prime minister and answerable to the cabinet
and emperor in Tokyo. He would govern with a central advisory com-

                  
mittee that included a small number of cooperative Koreans. General
Terauchi Masatake, a former Japanese war minister, was the first
appointee, and held the post until returning to Tokyo as prime minis-
ter in . Government bureaux, originally six in number, were
increased to ten in , and the country was divided into thirteen
provinces. After  all senior administrative posts, including those in
banking, law, industry, business and land management, were held by
Japanese, most of whom knew no Korean language. The Japanese mil-
itary police, operating as a virtual army of occupation, turned the
whole country into what a London Daily Mail reporter called ‘a mili-
tary camp’, and initiated what the historian Andrew Nahm has referred
to as ‘a reign of terror’ (Picture Essay ).
According to the Annual Report for , the number of Japanese
residents in Korea was ,, or just over  per cent of the popula-
tion. Even through the s the ratio remained below  per cent, but
despite their relatively modest overall total, Japanese command of the
Korean economy was disproportionately great. Between  and 
the Government-General conducted a comprehensive land survey
intended to make Japanese acquisition and management of land easier.
Any property not registered with the authorities was confiscated, along
with lands formerly owned by the government and royal household,
and Japanese ownership of arable land rose from under  per cent in
 to around one third in . Productivity rose, though Koreans
scarcely felt the benefit of it. In  rice shortages in Japan led to riot-
ing, and Korea was seen as the answer to the need. In , . per
cent, and in ,  per cent of the rice crop was exported to Japan.
In  the figure was a massive . per cent. The Japanese controlled
finance and dominated the industrial scene. To benefit domestic
Japanese manufacturers the Government-General concentrated on
improving communications, docks and rice production. It limited cor-
porate development: in accordance with the Company Law of ,
new ventures must obtain a licence and investments were mainly chan-
nelled into existing zaibatsu, but pressure from Japanese producers
increased after World War One until the Company Law was repealed in
 and more expansion was permitted. Urbanization grew, begin-
ning the transformation of traditional Korean community life and
simultaneously creating conditions in which the seeds of radical nation-
alism could germinate.
Japan’s colonialism needs to be understood not only as a step
towards the fulfilment of an age-old dream of continental domination,
but also against the background of Western colonial imperialism in
East Asia, from which Meiji leaders had learned. Neither colonialism nor

               ,     ‒   
 The former Japanese Government-General Building,
Seoul

Japanese policy was to eradicate nostalgia for recent history in Korea, and
to get rid of the old-fashioned, the inefficient and the superstitious.
Hundreds of buildings in the Kyŏngbok Palace were destroyed in a sym-
bolic washing away of the Chosŏn heritage, and the great Kwanghwa
Gate that had stood in front of it was removed. The new neo-
Renaissance Government-General Building was commissioned from a
German architect, George de Lalande, and built provocatively in front
of the old throne hall, Kŭnjŏng-jŏn. It not only hid this from view but
also interrupted the flow of p’ungsu energy from Pukhan mountain
down the north–south arterial road, Kokamon-dori (today’s Sejongro),
towards Namsan. Begun in  and completed in , the Govern-
ment General Building was a splendid edifice. (So were other demon-
strations of what the Japanese would do architecturally for their new
province, among them Seoul railway station, City Hall and the Central
Post Office. Most Koreans, however, felt emotionally attached to their
traditional single-storeyed and thatched styles and remained unappre-
ciative.) The white-marble grand hall made a huge and spectacular
entrance. Its curved ceiling was supported on Corinthian columns and
its walls decorated with murals by the Western-trained artist Sanzo


Wada (–). Long corridors were adorned with tiles and mould-
ed reliefs; a wide staircase led up to the second floor, and surmounting
the building was a dome of stained glass. In the basement was the inter-
rogation and torture centre used by the police.
Following Liberation in  and the division of the country, the
building was first commandeered by the American Military
Government, which gave it the unofficial title of Capitol, and in 
it became the seat of government for the Republic of Korea. Rising
nationalism found this inappropriate in view of its Japanese origins, and
in  it was converted, none too happily, into new headquarters for
the National Museum. In time that too was deemed to require a purpose-
built home, and one of the most impressive modern buildings in Korea
was condemned to demolition.


imperialism was yet tainted by the vitriol heaped on them later in the
century, and their advocates no doubt believed sincerely in the benefits
bestowed by spreading their own way of life. Liberal colonialism offered
the recipient potential growth benefits: to reject them invited charges
of reactionary nationalism. In September  the Manila-based Far
Eastern Review blamed Korean ‘suspicion and misgiving’ for the slow rate
of progress over the previous five years and looked ahead to ‘a remark-
able era of development under the new regime’. Its editorial went on:

It is generally realized that Korea, in its decadent state, was a

menace to Japan. It offered temptation for international
intrigue. It is now an added safeguard to the integrity of the
Japanese Empire . . . [Japanese writers] claim that Japan’s con-
trol of Korea will give it the same authority there to carry out
its policy as that enjoyed by America in its [Philippine] island
possessions, and, while it is the present pronounced policy of
the administration at Washington to give the islands independ-
ence at some indefinite date, it is the generally accepted belief
that the advantages of American sovereignty over the islands
will become in time so apparent to the Filipinos that they will
refuse to countenance agitation favoring withdrawal.

So Korea took its place alongside Taiwan as the second of Japan’s outer
provinces (gaiji) and was expected to be grateful. In December ,
speaking to the Colonial Academic Society, Governor-General Terauchi
promised that Japan would lead Korea to civilization. The Japanese were
well aware that a great many of the  million Koreans (or the  million
of Prince Yonghwan’s dying hyperbole) were not yet grateful enough. In
particular, the new colonialists perceived a link between Christianity,
especially Protestantism, and Korean nationalism, and unearthed what
they claimed to be a plot to assassinate General Terauchi at a meeting
scheduled with the American Presbyterian missionary George McCune
in North P’yŏngan province on  December . The police made
many hundreds of arrests, including the Sinminhoe leaders Kim Ku and
Yun Ch’iho and the journalist Yang Kit’ak. On  June  the trial
began of  defendants, mostly Christians, accused of treason. It was
known later as the Korean Conspiracy Trial. Falsified evidence and tor-
ture got  convicted, and although most were released on appeal in
 after worldwide publicity, Yun served four years and Kim Ku three.
In the words of Donald Clark, the case ‘proved that the freedoms guar-
anteed by the Meiji Constitution were not to be extended to the Koreans,
and perhaps least of all to Korean Christians under the influence of for-

                  
eigners’. Missionary schools were to be found all over the country.
Besides the basics of Christianity, which the Japanese insisted should
gradually be phased out, they also made a point of teaching han’gŭl, and
Korean patriots were increasingly recognizing the value of the native
script. Some of the private Korean schools that had sprung up under the
Protectorate and survived into the colonial period also taught it. Patriotic
periodicals such as Ch’oe Namsŏn’s Sonyŏn (‘Young People’, appearing
–), and Ch’ŏngch’un (‘Youth’, –) used han’gŭl. So, more
surprisingly, did the government mouthpiece, Maeil Sinbo.
Faced with the takeover and suffering of their country, what could
Koreans do? Many former yangban, who traditionally eschewed radi-
calism anyway, saw sufficient opportunities to adapt to new circum-
stances without losing their familiar privileges. But the majority of the
population who struggled against rising odds to earn a precarious
living were predictably drawn from the lower classes. Many of these
were driven from their villages, forced out by Japanese victimization
or economic circumstance. Some left home to join partisan armies.
Considerable numbers went abroad, swelling the Korean communities
in Japan itself, and in Manchuria, the Soviet Far East and China (by
 more than  per cent of all Koreans lived abroad). Others sought
solace through religious affiliation, whether Ch’ŏndogyo, Buddhist,
Christian or shamanistic. After the way they had been treated over
the last half-century or so, Koreans might just have rolled over and
succumbed to a kind of universal depression. Instead, Donald Clark
has pointed out (personal communication) that whereas in  ‘most
Koreans accepted annexation without protest, [it was] only nine years
later [when] they rose up against the Japanese in nationalist fervor’, the
famous Samil (March First) movement.
Ironically, the first shot was fired in Tokyo. Young Koreans could
discuss radical political ideas more freely abroad, and, stirred by emo-
tion – and for some, suspicion – at the death of ex-Emperor Kojong on
 January  and hopeful of the impact of Versailles peace negotia-
tions after Woodrow Wilson’s defence of national self-determination,
a Declaration of Independence by Yi Kwangsu (–), student
founder of the Korea Youth Independence Association in Tokyo, was
read out on  February . News of this enthused patriots at home,
and on the morning of  March sixteen Protestants, fifteen members of
Ch’ŏndo-gyo (among them Son Pyŏnghŭi) and two Buddhists signed an
affirmation of Korea’s right to independence in a Seoul restaurant. The
document was composed by Ch’oe Namsŏn, and they bravely read it
aloud. At  p.m. the same day, in Pagoda Park, a teacher read it again to
a large crowd waving the Korean flag and singing the national anthem,

               ,     ‒   
Aegukka. Then, as they took to the streets shouting Manse! (‘Long Live
[Korea]!’), the mood turned nasty. The  signatories were arrested,
their plea for non-violence went unheeded, and the police response
as they struggled to contain the uprising was brutal. Contemporary
reports, smacking of hyperbole as such things inevitably do, told of sus-
pects rounded up and imprisoned; schools, church buildings and other
property destroyed; schoolgirls raped; entire villages massacred. Order
was restored by May, but students went on fanning the flames into a
wider resistance movement, and over the next twelve months estimates
of casualties rose to , dead and , wounded.
Some of those who escaped abroad ended up in Shanghai, where
they formed a Korean Provisional Government (). They elected
Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman, –), then in America, as their
president in absentia. The  had no authority over any Koreans and
struggled to achieve any kind of international recognition; it was not
recognized even by many of the anti-Japanese activists continuing the
fight across the peninsula itself; but it helped to keep the notion of sov-
ereignty alive. This was the make-or-break time for Korean independ-
ence, for as Shin and Robinson put it, ‘The notion of the nation was
not [yet] an immutable given . . . It was contested, negotiated, reformu-
lated and reconstructed during the colonial period.’

Nationalism, culture and politics, ‒

Admiral Saitō Makoto, brought in with the unenviable job of handling
the aftermath of March First, arrived in September  to the same
sort of welcome that had greeted Terauchi, a botched assassination
attempt. The appointment of a more cultured man than the two gen-
erals who preceded him as governor-general was a sign that Tokyo at
least recognized the failure of hard-line militarism. Saitō was not,
however, a soft touch, as he soon showed by ordering a military expe-
dition against Korean ŭibyŏng attacking the Japanese in the rugged
Manchurian border region of Jiandao (Kor. Kando). This became infa-
mous as the ‘Jiandao Incident’, and a Canadian missionary there
reported that ‘Koreans are daily being shot and whole villages burned’.
Both sides made exaggerated casualty claims, with missionary sources
estimating more than , Korean deaths and nearly , homes
burned in October–November .
Taken aback by the Samil Movement’s ferocity and the growing
resistance, the admiral eased open a safety valve. He was not about to
make any concessions to Koreans over the right to run their own country,
but he did aim to produce more cooperation from his citizens, and the

                  
terms kyōson (‘coexistence’) and kyōdo no fukuri (‘mutual welfare’) were
increasingly heard. An embargo on Korean publishing was lifted in
 and two newspapers were immediately launched, Tonga Ilbo
(‘East Asia Daily’) by the industrialist and cultural entrepreneur Kim
Sŏngsu and Chosŏn Ilbo (‘Korea Daily’) by Sin Sŏgu. A dispensation to
organize societies led to the sprouting of well over , new ones,
including the influential Han’gŭl Research Society in December .
More than one-third had religious affiliations. Not unnaturally, the
Government-General also made use of the trend. Pro-Japanese
Koreans were recruited into its Kungmin Hyŏphoe (‘People’s
Society’), and in  it set up the Korean History Compilation
Committee. Responding to powerful denunciations of the annexation
by the exiled journalist Pak Ŭnsik (–), the Committee saw its
prime task as proving Korea’s ancient links with and dependence on
Japan. Schools were already using Sōtokufu-approved textbooks assert-
ing the colonial power’s claims to dominion. Nationalists like Ch’oe
Namsŏn countered by reviving interest in Tan’gun as an independent
progenitor of the Korean people.
Korean radio broadcasting did not begin until , and three
years previously foreigners had been forbidden to use short-wave sets.
Newspapers and magazines were therefore vital to people who cared
about their country and could read. Tonga Ilbo and Chosŏn Ilbo imme-
diately provided a forum for debate on the nation’s ills and ways of
alleviating them. Both promoted the use of han’gŭl and spoke out in
favour of social reform. In the February  issue of the
Ch’ŏndo’gyo-backed intellectual journal Kaebyŏk (‘Dawning’), Yi
Kwangsu denounced the sterile, ritualistic political and social systems
of the past, the kind of thing the Government-General might have
been glad to hear had it not been for the author’s avowedly national-
istic tone. As political opinion polarized, censorship increased, and
the police – whose numbers grew from , in  to around ,
in  – were given harsher powers of search and confiscation.
Kaebyŏk was closed down in , and journalists moderated their
tone and followed a more accommodating path.
New decade; fresh opportunities; greater outspokenness. Nationalist
critics were quick to condemn the country’s economic ills. Yi Kwangsu
launched a Native Production Society in December  and Ch’oe
Namsŏn a Korean Products Promotion Society the following February,
both aimed at stimulating Korean manufacturing and sales. Kaebyŏk sup-
ported both. But the Government-General itself, albeit out of self-inter-
est, was already talking about the promotion of co-prosperity (kyōei)
and taking steps to bring Korean capitalists on board. It abolished the

               ,     ‒   
Company Law and selected Korean businessmen to join a new industrial
commission. As tariff revision made cheap Japanese imports more acces-
sible to poorer Korean consumers, the two societies lost their impetus,
and were further undermined when the Government-General began
offering subsidies to Korean companies that would cooperate with the
authorities and employ Japanese-speaking staff. One of those that accept-
ed was Kim Sŏngsu’s Kyŏngsŏng Spinning and Weaving Company
(Kyŏngbang). As it widened its manufacturing operations and diversified
into railways and financial services it became the first chaebŏl, the Korean
equivalent of the Japanese zaibatsu. On the plus side it provided employ-
ment for Korean workers, but against that must be set the fact that con-
ditions in its factories were horrible, and remained unimproved despite
strikes in  and .
In the s the Government-General had put agriculture first.
Although the s began with a drive to open up new lands, increase
the use of chemical fertilizers and improve irrigation, it was industry
and commerce that benefited most as the decade unrolled. Landowners
were persuaded to invest in financial services such as the Korean Life
Insurance Corporation. Joint ventures were permitted and the country
opened up by an expanded rail network. Noguchi Jun’s development of
the Hŭngnam industrial complex in South Hamgyŏng represented the
first step in the industrialization of north Korea. It began with a fertil-
izer plant and eventually expanded into electro-chemical sections,
important to the Japanese even though ordinary Koreans derived little
benefit from them. The suffering of the peasantry deepened. They
were growing ever more rice but eating less and less of it themselves, a
pattern that would persist and multiply. Seventy-five per cent of them
were in debt by .
Thanks to moderate nationalists’ efforts to stir up a sense of patri-
otism among businessmen, the number of Korean small entrepreneurs
rose. But many thought no further than profit-making for their imme-
diate families and associates, and Yi Kwangsu denounced the general
attitude towards growth as too blinkered. Implying, as he did in Tonga
Ilbo in January , that Koreans must build up a better educational
and economic base in the hunt for eventual independence opened him
up to accusations of accommodationism, and his plea met with no
widespread response. One company that did briefly show that his
vision was not incompatible with demonstrative nationalism was An
Hŭije’s Paeksan, a Pusan-based import-export company founded in
 that set up schools, financed Korean students in Japan and chan-
nelled funds into the independence movement across Korea and
Manchuria. The police closed it down in .

                  
 The Government-General remodelled the education system, enti-
tling Koreans to secondary education in  and enabling more
teenagers to go to colleges in Japan. (Ch’oe Namsŏn, Kim Sŏngsu and
Yi Kwangsu were all alumni of Waseda.) But since it still failed to make
even primary education compulsory and racial discrimination was
undisguised, it was Japanese children who benefited from the best edu-
cational opportunities. At the tertiary level, moderate nationalists
launched a Society to Establish a National University (Minnip Taehak
Kisŏng Chunbihoe) in November . The Government-General
upstaged them and opened its own Keijō Imperial University (today’s
Seoul National University) in . But most of its teachers and (male-
only) students were Japanese, and even the Society’s own plans were no
more inclined to break the heritage of traditional elitism. In the end, it
diverted what funds it accumulated into a library at Posŏng College,
founded in  by Yi Yongik and later to become Koryŏ University.
Radical nationalist thinking aimed beyond the limited advantages
that Koreans derived from Japanese measures. What Yi Kwangsu called
for in his newspaper articles of  was an extension of practical edu-
cation in rural areas and training in basic administrative skills. Real edu-
cation must be progressive. Students took part in a campaign against
mass illiteracy. Women, too, became involved in nationalist politics.
They demonstrated actively in the course of the March First
Movement, and formed the Patriotic Women’s Society of Korea
(Taehan Min’guk Aeguk Puinhoe) and the Korean Women’s League, or
Friends of the Hibiscus (Kŭn’uhoe). The vice-chairman of the former,
Yi Hyegyŏng, endured three years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
Moderate nationalists formed no single representative organization,
but at the opposite end of the political spectrum the Korean Communist
Party was launched in April . Its survival was straight away put in
jeopardy in November when secret messages from one of its founders,
Pak Hŏnyŏng, in Seoul to Yŏ Unhyŏng in Shanghai were intercepted at
Sinŭiju, and many of its members arrested. More were jailed in , as
mass demonstrations followed the funeral on  June of the last emperor,
Sunjong. But in , in a classic attempt to spread its appeal from
within a more broadly based organization, it participated in the
establishment of the Sin’ganhoe (‘New Shoot Society’), a common front
of radicals and moderates. Sin’ganhoe created a nationwide network of
branches and quickly acquired some , members. Not only did it
steady communist fortunes, it also helped to keep anti-Japanese feeling
simmering until the next boiling-over point was reached. This came late
in October . Localized fighting erupted after Japanese youths
insulted three Korean schoolgirls at Kwangju railway station, and

               ,     ‒   
Korean students across the country, already resentful of the better
facilities enjoyed by their Japanese peers and the inadequate teaching of
Korean language and history, took up the fight. The police invaded
school campuses; students were expelled and suspended; many were
imprisoned. It was the greatest nationalist demonstration to occur in
Korea for ten years. Forty-four of Sin’ganhoe’s left-wing leaders were
arrested in January , and when surviving moderates tried to take
control of the society the communists – unhappy at its loss of
revolutionary impetus – closed it down in May .
The June th Incident of  and the Kwangju Incident of 
showed that Saitō’s velvet-glove approach had failed to meet with uni-
versal success. Ethnic integration was not progressing as planned, and
Koreans wanted still more political freedom. But they also indicated
the failure of the moderate nationalists’ gradualist approach to defuse
racial tension and satisfy aspirations for short-term victories. Moderate
leaders were the intellectual inheritors of the elitist yangban tradition;
but now they identified long-term salvation with middle-class intellec-
tual leadership and its eventual re-education of the labouring masses,
whom they seemed prepared to neglect in the interim. Colonial status,
they conceded, had to be accepted and its rules kept for the time being.
Michael Robinson writes: ‘In retrospect, cultural nationalism could be
interpreted as a program that would allow Korean intellectuals to main-
tain their own status as a social and cultural elite by monopolizing a
truncated version of nationalism that tolerated national cultural auton-
omy within the confines of Japanese sovereignty.’ It was, he suggests,
sadae in new guise, putting their own Westernized values in place of
traditional yangban admiration for Chinese inspiration. If ever the sit-
uation of a country called for the closing of ranks in resistance to a
common foe, this was it. Past experience had shown, however, that
where political decisions were concerned Koreans did not come by
unanimity easily, and the multiplicity of small parties and groups that
sprang up in the s posed no serious threat to the colonial power.
What of the religious organizations? Ch’ŏndo-gyo continued to help
the peasantry, forming a Korean Farmers’ Association in  to try and
improve living and working conditions in the countryside; but its
involvement in the June th Incident led to the arrest of many members
and deepened Japanese suspicions of its motives. The Buddhist commu-
nity had greater experience in dealing with governments, centuries of it
in fact. It was used to welcoming their support and tolerating their peri-
odic interference in its affairs. Now, Buddhists felt they were regaining a
measure of respect denied them by Chosŏn Neo-Confucians. Soon after
Annexation the Government-General had reorganized and taken effec-

                  
tive control of the Korean community, and Buddhists were encouraged
to go to Japan for study. One of the leading Buddhist scholars, Yi
Nŭnghwa (–), later sat on the Korean History Compilation
Committee, where as an expert on shamanism he also acknowledged the
vital role that folk religion had played in traditional Korean society. This
did not mean that all Buddhists were collaborationist. The Wŏn sect,
or Society for Dharma Research (Pulbŏp yŏn’guhoe), founded in Chŏlla
Namdo by Pak Chungbin in the late s, may have appeared to the
occupiers to be accommodating, but actually advocated material and
spiritual strengthening for its own sake.
Christian missionaries, meanwhile, did their best to maintain the
ethos of social concern introduced by their nineteenth-century prede-
cessors, especially through medicine and education, though the mis-
sion bodies were far from agreed about how best to counter pressures
from either official policy or individual Japanese persecutors. Dedica-
tion to the saving of souls in East Asia provided men and women of
widely varied Western upbringing with no automatic, God-given
empathy for their flock. It was not easy to disregard their own cultural
heritage and to adjust to Asian priorities and sensitivities. Some of
them were just as liable as the Japanese to write off traditional Korean
ways as backward and in need of foreign-determined change. Despite
the Government-General’s restoration of the right to teach religion in
, Korean Christians and their foreign pastors experienced discrim-
ination and persecution, and some gave way to apostasy and accommo-
dationism. Nevertheless, many instances of selfless devotion to Korean
needs and sensitivities and dedication to the cause of social reform
helped Christianity to make strong progress. So committed did
P’yŏngyang become as a centre for Protestantism and Catholicism that
it has subsequently been dubbed – albeit on doubtful grounds – the
‘most Christian city in Asia’: by the mid-s,  churches were serv-
ing its , inhabitants. Ominous for Christians, however, was the
Government-General’s decision in  to build a national Shintō
shrine, Chōsen Jingu, at a site on Seoul’s Namsan.

Cultural cleansing and the advent of war, ‒

Approximately , Japanese were living in Korea in . Rather
more Koreans (sources estimate ,–,) lived in Manchuria,
where they farmed mainly rice and opium poppies. Their relations
with local Chinese were not always peaceful, yet as far back as the
Jiandao Incident in  the Japanese had suspected the regional war-
lord Zhang Zuolin of siding with them, and poor social and economic

               ,     ‒   
circumstances made the Koreans a fertile recruiting ground for the
Chinese Communist Party. A Japanese–Manchurian agreement in 
promised a reward for every Korean ‘communist’ arrested by local
officials and led to numerous outrages. When Kwantung army officers
instigated the small explosion that gave General Hayashi Senjurō a pre-
text for sending an invasion force across the Yalu river on  September
, the prospects looked bleak for Chinese and Koreans alike. As
Korean guerrillas linked up with Chinese in the struggle against the
conquerors, an army regiment sent into Jiandao from Korea in April
 killed , suspected communists of both races. To the Japanese,
the newly inaugurated puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria) acted
as a cushion between its Korean colony and the unattractive axis of
Guomindang China and the . The Government-General encour-
aged entire communities to shift from northern Korea to Manchuria to
assist in the urgent drive for industrial output, and , Japanese
migrants, mostly peasants, poured in at the rate of about , per
annum between  and . The new gaiji would take time to yield
its undoubted benefits, but in the mean time the basis for industrial
development had already been laid in northern Korea, where the pro-
duction of raw materials and the growth of manufacturing, especially
in the munitions industry, became the top priority under Governor-
General Ugaki Kazushige (–). With the formation of the Chōsen
Petroleum Company in , Western companies in the oil and mining
industries, including Caltex, the Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary Rising
Sun and the Oriental Consolidated Mining Company, began to suffer.
Japanese zaibatsu such as Noguchi, Mitsubishi and Matsui, on the
other hand, received substantial funding, and as pressure on land
increased in the south, starving peasants headed north in search of fac-
tory jobs, poorly paid though these were. Thousands more crossed the
sea to Japan.
Moderate nationalists came under pressure to collaborate. The
industry of publishing newspapers, magazines and books was allowed
to expand. Michael Robinson, analysing popular culture, found that
‘s Korea was relatively densely saturated with printed materials’,
and that ‘the Korean middle class was also reading Japanese publica-
tions’. In line with the Naisen Ittai (Kor. naesŏn ilche, ‘Korea Japan One
Body’) assimilation policy, attempts were made to convince Koreans
that the fate of the two nations bound them together; and as Korean
culture was reinterpreted as a relative of Japanese culture, appeals were
made to the Korean sense of sacrifice for the communal good and hier-
archical obedience to those in authority. Some Koreans may have been
convinced by the argument that assimilation into the Yamato minjuku

                  
(‘Great Japanese Race’) would help achieve the supremacy of oriental
over Western races. The editors of Tonga Ilbo were not, and provoca-
tively demonstrated it on  August  by publishing a picture of
the marathon winner Son Kijŏng receiving a gold medal at the Berlin
Olympic Games, but replacing the rising sun on his vest with the
Korean t’aegŭk roundel. It was the very day the new governor-general,
General Minami Jirō, arrived in Seoul, and the paper was immediately
suspended.
To modernize Korea without simultaneously encouraging
Koreans’ nostalgia for past traditions or aspirations of future inde-
pendence was a delicate line for the Japanese to tread. The Government-
General accepted that an educated workforce was essential to sustain
industrial expansion and economic development. More schools were
opened in manufacturing centres, and enrolment in elementary schools
rose from . per cent in  to  per cent in , with boys in the
majority. But in  only . per cent of Korean applicants to Keijō
Imperial University were admitted. Nearly , Koreans gained their
tertiary education in Japan, most at private rather than the imperial
universities, but nonetheless of better quality than anything available
in Korea.
Naisen Ittai was trumpeted the more loudly as the war effort
mounted. But when the Japanese began to force all Koreans to visit
Shintō shrines in late  and make obeisance, tension was height-
ened. Presbyterian leaders in P’yŏngyang urged their members to
refuse, and although Catholics and Methodists saw no objection to
what they termed a secular ritual, a conflict reminiscent of the fateful
Rites Controversy in eighteenth-century China loomed. General
Minami’s credentials gave no reassurance. An ex-commander of the
Japanese army in Korea and former ambassador to Manchukuo, he
came to gear Korea up for war. He was also determined to get the
Western missionaries out of his country. The police used extensive
powers to intimidate and arrest Koreans and foreigners alike. In 
alone they threatened and detained , people. From March 
use of Japanese language was made compulsory by all those younger
Koreans who already spoke it, and efforts to teach it to the older gen-
erations were stepped up; November  saw the compulsory, igno-
minious adoption of Japanese names for use by all Koreans. Korean
newspapers were closed down: strict censorship was imposed, and
news was hard to come by. In  the traditional East Asian mutual-
responsibility system was revived as local communities were organized
into ten-family neighbourhood units for the enforcement of rules
and regulations. Spying and denunciation were encouraged, especially

               ,     ‒   
against those – such as Christians – who were suspected of harbouring
sympathies with foreigners. By the end of the year, though, most
Westerners had left Korea.
Conscription into Korean mines and factories was introduced in
, and thousands of men left for war work in Japanese factories.
About , volunteered to enlist in the Japanese army between
February  and . Those who became officers, like those who
joined the Japanese police, later came in for the strongest condemna-
tion as collaborators. Some were accused of coercing others into serv-
ice as student volunteers and ‘comfort women’ (ŭianbu). Ten times as
many were compulsorily conscripted in –, and a further ,
drafted into manual war work. In wartime everyone expects to tighten
belts, and as the  inflicted growing losses on the imperial forces after
the Battle of Midway in June  the Japanese people endured great
hardships. But as they did so, ill-treatment of their Korean ‘compatri-
ots’ increased commensurately. Korea was spared Allied bombing but
suffered dreadfully nonetheless. Materials were commandeered for the
Japanese war effort; rice output, which had risen in the early s
thanks to better irrigation and more use of fertilizers, fell to about 
million tonnes in the years –, and as exports to Japan rose,
Koreans were reduced to eating more barley and millet; heating fuels
were in short supply. The ordeals of comfort women (a euphemism for
young girls forced into prostitution and quite wrongly regarded by
some Japanese as the successors to the kisaeng whom they had got to
know well) were so appalling that shame forced them to conceal the
truth about their abuse for almost fifty years, until the end of the cen-
tury. Koreans, wrote the  missionary Ethel Underwood in ,

revile and hate their rulers and despise them. Thousands of

Korean leaders from schools and churches, from newspapers
and farms [who have been] thrown into jails these last few
years report that the only conversation of the police is of
drink, and of the lustful delights of girls from inns and cafés,
and from the registered brothels. Brutal by day and bestial by
night, the policeman is both hated and despised.

   

Reinterpreting history to demonstrate consanguinity; enforcing the use
of the Japanese language, Japanese names and Japanese state religion;
educating the most promising Korean youth at Japanese universities;
banning a wide range of publications: in today’s terminology, Naisen

                  
Ittai amounted to cultural cleansing. Yet where Korean ancient history
was concerned, at least, the trouble taken by Japanese anthropologists
and archaeologists early in the twentieth century constituted a form of
flattery. They published beautiful photographic studies of memorials,
stelae and ancient buildings, and their reports would inspire and serve
researchers long after Liberation. Sekino Tadashi made the first survey
of Korean antiquities in , and later he, Yanagi Soetsu, the Asakawa
brothers and Imanishi Ryū all published extensive data on the Lelang
period. Yanagi’s empathy for Korean art and sympathy for the suffer-
ings of the Korean people fired his passion for Chosŏn porcelain and
helped to inspire the Japanese mingei (folk crafts) movement. The
Research Division of the South Manchurian Railway, the Mantetsu
Chōsabu, contributed to important discoveries across north-east Asia.
The formation of the Committee for Archaeological Investigation
(Chōsen Kōseki Chōsa Iinkai) in  led to the publication of many
volumes of detailed and careful reports on sites and monuments over
the next twenty years. On the face of it, the Japanese were simply doing
in Korea what Western archaeologists were concurrently doing in
China. There was, however, a difference in underlying motivation: as
well as filling cases in European museums, the British, Swedes and
French enthusiastically digging across China had a more detached
interest in unearthing the story of early life in the Orient; the Japanese,
on the other hand, were out to find proof of shared ethnicity, and hence
to legitimize their claim to govern Korea. Archaeological discoveries
were sent back to Japanese museums until the Government-General
established the Chōsen Sōtokufu Museum (later to become the
National Museum) in . Among its first notable acquisitions were
finds made in the Dunhuang region by the Japanese monk-explorer
Count Kozui Otani a dozen years before, including wooden masks and
a straw basket. (The discovery by Chinese archaeologists in December
 of similar masks and a basket confirmed a Tang/Silla-period
dating for the Otani objects.)
Individual Japanese also began acquiring Korean artefacts, setting
an example to wealthy Koreans who had traditionally lagged behind
both the Chinese and Japanese in the collecting habit. The landowner
Chŏn Hyŏngp’il (–), an antiquarian bibliophile, was guided in
his purchases by one of the Ch’ŏndo’gyo signatories of the Declaration
of Independence, the master calligrapher O Sech’ang (–).
Chŏn built a private gallery for his treasures that later became the
Kansŏng Museum (). The interest of the Kyŏngbang owner Kim
Sŏngsu lay in folk materials rather than fine arts, and when he took over
the struggling Posŏng College in  his own collection was displayed

               ,     ‒   
there as a token of determination to preserve national consciousness.
The college received a substantial bequest from a female landowner,
An Hamp’yŏng, which Kim devoted to building up an archive on
women’s lifestyles, and when Posŏng became Koryŏ University in ,
the basis had been laid for one of Korea’s finest university museums.
Korea’s supposed dependence on Japan was emphasized in a -
volume History of Korea (Chōsen-shi) completed in  by the Korean
History Compilation Society. But if the Japanese viewed culture as a
means of binding Korea into their empire, Koreans under occupation
had different ideas. For some, the arts offered a diversion from the
depression of the world around them. Critics who were unable to
appreciate art for art’s sake accused them of escapism, though by pre-
serving and building upon traditional styles and patterns made so
familiar through the long years of the Chosŏn dynasty it could be said
that they were, in their way, doing their bit for their country. Others, as
they became aware of the great Western traditions, were anxious to
develop their own aesthetic taste and expand the parameters of Korean
art by experimentation with new forms, including abstract art. Radical
nationalists, meanwhile, found that painting, music and writing all
offered opportunities to protest, either overtly or more subtly, at the
pillaging of their land.

Painting
The Sŏhwa Misulwŏn (‘Calligraphy and Painting Fine Art School’),
founded by a group of leading artists in  in succession to the
Tŏhwa, lasted only until the Japanese closed it down in . One of
its alumni was Kim Ŭnho (–), the last artist to paint the
portrait of a Korean monarch. In  he headed for Japan, where
he studied with Yūki Somei. On returning to Korea he opened his
Nakchŏnghŭn (‘Linking with the Young Pavilion’) in . No special-
ist art colleges existed in colonial Korea, and it was only through pri-
vately run groups such as this that young painters could learn their
craft. Kim Kichang (–) was one of Nakchŏnghŭn’s protégés;
so was Chŏn Hyongp’il; a third was Chang Woosung (b. ),
renowned nowadays for his reinterpretation of Northern Song literati-
style painting. Groups of artists also gained encouragement by joining
associations such as the Tongyŏnsa (‘Society for the Like-minded’), set
up by Yi Sangbŏm (–) in  for artists to study old and
modern art together. Traditional landscape and figure painting under-
went transformation, with the appearance of female nudes provoking
predictably hostile criticism from Confucian moralists. Some joined

                  
the politically motivated Korean Proletarian Artists’ Federation,
formed in , and produced cartoons and prints in Socialist Realist
style reminiscent of the Chinese woodblock artists’ movement. Among
Japanese teachers who introduced students in Korea to Western meth-
ods, such as the use of oils, and fostered an interest in modern art was
the abstract pioneer Yamaguchi Takeo (–). In Japan, Koreans
could study either Eastern- or Western-style art. There, Japanese
painters were swept along through the s on a patriotic tide of sub-
jects inspired by the expansionist political mood. Nationalist Koreans
joined the symbolically named Paek U Hoe (‘White Bull Society’),
which managed to hold several exhibitions before the authorities dis-
banded it. The Japanese felt less inclination than the Koreans for indi-
vidual experimentation, though even a Korean and admirer of Western
modernism such as Kim Whanki (Suhwa, –) could still begin
to make a name for himself in Japan, and was one of those selected to
exhibit by the progressive art group Jiyū Bijutsuka Kyōkai (‘Free
Artists’ Exhibition’).
While the Japanese art establishment was happy to absorb non-
controversial Korean artists into its own evolving world, the colonial
authorities were anxious to nip in the bud any development that might
be viewed by Koreans as a means of affirming independence through
reform. So when the Sŏhwa Hyŏphoe (‘Calligraphy and Painting
Association’), founded in  by Ko Hŭidong to promote modern
artistic concepts, introduced an annual art exhibition (the Hyŏchŏn)
in , the Government-General immediately countered with its
own annual series, the Senten (Kor. Sŏnjŏn). Known later as Korean
National Art Exhibitions (Chosŏn Misul Chŏllamhoe, or simply
Mijŏn), these lasted from  until , eight years after Minami
Jirō’s arrival marked the end of the Hypŏpchŏn. By the s the
Japanese could congratulate themselves that both in terms of size and
quality the Mijŏn outdid the Hyŏpchŏn, even if most of their
exhibitors, and all the judges, were Japanese. Artists were by no means
averse to expressing their opposition to colonial rule through their work,
but their nationalist conviction was generally of the moderate rather
than the radical kind (Picture Essay ). Among those who showed in
the Eastern-style section of the Mijŏn but tried to create an updated
Korean style were the figure painter Kim Ŭnho and the landscapist Yi
Sangbŏm. Yi was a member of the Sŏhwa Hyŏphoe, showing his work
for the first time at its exhibition of , but the next year he entered
the Eastern-style section of the Mijŏn, where he won the top prize
every year from  until . Among his innovations was the intro-
duction of fixed-point perspective.

               ,     ‒   
 Yi Insŏng, One Autumn Day
In the s the number of Korean painters submitting work to the Sŏnjŏn,
and being accepted by the Japanese judges, rose. Were they collaborating or
awakening to an opportunity to express nationalist sentiment? Some used
the palette favoured in Japanese art colleges, brighter and more varied than
that of traditional Chosŏn artists, while others, recalling Chŏng Sŏn’s True
View style, responded by working in colours they saw and associated with
the Korean landscape and the physiognomy and clothing of the Korean
people. Some later critics have seen the preference for ‘local colours’ as an
antidote to Westernization in art. Others argue that it was an alternative
contribution to a Japanese-favoured ‘Pan-Asianism’. Although the subjects
and styles it favoured were perhaps anachronistic, it was part of a rising
debate over the definition of Korean art that would roll on throughout the
rest of the century. And if, as Kim Youngna claims, ‘a desolate or pastoral
landscape lacking any sign of modernisation was the prevailing image of
Korea among most Japanese’, this should not be seen as an admission of
neglect on the part of the colonizers, rather as a statement of the modern
superiority of the centre (naiji) over the backward provinces.
Easily the most successful artist of his time, in Kim Youngna’s view,
was Yi Insŏng (–). To Japanese viewers, the bare-breasted peas-
ant woman seen in One Autumn Day () may have confirmed their
image of Korea as a land of forbidden fruits. Koreans, on the other hand,
might have recognized a defiant note in her face and noted the unusual fer-
tility of the typically reddish soil of the field in which she and the smaller
girl stand, gestures of optimism.

Yi Insŏng, One Autumn Day, , oil,  ×  cm.


 Music
Korean traditional music is itself commonly known as national music
(kugak), but under the influence of the late Chosŏn modernization
movement the concept of a Western-style national anthem was also
introduced. Kojong ordered the writing of an anthem in , and a
tune was composed by his German bandmaster, Franz Eckert, who had
worked in the music department of the Japanese imperial household
since . (Ironically, he had also written the tune for the Japanese
national anthem Kimigayo.) From  all schools began the day by
singing the song, but the sentiment expressed by the opening words,
‘High Lord of Heaven assist our Emperor’, failed to endear them to the
Japanese, and the practice ceased in . The words of today’s 
anthem, Aegukka (‘Love Country Song’), are said to have been written
by Yun Ch’iho in the s, and are sung to a tune written in  by An
Ikt’ae and incorporated into his Symphonic Fantasia, Korea of . The
first verse speaks stirringly of the land flourishing ‘till the Eastern Sea
and Paektu-san [Mount Paektu] dry out and wear away’, and the refrain
begins with a reference to the national flower, the hibiscus, ‘Thirty thou-
sand leagues of mountains, streams and deathless flowers’.
After , as Koreans went to study music in Japan and Germany,
kugak was generally considered to be outdated. According to the
musicologist Han Manyoung, Japanese research into its history was
inadequate and ‘attempted to show Korea merely as a bridge between
the high cultures of China and Japan’. Kugak was, nevertheless, to be
heard on Kyŏngsŏng Broadcasting programmes, along with folk music,
during the s. The establishment of a wholly Korean-language
service in  further promoted traditional cultural performances,
including p’ansori. The Japanese also began to popularize Western
music, anticipating perhaps, as in the case of modern painting, that in
time it would wipe nostalgia for past native traditions out of mind.
Players took up Western instruments and a few went abroad to study, in
European, American and Japanese conservatories. Prominent among
composers who began to write in modern idioms was Yun Isang
(–), whose music – though some Koreans dispute it – has
subsequently been described as embodying an instinctive Korean spirit.
At a more popular level new Korean songs, ch’angga, derived partly
from late nineteenth-century hymn settings, borrowed Western and
Japanese tunes, and ‘trot’ music introduced from Japan was even
adapted to reflect nationalistic sentiment.
And did all this mean the demise of court music, one of the glories
of traditional Korean culture? Fortunately not, for it was kept alive in

               ,     ‒   
the Yi Royal Court Music Office (Yi Wangjik Aakpu), saved from
extinction perhaps because of the respect the Japanese held for their
own surviving imperial court music, gagaku. The director and
kŏmun’go-player Ham Hwajin (–) made a significant contri-
bution to Korean musicology and published four works on the basis of
his research. Although most of the court rites were abolished, aak was
still performed at the Confucian and Royal Ancestral Shrines. The
Royal Conservatory, as the Aakpu is commonly known, was drastically
reduced in size; the principle of hereditary membership was officially
abolished; and students were recruited on only six occasions between
the years  and , when it comprised just  musicians.
Standards at the Conservatory fell, but with American technical collab-
oration, Japanese companies such as Shinsegi issued records of tradi-
tional Korean music. The Royal Conservatory made a disc entitled
‘Essence of Aak’ in ; p’ansori was recorded by the great Yi
Tongbaek (–); and a photograph taken after the recording of
the ‘Song of Ch’unhyang’ in  shows a formal group of six tradi-
tionally attired musicians, including Chŏng Chŏngnyŏl in a tall horse-
hair hat and a -year-old Kim Sohee. Between them these two bridged
a generational divide: Chŏng had been one of the male singers who
performed at Korea’s first Western-style theatre, the Wŏn’gak-sa, dur-
ing the Protectorate period, and Kim Sohee lived on to become one of
the ’s best-loved and outstanding singers of p’ansori and folk-songs.
The Koreans are a musical people, and they were neither the first nor
the last to understand that in time of warfare and occupation music
offers solace and stiffens resistance. Not aak: however highly valued that
may have been by the former nobility for its royalist traditions, to most
people it was too class-bound and esoteric. Even adaptations of native
folk tunes as instrumental suites (sanjo) were beyond popular apprecia-
tion. Folk-songs, however, were a different matter. Numerous local styles
enlivened the daily labour and social life of peasants and workers, and
however much the Japanese may have tried to discourage them and their
patriotic connections, it was beyond the powers of non-Korean-speaking
officials to eliminate them. The popularity of singing and songs with
regional connections led to the formation of a Korean Song Research
Society in , followed by a Korean Song and Dance Research Society
the following year. Yun Isang brought out a volume of folk-song settings
in . The Japanese even went so far as to honour one of the greatest
exponents of traditional folk dance, Han Sŏngjŭn (d. ).
Today’s best known of all Korean songs, Arirang, dates from some
time in the Chosŏn period. By the s it had already spawned many
variations. It tells of lovers parted by a hill, or in the late Chosŏn

                  
dynasty of workers carried away from their homes to help rebuild the
Kyŏngbok Palace. Besides the sorrow of the separated, it came to bear
the lament of Koreans mourning the loss of their homeland, whether to
the Japanese or through the division of their country after . What
particularly helped transform it from a pleasant-enough, lilting melody
with commonly encountered sentiments into an icon for Korean nation-
alism was its choice as the title for a silent film by Na Un’gyu in .
It was just seven years since the appearance of the first Korean film ever
and only four since the first feature film, Kuggyŏng (‘National Border’),
had been completed, but banned by the Japanese from public release.
But Na Un’gyu’s silent film excited the prospect of a national film
industry, and profit-seeking Japanese business helped finance what
Michael Robinson calls ‘a golden age of [Korean] silent films’, with up
to  being issued between  and . The hero of Na Un’gyu’s
Arirang is Yong Jin (played by Na himself), a student leader of the
March First protest arrested and driven insane by torture in police cus-
tody. On returning home he kills his bullying landlord, a Japanese
informer, and is rearrested. The film’s success was guaranteed by its
political message alone, but its artistic quality went further and ensured
it a place in cinematograph history.

Literature
In China the end of the imperial era in  prompted radical heart-
searching about the exclusivity of literati culture and the classical
language in which it was ineluctably embedded. As part of the New
Culture Movement originating around , the scholar-diplomat Hu
Shi launched a campaign for the use of ‘plain speech’ (baihua), citing
the progressiveness of Western countries where people wrote in the
vernacular language. However inevitable the eventual success of the
baihua movement, the power of the scholar class meant that it made
comparatively slow progress, undermining as it did Confucianism’s
canonical foundations. In Korea, as we have seen, scholars were also
brought up on the classics and were accustomed to using Chinese char-
acters. But though many scholars clung to them with genuine emotional
attachment, the existence of an efficient native alphabet, and the fact
that even character-based Korean literary styles had evolved away from
the strict syntax of classical Chinese, meant that the forces of reaction
were less deeply entrenched. So when Korean nationalists launched
their own New Culture Movement it met with some, but less convinc-
ing, opposition. Given the pride with which Koreans today exalt the
merits of han’gŭl, the only surprise is that the colonial power should

               ,     ‒   
have tolerated its use as long as it did. The first of nine editions of
Ch’angjo (‘Creation’) was produced by Korean students in Japan in
February , and in the culturally relaxed era of the early s lit-
erary magazines in Korea were able to promote the use of han’gŭl.
Their outspoken nationalism risked Japanese censure, and to avoid
government action the three issues of Paekcho (‘White Tide’) were
published under the name of a Methodist missionary.
The literary revolution had begun some years earlier. When Ch’oe
Namsŏn returned to Korea from Waseda University in  he imme-
diately founded the first of his innovative journals, Sonyŏn (‘Youth’), in
which he introduced Koreans to a new style of poetry (sinch’e-si).
Echoing the four-square pattern and rousing content of the Christian
hymn-like ch’angga songs, its form was novel; so was its style, appeal-
ing to the modernizing, patriotic instincts of the younger generation.
Poets such as Kim Sowŏl (–), with Chindallae kko (‘Azaleas’),
and a Buddhist monk who had signed the Declaration of Independence
in , Han Yong’un (–), with his collection of poetry Nim
ŭi ch’immuk (‘Silence of Love’), responded and expressed the popular
sense of loss somewhat wistfully. A poem by Yi Sanghwa (–)
in the June  edition of Kaebyŏk was more blatantly daring, begin-
ning with the lines: ‘The land is no longer our own / Does spring come
just the same / to the stolen fields?’
Other writers were not slow to follow the poets’ lead. Yi Injik
(–) and Yi Haejo (–) rewrote old stories and com-
posed new novels in language that ordinary people might understand,
staging some of them between  and  in Seoul’s Wŏn’gak-sa
theatre. But as the repression of the colonial era deepened, writers
sharpened their wits along with their powers of criticism, turning them
against the decadence of their own nation as much as the oppression of
the Japanese and discovering new scope for nationalism in both present-
day realism and historical fiction. The prolific Yi Kwangsu’s varied
works included Yŏjaŭi ilsaeng (‘A Women’s Life’) and Tanjong aesa (‘The
Tragic History of Tanjong’). Hong Myŏnghŭi (–), following
the tradition of the epic Chinese novel Shuihuzhuan, broke away from
upper-class subjects with his innovative tales of the low-class ŭibyŏng
hero Im Kkŏk-chŏng, appearing in Chosŏn Ilbo from  to . And
Yŏm Sangsŏp (‒) was surely lucky to escape censure for his
novel Samdae (‘Three Generations’), serialized by the same paper in
, which offered a forthright exposé of pressure experienced by
ordinary people in Seoul under Japanese rule.
Some authors naturally wanted to avoid confrontation and to write
simply for the sake of it. One of these was the tragic poet Yi Sang

                  
(–), whose disgust at the nature of the times led him into out-
rageously decadent behaviour. He composed the semi-autobiographical
story Nalgae (‘Wings’), in which he described the life of a man living off
his wife’s earnings as a prostitute, and was one of those who formed the
Club of Nine Men (Kuin-hoe, –), a short-lived group of writers
with no strong ideological persuasion. Radicals who saw literature as a
means of advancing class struggle formed the Korean Proletarian
Artists’ Federation. At the peak of its ten-year existence, before the
Japanese disbanded it in , it claimed around  members, some of
whom – such as Han Sŏrya (b. ) – would later become active in
post-war North Korean cultural life. Wartime conditions inevitably
brought forth more expressions of grief and resentment, and the poets
Yi Yuksa (–) and Yun Tongju (–) died in prison, vic-
tims of putting unrepentant nationalism into symbolic word form.

  :   

Spirit and intellect thrive in adversity and artistry responds to repres-

sion with originality. Through Admiral Saitō’s partially opened door-
way of opportunity cultural nationalists glimpsed a passage leading to a
brighter Korean future, and before Ugaki and Minami slammed the
door shut they had risked a few steps along it. They espied a world free
from Japanese domination, free too from the restricting priorities of
yangban culture, a world still happily unconscious of the conundrum –
acknowledged later in the painting of Hwang Yŏngyŏp (b. ) – of
how an Asian culture might extract the benefits of Western civilization
without becoming subservient to it. For all that, the roots of yangban
culture spread wide and deep through traditional Korean society and
were not going to be dug out in a hurry. Among them, the Confucian
predilection for holding up ‘praise and blame’ figures was – and still is
– deeply embedded in the national psyche. With the death of ex-
Emperor Sunjong on  April , Koreans found themselves for the
first time in their history with neither royal nor military leaders. Barring
them, to whom should people look for inspiration and guidance?
Heroes and villains are not going to be in short supply during a
period of foreign occupation. But besides contemporary or recent
champions, the most ancient founders of Korea also found themselves
being resurrected rather surprisingly to counter Japanese assertions
of ethnic and political relationships between the two countries. In
response to claims that Kija had instigated the spread of civilization
from China onto the peninsula and that the Kwanggaet’o stele proved

               ,     ‒   
Japan’s early rule over parts of it, Sin Ch’aeho and Ch’oe Namsŏn
talked up the historicity of Tan’gun as the first dynastic founder, and
the importance of Wiman Chosŏn Manchuria, rather than China, in
the formation of the early state. Today, both men are identified with
the origins of the nationalist concept of a Korean minjŏk (‘ethnic
nation’). Not for them the yangban mentality of Confucian culturalism
with its acceptance of hierarchical inferiority: according to Sin the
social Darwinist, this had emasculated native Korean initiative and
values and must be done away with. Ŭlchi Mundŏk had been a great
hero, but Silla’s dependence on Chinese help had encouraged the
Sinocentric rot. Nationalism, moreover, should be vested in populism.
When he wrote his Declaration of Korean Revolution in , Sin the
anarchist may, indeed, have been the first to use the term minjung in its
subsequently recognized political sense. During the colonial period
minjŏk was a source of anti-Japanese inspiration, and whatever we may
think of its erstwhile irredentist claims to Manchurian territory or fan-
ciful stories of creation by divine intervention, it remains fundamental
to modern desires for reunification.
But a people must have heroes and villains to guide them, and
immediately after Liberation in , even as crowds welcomed
Syngman Rhee back to Korea to lead them into what they expected to
be their sovereign future, attacks began on recent collaborators. The
debate about whether, in the flush of emotionalism, they got their defi-
nitions right straight away goes on to the present day. Sometimes the
dividing line between goodies and baddies was blurred, and even with
the benefit of hindsight the interpretation of an individual’s motives
and behaviour might be unsure.
One of the earliest martyrs honoured with a plaque at the National
War Memorial is An Chunggŭn, the man who assassinated Itō Hirobumi
on  October  and inspired his brother, An Myŏnggŭn, to repeat
the gesture, but with less success, on General Terauchi. Other political
nationalists made their protest less dramatically. The curriculum vitae of
Yi Tonghŭi (–) was unimpeachable in its anti-Japanese creden-
tials. A member of the Sinminhoe and head of the military garrison on
Kanghwa island until , he was twice imprisoned before seeking
sanctuary in Jiandao and assisting the ŭibyŏng. In  he founded the
Korean People’s Socialist Party in Khabarovsk and sent anti-Japanese
agents into Korea. After moving to Shanghai, where he served for a spell
as prime minister of the , he established the Koryŏ Communist Party.
It was his partisans who were behind the anti-Japanese rising in Jiandao
in , and Yi himself soon moved back to the north-east, where he
lived out the rest of his life in Vladivostok. The career of An Ch’angho

                  
(–) was not unlike that of Yi Tonghŭi. A founder member of
Sinminhoe, he travelled the world for two years rallying overseas
Koreans against the Annexation. In  he too joined the  in
Shanghai, but quickly tired of its squabbling and returned to Seoul. He
was back in the  in , fighting alongside ŭibyŏng guerrillas in
Manchuria the next year, and was arrested by the Japanese in Shanghai
in . From there he was taken back to Korea to spend most of his
remaining years in prison. In the rivalrous post-Liberation years, politi-
cal activists risked gangland-style killings rather than Japanese execution
squads. Two undoubted patriots who met violent ends were Yŏ Unhyŏng
(–) and Kim Ku (–). Both, like Yi Tonghŭi and An
Ch’angho, had been early members of the . Yo was a moderate left-
winger who spent three years in prison after returning from China and
edited the Chungang Ilbo (‘Central Daily’) after his release. Despite his
post-war efforts to achieve consensus across the political spectrum, he
was murdered in July , probably on the orders of Kim Ku. Kim had
been a tireless worker for independence ever since his youthful Tonghak
days. He had even been sentenced to death for killing a Japanese officer
in vengeance for the murder of Queen Min. He had been implicated in
Itō Hirobumi’s murder; imprisoned among the  in ; made leader
of the  in  and instigated an anti-Japanese terror campaign in
Shanghai; founded his own Korean Nationalist Party; moved the  to
Chongqing in  and assumed its chairmanship in ; and returned
to Seoul in  as a proven champion of the centre right. But therein
lay the seeds of his undoing. After making unavailing efforts in  to
unite north and south, he was passed over for office in the government
formed by his rival Syngman Rhee, and it was Rhee’s agent, An Tuhŭi,
who gunned him down in his home. It was, perhaps, poetic justice for
one whose life had been spent in the shadow of violence. By contrast, a
hero whose reputation was not associated with violence of any kind was
the gold medal-winning marathon runner Son Kijŏng. Born in , he
graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo. Although forced to compete
in the Berlin Olympic Games under his Japanese name, Son Kitei, he
used his own name to sign documents while he was there, and drew a
map of Korea composed of his signature. After Liberation his picture
was used as an emblem of Korean patriotism, and he carried the
Olympic torch into the stadium for the opening ceremony of the Seoul
Olympics in .
Yi, An, Yo and Kim may be celebrated for their resistance, but
what should we think of the majority of those who emigrated and went
to Manchuria, China, the Soviet Far East, North America or even
Japan? By  some . million Koreans lived abroad. Critics con-

               ,     ‒   
demned them for fleeing their homeland and compatriots. Were they
really to be disparaged for un-Korean behaviour, or could they serve
their country better from there? Syngman Rhee himself could boast of
being a founder member of the old Independence Club and of a brief
period of imprisonment in post-Annexation Korea, even of being elected
president in absentia of the Shanghai , yet he spent most of his life
in the United States. There his strong right-wing nationalist views
were well known on Capitol Hill, and in spite of reservations the
Americans saw him as the obvious choice to help them run their sector
of Korea in . Thereafter, he was transformed from hero to villain
in far less than the fifteen years it took to oust him from leadership, and
to the present day he remains a largely discredited figure. (When it
comes to the predictability of political reputation, however, one never
quite knows. Hatred for Park Chung Hee as president from  to
 stemmed from the ruthless suppression of his political opponents
and from his pro-Japanese activities during the war years. Any thought
of rehabilitation seemed impossible in the aftermath of the military
dictatorships and rise of democracy from  onwards. Yet nobody
ever accused him of personal gain from corruption, and as  politics
slid into a mire of financial scandal in  voices were heard praising
the success of his economic policies and calling for acknowledgement
of his patriotism, and his daughter Pak Kŭnhye was chosen as chair-
woman of the Grand National Party.)
From revisionist views of history it is but a short step to deconstruc-
tionist efforts to evaluate and re-evaluate the actions and motives of the
so-called villains in modern Korean history, pro-Japanese collaborators.
Many former yangban fared comfortably under colonial rule, whether or
not through deliberate acts of cooperation, and articles in the autumn
 issue of Korea Journal (entitled ‘The Issue of Settling the Past in
Modern Korean History’) showed that arguments were in fact far from
being settled. In August  President Roh Moo-hyun announced the
setting up of a national commission to look into colonial collaboration,
and also into human-rights abuses committed by  governments
before . To use a chilling phrase from the vocabulary of China’s
Cultural Revolution, decisions about former reputations may still be
reversed. Goodies cannot rest on their laurels; baddies may yet hope for
understanding. Yun Ch’iho died after taking poison at the age of ,
public opinion having long since rejected his earlier nationalist creden-
tials and cast him as a turncoat. He rejected the stultifying influence of
China and Confucianism, was impressed by what he saw of Japanese
modernity and determination, and associated the progressiveness of
Western civilization with Christianity, in which he was a strong believer.

                  
Hating and ashamed of the backwardness of his own country, he devel-
oped a love–hate relationship with the United States, where he studied
and had many friends. He endured four years’ imprisonment after the
Korean Conspiracy Trial, but as time went by and Japanese pressure
increased, especially under the Naisen Ittai policy, he became what Koen
de Ceuster calls ‘a consenting colonial subject’, and wrote of the need for
mutual Korean-Japanese tolerance if ‘the concept of assimilation [is] to
be successful’. He was a moderate nationalist, an imprecise description
liable to misunderstanding. Those who are now so labelled ought not ipso
facto to incur any slight to their nationalism: the fact is simply that in
contrast to radical nationalists they took a longer-term view of how
Korean independence might be restored. Accepting that the Japanese
had too firm a grip on their country to be dislodged quickly, they aimed
for survival and gradual change. And that meant accepting the Japanese
presence, and, in unavoidable situations, working with the Japanese for
the betterment of Korea. To radicals, and to those quick to rush to
judgement after , that was anathema, and some of Korea’s most sig-
nificant cultural figures, men like Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsŏn, suf-
fered adverse criticism, which in some cases has taken decades to correct.
Rather than vilification as collaborationists, the two deserve at the very
least recognition for their determination to introduce modern vernacu-
lar literature to Korea as a self-strengthening agent. (Ch’oe it was, too,
who developed the old poetic form sijo as a modern style and concept,
exalting it as an expression of Korean-ness in the face of Japanese
efforts to destroy national consciousness.) Other cultural figures who
saw their reputation marred by political prejudice were Chŏng Chiyong
(–?), described by Richard Rutt as ‘the finest modern Korean
poet’, whose work was banned in the  from  to , and the
composer Yun Isang, tortured by the Japanese police, captured by North
Koreans during the Korean War, and tried as a collaborator. Outstanding
artists like Kim Ŭnho and Yi Sangbŏm were denounced for having
exhibited in the Mijŏn. And among the accused landlords and business
tycoons who did, it is true, stand to profit more than most Koreans by
collaborating with the enemy, were Chŏn Hyŏngp’il and Kim Sŏngsu.
Chŏn’s ‘incorrect attitude’ can be overlooked by most of today’s visitors
to the Kansŏng Museum, grateful that he saved so many important
works of art from export to the Japanese fatherland. As for Kim Sŏngsu,
the views daringly published in his outspoken nationalist newspaper
Tonga Ilbo, and the formation of the museum and library at Posŏng
College, speak for themselves.
Seemingly beyond the pale and incapable of restitution was the
group known as the Seven Traitors, the senior officials who accepted the

               ,     ‒   
Protectorate Treaty in . They comprised the prime minister, Han
Kyusŏl, and the ministers of finance, war, home affairs, education, agri-
culture and industry, and justice. Irrevocably attached to the name of the
education minister, Yi Wanyong, is the epithet ‘quisling’, for he also
accepted the Protocol Treaty of , served as prime minister from
then until , and then signed the Annexation Treaty. He later became
vice-president of the Government-General’s Central Council, and by
the s was one of the richest men in Korea. His recent biographer
Yun Dokhan calls him ‘the very picture of the spiritless, feeble-minded
intellectuals and opportunists who accepted the status quo in return for
personal gain’. Was Yi Wanyong a traitor or, as he himself claimed, a
sadae-style nationalist? He had, after all, once served as foreign minister
in the anti-Japanese cabinet of  and as chairman of the
Independence Club. Perhaps Mencius might have accepted the rationale
of his self-defence, even if few others have. Yet throughout Korean
history there have been those who continued to argue or to imply empir-
ically that ‘serving the great’ – whether the great be identified as China,
Japan or the West – is not incompatible with promoting long-term
national interest. Can a distinction be made between Silla’s admiration
for China, and readiness to imitate it from a position of self-confidence
and relative independence, and what is sometimes described in later eras
as political expediency? What did ‘serving the great’ mean to sirhak
advocates? Were the policies of Kojong and Kaehwadang ministers a
modernized version of the same thing? Was collaboration with the
Japanese colonialists defensible as a modern interpretation of defending
Korea while recognizing some of the admirable features of Japanese cul-
ture? Indeed, was the entire colonial process around the world a case of
the weak surviving to learn and grow by paying unavoidable lip service
to the strong? If assassins take the law into their own hands, it is some-
times because governments seem to bow lower to political advantage than
to the defence of principle. In September  Syngman Rhee’s govern-
ment acted in haste to pass a law leading to the arrest of pro-Japanese
collaborators, and then showed how touchy an issue the proof of treach-
ery was by rescinding it almost immediately. So few Japanese were
brought to trial as war criminals because the United States, in the person
of General Douglas MacArthur, needed to revive that country quickly as
a bulwark against the threat of Soviet expansion into the Pacific. But, like
the Israeli Nazi-hunters of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there are some
Koreans who will not give up, and early in the twenty-first century the
Korea Parliamentary League on National Spirit issued a preliminary list
of  collaborators of the colonial period. It appears there are still
scores to be settled.

                  
  

Partition and War, ‒:

Return to Disunity
The lack of an Allied strategy for post-Liberation Korea and the
failure of the United Nations to understand or handle its prob-
lems created a country divided along the lines of the Cold War
world. In  a bitter conflict broke out that shattered Korea and
brought the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

   

Sometimes the coming of peace and longed-for liberation turns into
anti-climax. Parisians danced in the streets to see the Nazi occupiers go
in August , only to begin quarrelling over everything from scarce
rations to cases of impugned honour. Londoners, released from the
tyranny of night-time bombing in , found that they missed the
comradeship it stimulated. That same summer, Koreans were about to
find the experience even worse, far worse in fact. After  years of
occupation, oppression and struggle for survival they were unprepared
for the sudden Japanese collapse on  August, and confusion and
social divisions quickly threatened to turn into chaos. The hasty dedi-
cation of a shrine to Yi Sunsin at his birthplace in Asan, Ch’ungch’ŏng
Pukdo, was not enough to dispel a deepening mood of despondency as
a reputed million deportees from Japan descended on a denuded coun-
try with little to offer. Euphoria quickly turned into what the artist
Park Seobo called ‘a period of despair and misery, a time of absolute
hopelessness’, and harsh retribution against suspected collaborators
broke out. Politically, the lack of a ready-made plan also proved disas-
trous. The capitulation came so suddenly that in order to prevent the
rapid deployment of Soviet troops into northern Korea turning into
nationwide occupation, the Americans had to come up with a dividing
line to delineate Russian and American spheres of responsibility. As a
temporary expedient, hastily conceived in Washington during the night
of  August and based on nothing more than a National Geographic
map, they chose the th parallel. The Yalta Agreement in February
had stipulated that no foreign troops would be stationed permanently
on Korean soil, but swift action was called for and there was no time to


Principal Events: February –May 

– February Yalta Conference, attended by Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin
 July– August Potsdam Conference, attended by Churchill,
Truman and Stalin
 August The  enters the war against Japan
 August Japan announces unconditional surrender
 September Proclamation of the Korean People’s Republic
 December Agreement concluding the Moscow
Conference of Foreign Ministers

 September General strike begins in South Korea
 October Beginning of the Autumn Harvest uprising

 March Pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine
signals the beginning of the Cold War in
Europe
 November  approves the creation of a Temporary
Commission on Korea ()

 April Beginning of the Cheju Rising
 May Elections in South Korea create the 
 August Elections in North Korea create the 
 October Beginning of the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn Rising
 December  recognizes the Republic of Korea
 December National Security Law passed;  ceases
to be ‘Temporary’ (becomes );
withdrawal of Soviet troops

 February Withdrawal of  troops
 March Kim Il Sung visits Moscow
‒
December–February Mao Zedong in Moscow; signs the Sino-
Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and
Mutual Assistance

 January Announcement of the  Defense Perimeter
by Secretary of State Dean Acheson
March Kim Il Sung makes secret trip to Moscow
May Kim Il Sung visits Beijing
 May South Korean legislative elections


weigh the long-term consequences. Lieutenant-General John R. Hodge
and the  Army Corps arrived off Inch’ŏn from Okinawa on 
September, and instead of the freedom they dreamed of, P’yŏngyangers
and Seoulites awoke once more to the sound of foreign boots marching
through their streets. This time they were Soviet and American.
Hodge, infamous for his reputed observation that ‘Koreans and
Japanese are all the same breed of cats’, was quickly cast as de facto
ruler of southern Korea, a role for which he had no political training,
no local knowledge and no desire. His first step was to establish an
American Military Government () to await the implementation of
trusteeship. This had been agreed at the Tehran Conference in 
and was part of the late President Roosevelt’s vision of a post-war world
in which  influence dominated the Pacific basin. It was based on the
assumption that ex-colonial states would not be ready to assume full
independence immediately after liberation, but would require an inde-
terminate period of tutelage to prepare for it. The Koreans themselves
had different plans. A hastily formed Preparatory Committee for
Building the Country was headed by the leader of the Korean Workers’
Party, Yŏ Unhyŏng, and though Hodge envisaged a Democratic
Advisory Council working alongside the  he was unable to persuade
Yŏ to join it. Yŏ’s Committee had already proclaimed a Korean People’s
Republic () with Hŏ Hŏn as its temporary prime minister. The 
delegated its authority to People’s Committees to keep order in local
areas and to oversee the redistribution of former Japanese-owned
land to Korean peasants. Despite the ’s professed intention of creat-
ing a united front, Hodge distrusted leftist moves of this kind. In
October Syngman Rhee returned to Korea on a plane arranged by
General MacArthur. Though a former head of the Korean Provisional
Government in China, Rhee had not gone unchallenged (he had been
impeached and ousted in ), and Washington itself had already
seen plenty of him and was tiring of his extreme right-wing national-
ism. Having dreamed of heading a unified Korea for so long, he per-
ceived this as his best, perhaps his last, chance. American administrators
regarded him as determined and devious, and were anxious to restrain
his headstrong tendencies, but faute de mieux they had to work with him.
The Russians approved Yŏ’s and Hŏ’s leftist inclinations and
accepted the  in the North, where the Christian nationalist Cho
Mansik (–) was made head of the People’s Committee for
North Korea. The artificial dividing line and the assumption of power
by left- and right-wing leaders to north and south of it respectively did
not reflect any pattern across the population at large. There were more
communists in the South than the North, twice as many Christians in

             ,     ‒   
the North as in the South, and cultural figures were randomly distrib-
uted. But adjustments were soon being made. As persecution of
Christians increased in the North, many of them were to be found
among the , refugees heading south. Even the popular Cho
Mansik, a leading Presbyterian layman, was arrested. P’yŏngyang, in
turn, attracted socialist activists from the South. Pak Hŏnyŏng (d.
), who had reorganized the Korean Communist Party in Seoul in
September, fled to P’yŏngyang in December, the same month as Kim Il
Sung (–) assumed the leadership of the Party’s northern
branch. Kim had emerged from the Manchurian shadows with an envi-
able name as an anti-Japanese resistance leader. Bruce Cumings calls
him ‘one of the few Koreans who joined forces both with Chinese and
Soviet communism yet still seemed to keep a patriotic image and the
loyalty of Korean comrades’. In July  he and Pak Hŏnyŏng went to
Moscow, where Stalin endorsed Kim as leader, with Pak as his second-
in-command. Later, however, as Kim pressed his case for invading the
South, an aging and ailing Stalin would discover that his left-wing
nationalism made him just as difficult to manage as the Americans
found Rhee.
It was hard to see just what was cooking inside the bubbling polit-
ical cauldron. In Seoul, the  aimed to work with the  returning
from Chongqing. Rhee was to be its president, Yŏ Unhyŏng its vice-
president. But when Rhee arrived, followed in November by Kim Ku
and Kim Kyusik (‒), Hŏ Hŏn failed to gain their cooperation.
The Americans, anxious to avoid the risk of communist control over
the whole peninsula, were inclined to support the recently formed,
more right-wing Korean Democratic Party, one of whose founders in
September was Kim Sŏngsu, but when Hodge had difficulty finding
any figures of national significance other than Kim Kyusik who would
work with him, the  brought the old independence fighter Sŏ
Chaep’il back from the United States to advise it. It would not recog-
nize the People’s Committees, and instead reappointed Japanese
bureaucrats to help in maintaining essential services and even Japanese
policemen as the core of a new paramilitary Korean gendarmerie. It
had to contend with trouble instigated by both left- and right-wing
organizations, and overreacted by imprisoning many independence
activists. Internecine Korean rivalries brought about the assassination
of Yŏ Unhyŏng – on Kim Ku’s orders – on  July  and of Kim
Ku – probably on Syngman Rhee’s – on  August .
The Moscow Resolution of December  established a Joint -
Soviet Commission to consult with Korean political parties and social
organizations until a provisional Korean government for the whole land

                  
could be set up, and to organize trusteeship under the supervision of the
, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China. Announcement of this
caused outrage in Korea, and the Commission turned out to be ineffec-
tual. So much in disagreement were the two sides that they held only
two rounds of talks, in January  and May , and when the latter
proved fruitless the Americans turned for help to the United Nations,
which established a (Temporary) Commission on Korea () to
oversee elections. Its team of advisers, drawn from nine nations, arrived
in Seoul on  January , but the Soviet Union refused it entry to
the North. Overriding objections from  itself and from many
Koreans,  proposals for elections in the South were put to an Interim
Committee of the United Nations General Assembly and approved.
Thus, on  May , the first independent election ever held in Korea
took place. Against a background of  deaths, the arrest of thousands
of leftists and disenfranchisement of many more, and a boycott by
Rhee’s political opponents, independents won  of the  seats and
Rhee’s Independence Party ;  seats were left vacant for the North.
The United Nations nevertheless recognized the new Assembly as the
legitimate government, and Rhee was elected as its president: the
Republic of Korea () was officially born, its name (Taehan min’guk)
seeking legitimation by recalling the Taehan Empire created in .
Not to be outdone, the communist authorities held their own elections,
filling  seats of a Supreme People’s Assembly for constituencies
across both North and South Korea, and enabling the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea () to be inaugurated on  September
 amid claims of its own legitimacy derived from proximity to the
Manchurian heartlands of Tan’gun and Koguryŏ, and of anti-Japanese
colonial resistance. The United Nations route to unified self-govern-
ment was looking like a dead end, and those who professed their
nationalism too forcefully found that they were criticized as counter-
revolutionaries in the North and as communists in the South.
In signs of what returning normality should be able to offer, the
Chōsen Sōtokufu Museum was re-designated the National Museum of
Korea and opened to the public in the former Capitol Building in
September , while P’yŏngyang established a Central Historical
Museum. Any such show of optimism was to be welcomed, but in truth
the examples were few enough. Through the winter of – an influx
of refugees from the North and returnees from Japan exacerbated food
shortages and unemployment in the South. Simmering discontent,
fuelled as well by corruption, landlordism and oppressive policing, erupt-
ed in the autumn into a general strike and widespread peasant rebellion,
which the  denounced as communist-inspired and Soviet-assisted.

             ,     ‒   
Many died as  troops and the hated Korean National Police ruthlessly
suppressed the dissidence, and People’s Committees were among the
victims as right-wing authority was reinforced. One of the police officers
involved in the violence, the son of a poor farmer, had been a prize-
winning cadet at Japanese military academies in Xinjing (Changchun),
Manchuria and Tokyo in the early s. His name was Park Chung
Hee.
The suppression of what has become known as the Autumn Harvest
Uprising failed to douse the smouldering embers of communism, and
they burst into flame again on Cheju island in April . Rebellion
raged for a year. More than  villages were destroyed and ,
peasants, one third of the island’s population, may have died as the 
army followed American directions to suppress it. Soldiers of Rhee’s
Fourteenth Regiment mutinied against their orders and instigated an
uprising of their own around Yŏsu and Sunch’ŏn in Chŏlla Namdo.
Thousands more died before it was put down by the Fourth Army, sent
from Kwangju, and in the aftermath thousands of political dissidents
were arrested and sent to re-education camps. Among the detainees this
time was Park Chung Hee, who turned state’s evidence and betrayed
fellow rebels to the Fourth Army. Paradoxical as it might seem, given
both his earlier and later career, stories that he was once a Communist
Party member have refused to go away. Some amateur psychologists
like to think that his extreme anti-communism as president was intend-
ed to cover his earlier tracks. There is no proof of either suspicion.
Nearly five years on from Liberation the political situation was a
shambles; food was in short supply; inflation was rampant; and border
fights multiplied as rivals on both sides of the th parallel became jittery.
Who or what might offer deliverance? The poet Sŏ Chŏngju (b. )
cloaked the feelings of many of his compatriots when he wrote:

The red and green pattern mottling the shell

is the sea’s hope, the sea’s,
that has seethed alone for thousands of years.
The flowers that unfold till the branches crack
are the wind’s hope, the wind’s,
that comes and whispers here day after day.
Ah! The revolution now spreading like a flood
Across our land with its crimson servitude
Is truly heaven’s own long-kept hope.

                  
 Hope was what kept many Koreans going. But events in the second
half of  destroyed even hope. At  a.m. on the morning of  June,
North Korean artillery opened up a heavy barrage across the th par-
allel, taking the unprepared South Korean army by surprise. Hours
later, several columns of armour thrust their way south over the border,
two down the east and west coasts, two in the centre and two headed
directly for Seoul.

     

The course of the war and its implications

The War Memorial of Korea is more than its name suggests. Situated
near the former Yongsan base of the  Eighth Army in Seoul, it is actu-
ally a fine museum covering the history of warfare on the peninsula
from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. At its main gate stands
a .-metre-high replica of a Bronze Age notched dagger, and near the
east gate a copy of the Kwanggaet’o monument of  . Much of the
Memorial is devoted to the Korean War. On  June  the 
Security Council voted in favour of a  resolution condemning the
North Korean invasion: and inside a replica bunker near the west gate
are the flags of the member countries that came to South Korea’s aid.
Over the next three years sixteen sent troops, from the  (sources go
as high as . million men involved throughout the whole war, though
perhaps never more than , were involved at one time) and the 
(, men) to Belgium and Luxembourg (one infantry battalion),
Ethiopia (one infantry battalion), the Philippines (one infantry battalion
and tanks), South Africa (one fighter squadron) and Cuba (one infantry
company). Five more – Denmark, Italy, India, Norway and Sweden –
contributed medical teams. In the grounds of the War Memorial stand
lines of aircraft, tanks and guns from the combatant nations on both
sides, mute reminders of the constant cacophony that Korea endured
for three years; inside the building is a numbing collection of matériel,
film and documents that graphically describe the progress of the war
and the horrors it inflicted on the entire population of the peninsula,
fighting men and innocent victims alike.
The results of what happened over three years in Korea were of
unforeseeable scope and complexity, and did more to change the world
order than any other similar period in the twentieth century. Foreign
intervention on a devastating scale turned a civil war of unimaginable
brutality into a surrogate for World War Three. Both Stalin and Truman
were anxious to avoid a third world war, even though the arms race

             ,     ‒   
started by Truman’s approval of increased defence spending on  April
 would heighten fears of it for years to come. Yet Dean Acheson’s
speech to the National Press Club on  January  had indicated that
America felt no automatic commitment to defend Korea for its own sake.
Korea must help itself. What Truman was intent on doing was contain-
ing Soviet communism, opposing its march wherever in the world it
threatened. The fall of Korea would endanger Japan and thence the ,
but a democratic Japan ready to accept  military bases should help to
render costly intervention in Korea unnecessary. A Japanese peace treaty
concluded on terms favourable to the  was therefore central to
Truman’s vision of Pacific security. It was, of course, entirely contrary
to Stalin’s concept of the same thing, as was the thought of Siberia
bordered by a Korea unified under Syngman Rhee.
Ironically, communist China did not worry Truman in the way the
Soviet Union did, and in anticipation of improved Sino-American
relations the president was even ready to tolerate the prospect of
Taiwan’s final fall. Chiang Kai-shek had, after all, proved a severe dis-
appointment through so many years of expensive support. At the same
time, Mao Zedong’s visit to Moscow gave Stalin an opportunity to
reassess his view of him now that the People’s Republic of China had
become a reality. Fraternal allies or no, it was vital that Stalin’s own
command of the world communist movement should not be chal-
lenged, and crucial that Beijing should not get on well with America.
But having refused Kim Il Sung’s request in September  for per-
mission to invade the South, Stalin later saw how this might open a
window of opportunity for him. The withdrawal of Soviet and 
troops from Korea in  had not diminished the reliance of North or
South on their political mentors. It had, however, removed the hedges
against precipitate action from either side of the th parallel, and
Stalin now worried that Syngman Rhee, who would have loved to be
able to mount a reunifying campaign of his own, might try and go it
alone with an attack on the North. His forces were vastly inferior in
number to those of the North, and even with the weaponry left behind
by the Americans they were inadequately equipped. But Rhee was
obsessive enough to be unpredictable, and Stalin decided that a pre-
emptive strike against him might be easier to handle than a defensive
campaign. Moreover, the completion of the ’s own -bomb and the
formation of  in January  both implied that the time was right
to issue a warning to the West. So he gave Kim the go-ahead, subject
to Chinese approval. Mao was not enthusiastic. China’s own revolution
had not yet been carried through to its logical end in Taiwan and Tibet,
and was still meeting resistance even in parts of China proper. But like

                  
Stalin, Mao was concerned about the threat of a Korea under Rhee,
and he was won round. Kim Il Sung’s visit to Moscow in March 
was rewarded with the delivery of aircraft, tanks, armoured vehicles
and guns to North Korea in June, and the die was cast.
Once the war had begun, the stakes were raised for Stalin, Mao and
Truman, and Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee were reduced to little
more than supporting cast. On the communist side Mao took major
command decisions, though Stalin retained ultimate authority.
Although no Russian troops were committed to fight, all weaponry
came from the  – all, that is, except matériel captured from 
armies. For its part, the  leadership had no alternative but to accept
 ⁄  direction. Whether Korea had been implicitly included within
the  Defense Perimeter or not, the Truman Doctrine of support for
peoples ‘resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or out-
side pressures’ now clearly applied, and if Stalin’s henchmen were
allowed to get away with their invasion the prospects for West Germany
and Europe looked ominous. The Americans, therefore, immediately
intervened. Strategic and field command was given first to General
Douglas MacArthur. He had been an outstanding leader in the Pacific
War, and as head of the post-war  administration in Japan enjoyed a
dominant political position in rebuilding Japan’s economy and steering
it towards -style democracy. His natural vanity was flattered by the
power he had exercised in protecting Emperor Hirohito from war-
crimes charges and redefining the Japanese monarchical system, and
now, returning to his familiar role as military commander-in-chief, he
was little inclined to listen to or obey orders from what he perceived as
a weak president, or even his own joint chiefs of staff. But the ‘viceroy
of Japan’ himself rarely visited Korea from his Tokyo headquarters,
and historians have not been kind to him in assessing these, the declin-
ing stages of his career. Adjectives such as egotistical, pompous, arro-
gant, dangerous, misguided, eccentric (even lunatic), paranoid (almost
as much in his despising of Europe as his hatred of communism) and
megalomaniac abound, and had it not been for his magnificent past
record, Truman would certainly have dismissed him sooner than he did
in April .
Compared with the political complexity of the years that preceded
it, the confusion and intensity that characterized the fighting and the
breadth of its worldwide effects, the pattern of the war was fairly sim-
ple. With the advantage of surprise and superior forces, North Korea
quickly swept the  and American defenders southwards. Within
only three months the Allies were forced to establish a last-ditch
enclave around Pusan, and only then did the arrival of reinforcements

             ,     ‒   
The Korean War: Principal Events

April South Korean guerilla leaders go to
P’yŏngyang for planning
 June North Korea moves combat troops towards
the th parallel
 June North Korea’s invasion of South begins at
 a.m.
 June The  announces its intervention; 
Security Council passes a resolution
authorizing assistance to 
 June North Korea captures Seoul
 July First  troops of the Eighth Army arrive
 July Kim Il Sung asks for greater Soviet aid in
view of serious  bombing
 July The first  troops are involved in fighting,
retreating from north of Osan
 July  takes over operational command authority
 August  troops blow the last bridges over the
Nakdong river and isolate the ‘Pusan
perimeter’
 August Molotov concludes talks with Mao in Beijing,
agreeing that if  troops re-cross the th
parallel, Soviet-equipped Chinese soldiers
will enter Korea
 August ,  troops arrive in Pusan from Hong Kong,
the first non-  brigade to reach Korea
 September The Inch’ŏn landing; North Korea mistakenly
believes that Japan has entered the war
– September Seoul is re-taken
 September Kim Il Sung sends a plea to Stalin for
Chinese or other outside aid; Moscow
pressurizes Mao to intervene
 October  troops cross the th parallel; Mao
unwillingly joins the war
 October Chinese troops secretly cross the Yalu river
 October The  Eighth Army takes P’yŏngyang
 October Chinese People’s Volunteers enter the war
 November First battle between  and Chinese troops
 December  general retreat begins


 January Communists re-take Seoul; the  line is
held  miles to the south
 January  counter-attack begins
 March Seoul is recaptured
 April  troops cross the th parallel


  April MacArthur is relieved of his command
 April Communist spring offensive begins
 April Battle of the Imjin river begins
 May Acheson informs Moscow that the  will
negotiate
 June Kim Il Sung and Gao Gang go to Moscow,
where Stalin agrees to armistice talks
 July Talks begin in Kaesŏng: Mao wants to settle
along ceasefire line, Stalin insists that fighting
should continue
 July  ⁄  bomb P’yŏngyang
 August  breaks off talks after attack on the
Kaesŏng talks area
 September Japanese peace treaty signed;  occupation
of Japan officially ends
 October Talks are resumed, at P’anmunjŏm


 June  planes bomb electricity-generating plant
on the Yalu river
 July  planes bomb P’yŏngyang
 August  planes again bomb P’yŏngyang
 October Peace talks are halted sine die
 November Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president of
the United States


 March Stalin dies; two weeks later Soviet Council of
Ministers orders Mao and Kim to seek peace
 April Peace talks resume at P’anmunjŏm
 July Armistice signed
 August Repatriation of s begins

from other  countries stiffen resistance and begin to tilt the scales.
The real retaliation, however, devised by General MacArthur, proved
to be as dramatic and decisive as the initial communist advance had
been. A daring seaborne landing at Inch’ŏn in September led to the
recovery of Seoul, and  troops, with  support, swept northwards
into the . Their advance towards the Yalu was the trigger for the
entry of Chinese ‘volunteers’, and with it the transformation of the
scale and nature of the war. The communists drove the United Nations
back and recaptured Seoul before a defensive line held  miles to its
south. By now it was January , and the war was still little more
than six months old. When the  counter-attack came and the capital
was retaken on  March, it had changed hands four times in fewer

             ,     ‒   
than nine months, and was a city in ruins, inhabited by starving vagrants.
Once more the  ⁄  crossed the th parallel, their aim this time being
to establish a defensible line above it rather than to carry the war to the
Yalu and beyond. The latter was MacArthur’s preference, but the presi-
dent’s patience with his insubordinate commander was running out.
Throughout the war, rivers and frontiers were of critical signifi-
cance: the Han helped to hold up the first communist advance and was
defended with valiant if doomed courage by the Student Volunteer
Corps; the Nakdong helped form the Pusan perimeter round the last
 ⁄  bulwark. Above all, the two political dividing lines, the th
parallel and the Yalu river, dominated strategic-planning issues on
both sides. Should  troops be allowed to respond to the initial inva-
sion by bombing the North? After Inch’ŏn, should  troops cross the
demarcation line? How close to the Yalu should they advance, and
should communist bases in China be attacked? (On  October
MacArthur countermanded orders from his own chiefs of staff and
instructed  troops to make for the border regions.) Should the com-
munists, after their second advance, be allowed to hold the line at the
th parallel? MacArthur certainly thought not, and exceeded his
powers on  March  by threatening Beijing with humiliation if
China did not withdraw from Korea and permit unification by the .
He and John Foster Dulles were prepared to extend the war into China
if necessary; Truman, however, feared that this would make World War
Three inevitable. When it came, the second crossing of the th parallel
by  forces prompted a massive communist counter-offensive. Losses
were heavy on both sides. In fierce fighting along the Imjin river
between  and  April the Gloucestershire Regiment won lasting
fame for its brave resistance, and the Chinese were left exhausted and
demoralized by their failure to capitalize on their numerical superiority.
Both sides were now ready for peace. Armistice talks began in July
, only Syngman Rhee refusing to take part in them. They dragged
on, first in Kaesŏng and then in P’anmunjŏm, for almost two years,
during which time , more American soldiers were killed. The
main sticking point was argument over the repatriation of prisoners of
war. The  held approximately , prisoners, comprising ,
North Koreans, , Chinese and , communist South Koreans,
against the communists’ declared total of only ,. The  refused
to accept the automatic exchange of such imbalanced numbers, fearing
that it would strengthen their enemies for a renewed fight: instead, it
proposed voluntary repatriation, offering Koreans the chance to return
to their homes and the Chinese the choice of going either to the main-
land or to Taiwan. The final agreement, reached in May , gave

                  
each government  days in which to try and convince their own sol-
diers to go home. Two crises threatened it. President Rhee, unhappy at
the dwindling prospect of a reunited Korea, tried to sabotage the peace
process by releasing around , North Korean s on – June,
before the screening process began. And the communists suffered a
propaganda blow when only about , chose to go home: more than
, of the Chinese, among them former Guomindang soldiers and
sympathizers, opted to be sent to Taiwan. The main parties, however,
were by now too war-weary to take up the fight again: in August the
communists began freeing , captives. Most were South Koreans;
, were Americans, including  who made headline news by choos-
ing to be released in the . Most of the North Koreans went home,
but the , Chinese who returned to the People’s Republic found
themselves treated as pariahs for supposedly having surrendered rather
than fight to the death. They suffered badly, especially during the Anti-
Rightist Campaign of  and the Cultural Revolution.

The victims
Early in the war the numbers of combatant and support troops had
escalated rapidly. The initial confrontation set , North Korean
against , South Korean soldiers, and estimates suggest that the
communists, already reduced by casualty to ,, were reinforced in
late November  by up to , Chinese. Confronting them
stood , combined  and  troops. In December the  Joint
Chiefs of Staff, concerned at MacArthur’s lack of judgement as the
situation on the ground settled into an evenly balanced stalemate,
refused his request for , more  ⁄  troops and ,–,
Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan. But the numbers ranged against
the South went on rising, and by April  communist strength was
estimated at around ,. By late , against the background of
ineffectual armistice talks, the respective figures were almost one
million against ,, each side having some , men at or near
the front. Korean nationalist sources claim there were a further ,
in guerrilla armies hostile to both Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee.
Figures can create such a false impression. Numbers like these of
fighting men raise images of professionalism, ruthlessness, unanimity
of purpose. One hopes that in time of war, such an impression of one’s
own side does not mislead. Yet the truth is invariably more fractured.
In June  the North Korean soldiers were Soviet-trained, deter-
mined and fired up with self-confidence. Many were veterans of the
Chinese civil war. After just one week’s fighting against them, ‘Syngman

             ,     ‒   
Rhee’s army could account for only , of its men. The remaining
, had merely disappeared, many of them never to be seen again’
(Hastings). But sweeping through the South, the North Koreans
replaced their mounting casualties with men and boys forcibly con-
scripted from ‘liberated’ areas. Their morale was low and their training
inadequate. Today, we are shocked when we see  pictures from such
places as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Haiti of boy soldiers armed
with machine guns. But we forget perhaps that the involvement and
exploitation of children in warfare has a long history. Fourteen-year-
olds falsified their age and signed up to fight in World War One, and
when the  Eighth Army found itself capturing, and, worse still,
shooting, equally young boys in  it was not really such an unprece-
dented thing. If most of these children must have been desperately
unhappy, they were not the only ones. The Chinese soldiers, when they
came to Korea, were called volunteers. They were no such thing, but
even as professionals fighting – so they believed – to defend their own
country against  imperialism they were none too happy about laying
down their lives in foreign territory. Proud though many undoubtedly
were to wave the flag of the newly proclaimed People’s Republic, they
were exhausted by years of their own civil war, and fighting abroad in
Korea was not the same as mopping up the last remaining areas of
resistance to the revolution in China. They were anxious about condi-
tions back home, and what most of them wanted was a quiet life. The
same went for the Americans. The Eighth Army, so recently decimat-
ed by the Pacific War, was under-funded and poorly equipped, its ranks
filled with drafted youths whose experience as occupying forces in
Japan had given them no inkling or preparation for the horrors of con-
tinuous fighting to come. When I paid my first visit to the United
Nations’ cemetery in Pusan I was struck by the low average age of the
enlisted men against the relatively high age of the senior officers, vet-
erans of the anti-Japanese war who had already passed regular call-up
age when Pearl Harbor first jerked them out of retirement. American
morale was often little better than Korean, a contributory factor to
the Americans’ high death rate as s. Survival rates among the
better disciplined Turkish and British contingents in captivity were
more favourable.
Both sides committed atrocities against soldiers, s and civil-
ians. Rhee’s government ordered mass killings of suspected commu-
nists across the country in July and August : up to , victims
died near Taejŏn in a mass execution that was later compared with the
rape of Nanjing. A massacre of villagers by  troops at Koch’ang in
February  later became the subject of Kim Wŏnil’s novel Winter

                  
Valley. Monica Felton, a British member of a fact-finding mission that
visited North Korea in  for the Women’s International Democratic
Federation, wrote: ‘The total picture is one of horror on a scale that
can be compared only with the behaviour of the Nazis in occupied
Europe.’ Stories of Americans abusing South Koreans, when attested
after the end of the war, contributed to long-simmering anti-American
feeling, but  soldiers found it hard to distinguish between Korean
friend and foe, and sometimes had neither the time nor the inclination
to try: their massacre of – civilian refugees, mostly women and
children, at Nogŭn-ni, South Chungch’ŏng, in July  has become
notorious. Conditions in prison camps on both sides were harsh, espe-
cially during the first year of the war, and prompted many suicides.
Food and medical supplies were scant and ill health abounded. Political
and national divisions among the prisoners added to natural tension
and strains, and the use of psychological and physical torture by the
Chinese was widely condemned around the world. But in  ⁄ 
prison camps Chinese prisoners also had much to endure. Pro-Taiwan
inmates, among them veteran Guomindang fighters from the Chinese
civil war, were rewarded with posts of responsibility, and they victim-
ized the communists. Particularly cruel was the practice, adopted in
mid-, of tattooing prisoners with anti-communist slogans, driving
some to self-mutilation and even suicide. One of the main  prison
camps was on the island of Kŏje, off the south-east coast. There, com-
munist prisoners began rioting in February , and on  May took
the American commandant hostage. Deaths and injuries occurred as 
troops were sent in to restore order.
In winter the cold was so severe that, according to one British offi-
cer, ‘the only way to dig was to put some petrol on the ground, light it,
and when it had stopped burning, dig the bit that had softened and
start again’. Across the peninsula the homeless were beset by starva-
tion, illness and bad weather. Families were divided. Forced to take up
arms by whichever army happened to pass by and pick them up, some
found themselves fighting against relatives: a sculpture at the War
Memorial recalls the actual meeting of two brothers on opposite sides
of the battlefield. The psychological effects on a people to whom kin-
ship and social relationships meant so much were shattering. On one
hand, people could not but have sympathy for friends and relatives suf-
fering and dying on the opposite side. On the other, passionate hatred
for the enemy and its ideology turned friends and relations against each
other and led to mutual suspicion and betrayal. Amid so much confusion
and panic, it comes as no surprise that the instinct for self-protection
led to instances of opportunistic side-changing.

             ,     ‒   
 American aircraft dropped more high explosive on Korea than they
used throughout World War Two, more napalm even than they would
use in Vietnam, and before his dismissal General MacArthur was ready
to release atom bombs along the Chinese border. Between them both
sides destroyed historic and cultural treasures on a scale unprecedent-
ed in Korea since the s. The South Korean authorities did what
they could to protect the country’s heritage. The Royal Conservatory
had been re-formed as the Music Office of the Former Royal Palace
(Ku Wanggung Aakpu) in , and was officially reinstituted at Pusan
in January  as the National Classical Music Institute (Kungnip
Kukakwŏn). Performances began in April . The National Theater
was established in Seoul in April . The Cultural Preservation Act
of  boasted of resurrecting national culture by improving the sta-
tus of artists and guaranteeing freedom of artistic expression. Painters,
however, remained sceptical. The government’s annual Kukchŏn art
exhibition, inaugurated in , perpetuated the bland conservatism of
the old Sŏnjŏn series and was shunned by avant-garde artists like Park
Seobo. Painters had had little chance to learn how to express their feel-
ings through their work. The only way that Park Seugun and Hwang
Yŏngyŏp, subsequently renowned for their stylistic originality, man-
aged to subsist in the immediate aftermath of Liberation was by paint-
ing portraits of  servicemen. The abstract movement appealed, but
painters needed time and experience to participate in it effectively, and
the war came as an impediment. Members of the left-wing Artists’
Federation who gravitated to the North after  soon found condi-
tions there less conducive to self-expression than in the South, where
artists did manage to unleash their pent-up anguish in art informel after
. Even so, it would be years before painters, among them minjung
artists in the s, confronted detailed treatment of war subjects.
Literary organizations sprang up after Liberation displaying the
ideological factionalism associated with earlier social politics.
Unsurprisingly, technique was subordinated to message, and a tendency
towards self-criticism was apparent. The war called forth expressions of
bitterness, resentment and mental turmoil. Suh Ji-moon’s analysis of
patriotism in conflict with brotherhood in Korean war poems includes
the following by Mo Yun-suk (–):

I gladly forego a grave for my body

Or even a small coffin to shield me from wind and rain.
Soon rough winds will whip my body
And worms will feast on my flesh.
But I will gladly be their companion.

                  
 My ardent wish is to become a handful of earth
In this valley of my fatherland
Waiting for better times for my country.

If poets reacted quicker than artists in recording this latest

encounter with their people’s pain and suffering, han, novelists would
also take time to confront their anguished tales of the war. When their
own reckoning came, Pak Wansŏ’s The Naked Tree () interpreted
the war as the end of the social solidarity that Korea had known under
Japanese occupation; Hong Songwŏn’s North and South () marked
it as the turning point away from Confucian social values based on
trust, respect and decorum and towards materialism and short-term
gain; and Yi Munyŏl blamed Koreans’ subservience to foreign ideology
for the collapse of the family unit and its values, which meant so much
to him and to Yi Chungsŏp (Picture Essay ). In The Age of Heroes
() he analysed the career and philosophy of his father, a Confucian
turned socialist revolutionary who brought deprivation to his wife
and children by defecting to the North. Yi spoke for the psychological
suffering of all divided families.

   

Once again foreign powers had taken advantage of Korea’s political inex-
perience and divisions and used it for their own ends. But this time the
stakes were higher, the confusion more intense and the suffering of the
Korean people far greater than in  or . Despite its brevity, the
eight-year period from  to  is one of the most complicated in
Korean history. Its interpretation is mired in ideological claims and
theories, chief among them being the question of whether it was
Korean domestic issues that led to conflict – in other words, whether it
was really civil war that erupted in June  – or whether festering
Soviet–American hostility was to blame. Even the war years themselves
are clouded by rival interpretations of both sides’ political and military
aims. One certainty, though, is that all Koreans are ever conscious of the
legacies and unfinished business of a war that has still not officially ended.
The world has become familiar with, and appalled by, the suffer-
ings involved in the recovery from colonialism – think of Cambodia,
the Balkans, Rwanda and many others. All too often, political confu-
sion and psychological trauma have been compounded by ethnic vio-
lence and retribution against those suspected of benefiting from
occupation. Korea’s liberation was among the first of such kind in
modern times, and though it was spared the horrors of ethnic rivalry,

             ,     ‒   
 Yi Chungsŏp, Family
Yi Chungsŏp’s personal relationship with Japan was an equivocal one.
As a teenager he shared his people’s resentment at the attempted sup-
pression of Korean identity, but on going to the Department of Western
Painting in the Tokyo Cultural Academy (Bunka Gakuin) in  he
enjoyed the company of other artistically open-minded Korean students
such as Kim Whanki, met the Japanese girl who was to become his wife,
and experienced the first thrill of professional recognition and acclaim.
He came under the exciting influence of works by avant-garde painters
such as Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso, and after experimenting with
Cubism he eventually settled into his own style, a typically Korean form
of expressionism characterized by bold and swift curving linear move-
ment, which has been likened to the strong simplicity of Koguryŏ wall
paintings and the dynamic descriptiveness of Van Gogh. Yi returned to
Korea in  and married in , but ironically the country’s libera-
tion from Japan marked the tragic disintegration of his personal life.
During the Korean War Yi and his family wandered in the vicinity of
Pusan, but starvation forced him to send his beloved wife and two chil-
dren away to Japan, from where they would never return. He continued
to paint prolifically with passion and not a little eroticism, whether
expressing his fury at foreign interference in Korea with forceful cock or
bull fights, or his agonized love for his own and all children, in whose
nakedness he proclaimed unconcerned vitality but vulnerable inno-
cence. One of his best-known pictures is entitled Bull (). To many
Koreans, the ox, the unremitting tiller of the soil, suggests the idea of
self-sacrifice, and in a series of vigorous studies Yi used its relative the
bull as a symbol of national fortitude amid the hardships of occupation
and war. An exhibition of his work was held in , but despite his
growing reputation many of his pictures were banned on grounds of
immorality, adding to his sense of anguish and rejection. Schizophrenia
developed, and he died in poverty at the age of . He has been called
an indisputable genius, a nationalist whose influence helped to free other
artists from the restraints of tradition to pour out their emotions at
being Korean in the twentieth century.


Yi Chungsŏp, Family, , oil on paper,  ×  cm.


its agony was exploited by the ideological naïveté of a Cold War world
prepared to battle in defence, it believed, of right against wrong.
Then, after three years of concentrated destruction, that world
quickly forgot Korea and switched its attention to Vietnam. No such
amnesiac relief could be granted to Korea itself, where the torment
would continue across both halves of the shattered country. First
must come recovery from the physical damage and the rebuilding of
economies: with support from outside, notably the , China and
the , both states could take encouragement from their progress by
the s. In contrast, the mental trauma would take decades of gradual
rehabilitation.
The final toll of the human tragedy was immeasurable. The War
Memorial claims ,, North and South Korean combatants and
civilians killed, more than , wounded and , left missing. If
those figures look unacceptably precise, they do roughly tally with the
more rounded figures quoted by Western historians of the war: nearly
three million, about  per cent of the population, killed, wounded or
lost. Five million fled their homes. Hundreds of thousands of families
were divided, and many refugees ended up in the ‘wrong’ end of their
country. (Claims that ,, Northerners crossed to the South are
surely exaggerated, but much of the human traffic was undoubtedly in
this direction.) More than  per cent of the  soldiers, over ,
men, may have become casualties in the first week. According to the War
Memorial, ,, Chinese were killed or wounded, and Western
authorities agree that not fewer than half a million must have died.
, Americans lost their lives either on the battlefield, in prison
camps, or from injury or exposure; , were wounded and ,
unaccounted for. Of other United Nations soldiers, , died, ,
were wounded and , taken prisoner or lost.
The statistics are appalling. We are shocked by them – briefly – and
then forget them as we come across the totals from some other crisis. It
is not so much facts and figures that stay in the mind as images. Who
does not recall the little girl running naked and crying down the mid-
dle of a road in the midst of a Vietnamese battle zone? Or remember
the unarmed man heroically confronting a tank outside Tiananmen in
? So too in Korea, pictures tell the horrors of the war better than
words, pictures of mud, snow, shattered buildings, mangled bridges,
streams of hopeless refugees, bayoneted corpses, napalmed civilians,
demoralized soldiers, ill-clad s and overloaded, panic-filled boats
carrying people and their scanty possessions across swollen rivers (Picture
Essay ): people who literally did not know which way to turn because
they were liable to abuse and attack from both sides.

                  
  Taedong river, December 

Refugees struggling to escape P’yŏngyang across a bombed-out bridge over

the Taedong river, December . Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by
Max Desfor.

Without doubt, the entire Korean people were the losers. The pre-
war division of power remained unaltered; the frontier between the two
equally misnamed ‘republics’, frozen by the Armistice into the -mile
( km) wide, -mile-long demilitarized zone, was little different from
the arbitrary dividing line along the th parallel; and the political
polarization between left- and right-wing leaderships in the North and
South respectively was more entrenched than ever. Death removed
Stalin’s baleful domination on  March , leaving Kim Il Sung free

   

to develop his own interpretation of communism, socialist revolution
and utopianism into the all-embracing concept of juche. The Central
Committee Plenum, meeting in August , hailed him as a ‘national
hero’. North Korean citizens, however, soon found their lives in thrall
to class struggle, land collectivization and the chasing of unattainable
economic targets. Syngman Rhee, too, grew increasingly out of touch
with his people’s hopes and needs as the First Republic’s military, eco-
nomic and political reliance on the  deepened. He revised and
strengthened the National Security Law of , and extended it in
December  to cover a range of loosely defined activities, including
publishing attacks on the president and spreading ‘false information’.
Both Kim and Rhee, with equal lack of justification, claimed vic-
tory in the war; none of the foreign participants, however, could claim
to have achieved anything. The United States, it is true, had ‘contained
communism’, but despite terrible losses it had failed to achieve
Roosevelt’s vision of a pro-American democracy in a unified Korea,
and McCarthyism now hung like a lead weight round the neck of the
American people. Stalin’s hope of making his backyard in the east
secure while he concentrated on expanding his powers over Europe
was left unfulfilled. And the newly established Chinese government,
even if its armies had earned grudging respect for their bravery, was
now faced with unforeseen resistance across the Taiwan Straits and the
unexpected prolongation of its domestic revolution. Perhaps the only
country to experience short-term relief as a result of the Korean War
was Japan, a non-combatant. There, the war gave added impetus to
the settlement of a peace treaty and international rehabilitation, and
thanks in no small measure to MacArthur’s personal scheming, the
issue of Emperor Hirohito’s war guilt was relegated to a matter of sec-
ondary concern, something for which the Japanese people were gener-
ally grateful. The absence of victors, however, does not lessen the huge
significance of the war in defining the future direction of American,
Soviet and Chinese policy and shaping the new world order. Stalin may
have been deterred from considering European expansionism and even
World War Three, but now, not only Korea was condemned to contin-
ued bifurcation, but Germany and China too. Germany had played a
large part in the thinking of both Soviet and American leaders in the
run-up to June . When war broke out, the Western powers believed
it might be a trial run for a Soviet-backed attack on West Germany.
Walter Ulbricht openly exalted North Korea’s aggression as an exam-
ple of how Germany could be reunified. (Chancellor Adenauer, how-
ever, was prepared for an attack: he had  pistols ready in his office.)
Soon after the war, in October , West Germany was admitted to

                  
, and the European mould hardened. In East Asia, the war further
damaged the Chinese economy after years of crippling corruption and
anti-Japanese and civil war. The new communist authorities, who had
been looking towards the  as a potential partner, found themselves
excluded from the United Nations and world trade opportunities, and
condemned to unprofitable alliances with P’yŏngyang and East
European states. The Sino-Soviet rift deepened, and amid the break-
up of the monolithic world communist order Kim Il Sung’s Pavlovian
adherence to Moscow weakened. Truman’s reversal of his earlier
refusal to endorse Chiang Kai-shek’s rule in Taiwan created a major
new international alignment that divided the world’s ‘Eastern’ (com-
munist) and ‘Western’ (non-communist) blocs until the s. The
Americans found themselves being drawn willy-nilly into Asian poli-
tics, though Vietnam would soon show that they had learned no lessons
from the war they were widely perceived as having lost.

             ,     ‒   
  

Post-War Korea:
Tradition and Change
In  Korea confronted a new and unwelcome phase of its
modern history, the prospect of a peninsula divided once more
between rival states. Of course, everybody hoped, and still does,
that ‘post-Armistice’ Korea really would mean ‘post-war’. But
earlier plans for unification and national elections had clearly
foundered; talks at P’anmunjŏm dragged on and became mean-
ingless; and North and South failed to sign a peace treaty.
Tension between them periodically rose and fell, and Korea
remained one of the world’s flashpoints where devastating conflict
could break out at any moment. Yet though the paths followed by
the two halves of one country since , still more since ,
have led them to utterly different destinations, the people on both
sides of the  have a strong sense of ethnic and cultural unity,
and neither side is willing to abandon the prospect of eventual
reunification.

  

The Republic of Korea (South Korea)

The South Korean transition from dictatorship to democracy was hard
work. Syngman Rhee’s autocratic and corrupt government, somewhat
ironically called the First Republic, ended in  with a student-led
revolt on  April against his rigged re-election. Troops killed around
 of them, but university professors joined the call for Rhee to go,
and pressure from the  Ambassador, Walter P. McConaughy, and the
military commander, General Magruder, finally forced him into exile.
A brief and unsuccessful flirtation with democratic plans known as the
Second Republic ended prematurely in May  when right-wing
officers, fearful that elections would mean communist successes, staged
a coup against the prime minister, Chang Myŏn, and brought Park
Chung Hee, now General Park, to power. Most influential in the mili-


tary caucus was Kim Chŏngp’il, founder of the Korean Central
Intelligence Agency () and a collaborator with Park in setting up
the Democratic Republican Party. Park claimed to believe in
‘Koreanized democracy’, yet within a year thousands of politicians,
bureaucrats and military officers had been purged or banned from
public life, communists outlawed, newspapers closed down, rural
markets banned and tough limitations imposed on people’s freedom.
Nevertheless, he narrowly won a presidential election in October
 and, having silenced or intimidated his opponents was re-elected
with a greater majority in . This was the Third Republic, following
a new constitution drafted by a  committee under the guidance of
a Harvard University lawyer, Rupert Emerson. The education system
expanded rapidly, with schools still favouring the military-style uni-
forms and discipline reminiscent of the Japanese colonial period;
compulsory military service helped the enforcement of government
authority; and the rapidly growing chaebŏl , nominally independent but
having strong links with government and receiving substantial financial
aid from it, implemented tight control over labour. The reward for
restricted social freedom was at least a decade of economic progress.
Through the s superior mineral resources and Soviet aid had help-
ed industrial output in the North to outstrip that in the South, but Park
made steel, chemicals and machine tools top priorities and embarked
on an industrialization programme to rival that of the . Against
strong criticism in  he sent troops to fight in Vietnam, where their
distinguished service earned not only praise from their allies but also
trading deals. Exports rose, and a measure of stability and wealth was
appreciated by a country unaccustomed to such things. Not yet having
any strong commitment to concepts of democratic rights, it gave
Park the benefit of the doubt. Nationalist sentiment, however, was
another matter, and his drive to improve relations with Japan stirred
more passion, especially among students. A treaty of Basic Relations
signed in June  brought welcome cash and loans for industry,
but failed to make adequate apology or reparation for all Japan’s past
offences against Koreans. On the face of it, Park’s haste to build
bridges with Tokyo looks surprising. But it was important to the 
administration, anxious to build a strong East Asian buffer against
advancing communism. And to an obsessed militarist like Park there
was plenty to admire in recent Japanese history. He could appreciate,
too, the efficiency of its economic development of Manchuria during
the s.
If the North were blessed with better mineral reserves, South
Korea had the advantage in land and manpower. After all it had suffered,

    -       
however, the countryside remained depressed in outlook and conser-
vative in method until Park Chung Hee aimed at reviving and modern-
izing it with the New Community Movement (Saemaŭl Undong),
launched in . At last wealth and health began to spread into
provincial towns and mountain villages. Banking, sanitation and medical
services improved; new schools were built; and garishly coloured red,
blue or green metal roofs replaced the attractive but highly flammable
and insect-ridden thatched roofs of traditional rural houses. In Park’s
view, economic progress was an essential precursor of democratic
change. Now, as he addressed the gulf that separated town and coun-
try, he was personally involved in the Movement and responded fiercely
to charges of aloofness and authoritarianism.
Park was shocked when he almost lost the presidential election of
 to Kim Daejung. On  October  he suspended the existing
constitution, replaced it with a new one entitled (like that of Japan’s
Meiji constitution of ) Yusin, ‘Revitalization’, and imposed
martial law. The old constitution would have barred him from a further
period of office, but now he had the right to unlimited six-year terms.
As the Fourth Republic took shape, popular resentment increased
against his now dictatorial rule. And while heavy industry and the chae-
bŏl forged ahead, critics complained that too much of the profit from
the country’s rapid economic growth was going into the coffers of the
government-chaebŏl alliance. A curfew was imposed; criticism of the
constitution became a punishable offence; and party-political opposi-
tion – never really effective under the old constitution – was emascu-
lated as the  jailed and tortured the president’s opponents. Three
things led Park further and further from the path of ‘Koreanized
democracy’: the continuing threat from the North as America, in the
wake of détente with China and defeat in Vietnam, reduced its troops
in the  from , to ,; the president’s anxiety for tighter
government controls over financial and labour aspects of industry; and
the psychological effect of the assassination of the First Lady in 
in a bungled attempt on his own life. In summer  rioting broke out
when Park expelled the opposition leader Kim Young Sam from the
National Assembly, and within weeks the president himself was
dead, killed on  October by the gun of his own  director, Kim
Chaegyu.
Chun Doo Hwan, head of the Defence Security Command,
quickly took charge of the , suspended the constitution, closed
universities, banned political gatherings, and arrested political leaders,
including Kim Daejung and Kim Young Sam. Violent counter-
demonstrations followed and came to a head in May , when special

                  
army forces killed more than , demonstrators and bystanders in
Kwangju, Chŏlla Namdo. It was as infamous an event in Korean history
as the Tiananmen Square massacre in Chinese nine years later, and it
lit a slow-burning fuse that would take seven years to reach the powder
keg. Those who were students through this radicalized era later became
known as the  Generation: born in the s, activists in the s,
and -something years old as momentous events unfolded in the
s. Hostile to their own dictators’ interpretation of -inspired
democracy, they took to studying Marxism. (To the present day they
claim that their conversation in those days was always about politics
and social change, even Maoism, rather than normal student concerns
such as sex and pop music.) In August  the acting president, Ch’oe
Kyuha, resigned. Chun temporarily took the reins, but his confirma-
tion as president in February  brought no prospect of an end to
military rule. His presidency was a period of frequently unhappy news,
of riots, strikes and political repression. The United States was con-
demned for not reining him in, and anti-Americanism began to link it
with the massacre of the Kwangju victims. Attempts to negotiate with
the  got nowhere, and in  a North Korean bomb killed sever-
al  ministers in Rangoon, though Chun himself escaped. Ironically,
despite his globe-trotting efforts to raise South Korea’s international
image and his success in getting an aid and loan agreement with Japan
(), the two most positive aspects of his presidency were appreciat-
ed only when it was over. They were the election of his successor and
the Seoul Olympic Games, for which his administration had success-
fully bid and begun to prepare.
Up to then, no president had been chosen in open competition,
and Chun intended to hand the presidential baton on to another former
general, Roh Tae Woo. Roh had played a major part in bringing Chun
to power and held important posts under his Fifth Republic. However,
public outrage at the proposal and continuing fury at police repression
led to two weeks of nationwide demonstrations that began on  June
. The so-called June Uprising persuaded Roh to insist on an elec-
tion in December. He won it with . per cent of the vote. Had the
two Kims (and a third, the veteran Kim Chŏngp’il, who also stood and
polled around  per cent) done a deal to field just one candidate, as once
seemed likely, Roh would have lost, for the opposition vote was split
fairly evenly between Kim Young Sam and Kim Daejung. It was anoth-
er example of Chosŏn-style political factionalism, but it was also a
valuable lesson in the ’s democratic learning curve. Under the
Sixth Republic, Roh introduced a more liberal approach to party poli-
tics and press freedom. Yet even though his term of office, from 

    -       
until , has been praised in retrospect as marking the birth of
democracy, mass arrests continued under the National Security Law
and workers still went on strike over anti- labour discrimination. Nor
was the president himself untainted by scandal, and in  his succes-
sor, Kim Young Sam, brought both him and Chun to trial for bribery,
corruption, mutiny and treason. Chun’s venality was such that he is
believed to have taken bribes worth more than one billion pounds
sterling. Initially sentenced to death and  years’ imprisonment respect-
ively, the pair were released from jail late in  by special dispensation
of the president and president-elect Kim Daejung. Chun returned to
the Buddhist monastery where he and his wife had sought sanctuary
before his trial.
Kim Young Sam was Korea’s first elected president with no mili-
tary background. The  Generation, now leaders of the new social
and political environment, embraced the growing mood of democrati-
zation and cosmopolitanism, and backed measures aimed at putting the
 at the forefront of the drive towards globalization. In  it was
admitted to the  in recognition of the part it was already playing
in global trade. Progress indeed, yet Kim would not complete his term
with his name untarnished. The fear of rough justice was still not
removed: between  and , , arrests were made under the
National Security Law and a further , under the Assembly and
Demonstration Act. The dangerous liaison between government and
chaebŏl was highlighted in autumn  by the economic crisis that fol-
lowed the bankruptcy of the Hanbo Business Group and Kia Motors.
Financial scandal engulfed Kim’s family. And he was accused of illegal
attempts to hamper Kim Daejung’s election as his successor by spread-
ing slanderous accusations.
Kim Daejung was aged  when he entered the Blue House, the
presidential residence, in . He had been an opponent of every one
of its previous occupants. He had been kidnapped, imprisoned, sen-
tenced to death and exiled, and had survived two assassination attempts.
His very election was mould-breaking (among other things, he was the
first president to come from the south-western Chŏlla provinces), and
the story of his presidency continued to show his determination to look
forward. He appointed his old rival Kim Chŏngp’il, now turned run-
ning mate, as prime minister. An Honour Restoration Act ()
compensated democratic campaigners who had suffered under previous
regimes, a majority of whom were students and teachers, and a
National Human Rights Commission was set up in . A Ministry of
Gender Equality was created, and discussion initiated on the abolition
of patriarchalism in Korean society. Confronted at the very outset by

                  
economic crisis, Kim accepted the  terms for a rescue package (he
could do no other) and agreed to break the anti-competitive power of
the banks and the chaebŏl. He was passionate about détente with the
North, visited P’yŏngyang for an unprecedented summit meeting with
Kim Jong Il in , and that same year was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize for his ‘sunshine policy’. The Korean tiger had regained its self-
confidence. And yet. The Honour Restoration Act, and a measure to
investigate the Truth on Suspicious Deaths (), had been conceded
only after a long campaign by associations representing bereaved
families. By the time Kim retired in , the monetary and manufac-
turing systems were still in need of radical reform; relations with the
North were still marked by distrust rather than cooperation; two of his
sons were under arrest for accepting bribes; and questions about finan-
cial irregularities hung over his own reputation. True, almost every
home might be wired up for broadband reception and almost every
passenger in a subway carriage might carry a mobile phone, but real,
fundamental change would take longer to achieve. In March 
Professor Song Duyŏl, after speaking out openly in favour of North
Korea, was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment under the National
Security Law for ‘spying’. President Roh Moo-hyun (elected )
spoke for many of the electorate when he proclaimed his personal wish
to repeal the Law, but fierce resistance continued to come from his
political opponents.
Against all the charges laid against them of political non-account-
ability and repressive behaviour, these presidents could plead the need
for stern authority in the face of imminent trouble from the , the
support of successive  administrations and the empirical fact of
remarkable economic progress. Between them, despite what according
to modern Western (and increasingly, modern South Korean) concepts
constituted so many infringements of human rights, they had brought
their country a long way since . Like the bad fairy excluded from
the party, however, the  leadership was determined to spoil any
feeling of triumphalism in Seoul.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

The history of North Korea after the Armistice was at best a severe
disappointment to Korean nationalists who hoped for reunification, at
worst a political and humanitarian disaster for those concerned about
the rights and welfare of its people. Kim Il Sung had been Stalin’s
choice as Korean leader, and his regime held the whip hand over
Syngman Rhee’s in terms of natural resources and popular support.

    -       
Through the s aid from the Soviet bloc and the  helped North
Korea to chase Japan as Asia’s most industrialized country. But all this
was marred by the extension of party and personal command. The
People’s Committees of the s were not translated into any effective
means of representing ordinary people’s views in the quasi-imperial
dictatorship of the Kim ‘dynasty’. Despite the façade of a Supreme
People’s Assembly, democratic centralism – operated through the
Central People’s Committee, the Administration Council and the
National Defence Commission – maintained a tight grip on political
activity. Decision-taking and control rested in the hands of the Korean
Workers’ Party (; secretary-general, Kim Il Sung), the Korean
People’s Army (; commander-in-chief, ), and the secret services
(under ). The  Central Committee, whose National Congress
met only irregularly, controlled mass organizations to which the major-
ity of the population belonged. These included the Democratic Women’s
League, the Young Pioneer Corps and occupational bodies for scien-
tists, factory and farm workers, artists and writers, and others. In the
countryside, the formation of rural co-operatives in  imitated
Chinese land reforms but stopped short of replicating the People’s
Communes in . Collectives probably brought communal advan-
tages to poor peasants, even if they were of no appreciable benefit to
richer ones, and gave the Party another command tool.
The personality cult raised the ‘Great Leader’ onto a lofty plinth
where his policies, deeds and sayings received the kind of adulation
enjoyed by Mao Zedong in China. Perhaps the most popular commu-
nist in Korea, North and South, had been Kim Il Sung’s deputy and
foreign minister, Pak Hŏnyŏng, and Kim executed him in  as a
warning to other would-be rivals. Though no heads appeared over the
parapet, further purges occurred. One of those who disappeared with
the election of the third Supreme People’s Assembly in  was Han
Sŏrya (b. ), the veteran communist writer who was minister of
education and held the chairmanship of the Federation of Literature
and Arts from  to . His fall was accompanied by that of other
cultural figures, including the prominent stage performers Sim Yŏng
and Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi. In  Kim Il Sung became president under the
new Socialist Constitution. He still retained his  post, and in the
fashion of a Chinese emperor chose his son as his heir. After the rup-
ture of Sino-Soviet relations in  he managed delicately to balance
his allegiance to his two great mentors, simultaneously promoting his
own political philosophy of self-reliance ( juche) into an all-encompass-
ing mantra. He had first underlined its importance in December ,
and over the next half-century it would be cited as the source of inspi-

                  
ration behind everything from steel production to music-making, shap-
ing people’s attitudes, driving them to strive constantly to improve
standards, and subordinating the individual to the group.
Juche was the antithesis of sadaechuŭi, the old-fashioned concept of
‘serving the great’ now condemned as ‘flunkeyism’. As P’yŏngyang
continued to pour out propaganda about the Great Leader’s achieve-
ments and the  (with  support) sullied its reputation in Vietnam,
the Third World was increasingly attentive, and by  the  and
 had roughly equal numbers of supporters in the  General
Assembly when it came to votes on matters concerning the divided
peninsula. At enormous cost, the  maintained embassies all over
Africa, funding aid projects from Guinea to Zimbabwe that ranged
from the self-evidently valuable (construction, agriculture) to the dis-
tinctly questionable (military training, statue-building). But then, just
as world diplomacy began to acknowledge that economics mattered
more than ideology, a succession of unsuccessful Five- and Six-Year
Plans sent the  economy spiralling downwards, and foreign trade
fell from . per cent of  in  to  per cent in . The coun-
try grew increasingly isolated from the outside world, especially after
the collapse of communism elsewhere in . From a position of eco-
nomic strength, juche could have denoted self-confidence; from one of
growing weakness, it hinted at desperation and encouraged deceptive-
ness on the part of the leadership. To try and achieve its ends the
regime turned to subversion, intimidation and criminal activity. North
Korean undercover agents had little trouble in fomenting resentment
and rioting against the  president’s autocratic rule, especially
among students. In October   agents assassinated many of the
 cabinet on a reviewing stand in Rangoon, and on  November
 a bomb planted by terrorists brought down a  airliner en route
from Iraq to Seoul. Evidence accumulated that North Korean diplo-
mats around the world were engaging in drug dealing to help finance
their poverty-stricken government’s imbalanced spending. High on its
list of priorities was its nuclear programme, using an experimental
reactor at Yŏngbyŏn. Few would have imagined, when the Soviet Union
installed it in , that more than forty years later this plant would
still pose one of the greatest threats to world peace.
To the surprise of many foreign commentators, Kim Jong Il (b. )
proved that he was up to the challenge when his father died in . He
avoided taking the presidency. His supreme title, now the highest office
of state, was Chairman of the National Defence Commission. Not only
did the widely predicted military coup against him fail to materialize,
but the ‘Dear Leader’ soon showed himself to be a wily manipulator of

    -       
foreign relations. Although the  signed the Nuclear Non-prolifer-
ation Treaty in , the  suspected by  that the  had
developed the facility for making nuclear weapons. In  P’yŏngyang
exploited international fears to extract concessions from the  and
the United Nations: two light water reactors and the promise of eco-
nomic aid in exchange for a halt to work on nuclear weapons. On 
August  it tightened the screws by test-firing a three-stage missile
over Japan, quickly followed by a statement giving heavy industry
economic priority. Yet as emphasis on agriculture was downgraded,
worldwide concern mounted at the suffering of ordinary North Koreans
from famine. On  May  P’yŏngyang admitted that , people
had died from famine in the last four years (compared with ,
estimated by Bruce Cumings and even four million by one over-
emotional commentator), and  and  officials set up offices for
the first time in the  capital. In the aftermath of  September 
P’yŏngyang denounced the use of terror, and its ambassador to the ,
Ri Hyŏngchŏl, signed two international conventions against terrorism.
Despite this, President George W. Bush took a much harder line than
his predecessor Bill Clinton over the regime’s nuclear record, and
P’yŏngyang retaliated by reactivating its uranium enrichment plant.

:  ,  

In the kaleidoscope of Korean history since the Armistice we can see
the recurrence of four patterns already encountered in our journey
through the politics of earlier ages. These show an impulse for unifica-
tion; limitations on popular expressions of political opinion; periods of
foreign backing, interspersed with displays of political independence;
and the use of culture to underpin authority.

Frustration at disunity
Around midday on  August  the streets of Seoul were deserted.
It was not one of the regular air-raid practices that had driven people,
resigned as usual, into the shelters, but the fact that the International
Red Cross had been allowed for the first time to send a team to North
Korea and to broadcast live television pictures, and Seoulites were as
desperate to get their first glimpse of P’yŏngyang since the war as
Westerners were to see the first pictures transmitted from the moon
on  July . Whether in the time of Kwanggaet’o, Kim Yusin,
Myoch’ŏng or Yi Sŏnggye, the inhabitants of the Korean peninsula
have always felt that it should be one. Gina Barnes may be right in

                  
saying that ‘the peninsula has never been one integrated unit of the
type envisioned by its modern inhabitants’, but a sense of guilt over the
split personality of modern Korea is apparent, at least in the South,
and the Red Cross visit was seen as the harbinger of progress towards
reunification. But as the Armistice talks dragged on year after year at
P’anmunjŏm, and not even a postal link followed the Red Cross visit,
hopes dwindled again. In  the North proposed a Federal Republic
of Koryŏ, a transitional bipartite state in which different ideologies
would be tolerated in either half. As a preliminary step the proposal
demanded the abolition of the South’s anti-communist laws and the
removal of  troops, and in the context of the ’s current political
difficulties it was obviously a non-starter. Thereafter the South grew
richer and the North grew poorer, and the economic and social prob-
lems that followed the sudden end to the bifurcation of Germany at the
end of the decade sounded a cautionary note to South Koreans. When
the  finally agreed in  to the ’s regular proposal for dual
membership of the United Nations, the two-Koreas mould seemed
more unbreakable than ever. Nevertheless, nobody gave up, and in 
an agreement was signed on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, Exchanges
and Cooperation. Nothing had resulted from it when Kim Il Sung died
in , and even south of the  a chill filled the summer air as
President Kim Young Sam refused to express any form of condolence
to the Northern leadership.
Kim Daejung’s determination to achieve at least a thaw in relations
won him emotional support in the election of . The response from
the North was more suspicious, and although it was  initiative that
brought about talks in Beijing in April , P’yŏngyang rejected Seoul’s
request for a permanent meeting place for divided families. At the same
time, however, a press release from Kim Jong Il issued through the
United Nations stressed the need to improve North–South relations,
and behind the scenes more moves were afoot. The founder of the
Hyundai Group and native of the North, Chung Juyŏng, visited
P’yŏngyang with Kim Daejung’s personal encouragement, and financial
inducements persuaded Kim Jong Il to grant Hyundai permission to
establish a tourist link with the North. It was also awarded business
contracts as Southern companies were allowed to invest in small-scale
manufacturing enterprises across the . Work started on rebuilding a
rail link from one end of the Korean peninsula to the other. South Korea
became the largest contributor of humanitarian aid to its famine-stricken
neighbour. Now, optimists looked forward to the opening of bilateral
relations between the two countries rather than their rapid reunification,
and to more chances to reunite long-separated family members.

    -       
 The expression of political opinion
Recovery from a bitter and destructive civil war is never quick or easy.
When, as in the case of Korea after , both sides claim to have won
yet peace is unattained and the outcome inconclusive, rehabilitation
may be a long way off. Neither, so soon after the Japanese colonial
period and its messy aftermath, could rehabilitation in Korea mean the
restoration of a status quo. Korea had no experience of self-govern-
ment in modern times. Fewer than ten years before, Koreans were not
even allowed to use their own language or their own personal names.
Now, the South was expected to learn new political skills under the
tutelage of a Great Power that was itself undergoing radical reassess-
ment of traditional attitudes and practices, struggling through the
Cold War and the nuclear age, the McCarthy era, and the problems of
racial and sexual emancipation. The North, beholden first to the Soviet
Union and then to the People’s Republic of China, had still less chance
to learn the techniques of self-government. Both North and South
sought sanctuary in patterns that were already familiar to them, to wit
those associated with authoritarian control based on traditional notions
of legitimization, and the Neo-Confucian appeal to respect for hierarchy
and superiority.
In China, where Confucianism had been denounced by the May
Fourth Movement in  yet had to be re-confronted in the Thought
Reform movement of the early s, the Cultural Revolution of
– and the Anti-Confucian Campaign of , it was associated
with strong feelings of kinship loyalty, relationship (guanxi) responsibil-
ities and respect for seniority and precedent. In twentieth-century Japan,
the Confucian tradition lived on in the rigid hierarchy, sense of duty and
self-sacrificing spirit of the military heritage, and in the all-embracing
care of the great zaibatsu for their workers. In South and North Korea it
was recognizable in society and economics, through ‘exhortatory’ cam-
paigns such as Park Chung Hee’s Saemaŭl Movement and Kim Il Sung’s
Three Revolutionary Teams Movement of  (which dispatched
teams of young activists into factories and other workplaces to stimulate
revolutionary fervour via songs and study of Kim Jong Il’s writings);
through mass participation in highly choreographed global-scale under-
takings, like those associated with the  Olympics and the 
World Cup; and in the role of the exemplar and adulation of heroes both
ancient and modern. Bruce Cumings sees the Kim Il Sung personality
cult in North Korea as Neo-Confucian rather than Stalinist.
A further adjunct of imperial Chinese-style government in Korea,
however antithetical to the principles of Confucianism, was the use of

                  
the military and undercover agencies to aid law enforcement. In the ,
the Honour Restoration and Compensation Act subsequently acknowl-
edged , victims of government oppression. The deaths of 
people during the military period, including many suicides, may have
been the result of improper official pressures. And  cases were accept-
ed for investigation under the Suspicious Deaths Act. Cases of victim-
ization by the Party and military in the  are impossible to compute.
In the pattern of government organization the  perpetuated
the monolithic pyramid structure of the dynastic era. In local areas, 
authority was backed up by the , and soldiers worked alongside
peasants in the fields as they did in Maoist China. In both countries it
was a case of ‘the Party commands the gun’, and a continuation of the
imperial tradition that in the tripartite command system of administra-
tion, censorate and military, Confucian officialdom was primus inter
pares. It contrasted with the Tokugawa interpretation of Confucianism,
which translated respect for discipline into superior military power
through the shogunate, and paved the way for the military–civilian cab-
inet crisis in the s. In all three countries the traditional recognition
that a non-elected oligarchy would take decisions following state or par-
ticular interests led to a non-accountability that sat uncomfortably with
the Confucian theory of imperial responsibility for Heaven’s people. It
also encouraged an ad hoc attitude to keeping agreements and treaties
rather than one of principled respect. Neither in the  nor in the 
were the national  or  congresses given a real say in policy-mak-
ing, and the  Politburo earned a reputation for untrustworthiness
in international affairs. Critics would cite as examples its disregard for
the  agreement of , and its rejection in December  of the
Northern Limit Line, the de facto maritime border between North and
South Korea observed since the Armistice of . Armed clashes
occurred across the North’s redefined Line in June  and July .
In fairness, no country has a monopoly of virtue or of fault when it
comes to adherence to treaties, and none can really afford to adopt a
‘holier than thou’ stance when accusing others of breaking them. We
must bear in mind that much of the denunciation of ’s foreign
policies stems from its enemies; that time has helped to allay some of
the unmitigated blame for the Korean War long attributed to North
Korea and the ; and that even Seoul took the view that President
Bush had gone too far in denouncing the  as part of his ‘axis of evil’.
In the , reliant on  support yet anxious too to maintain some
sort of independence, the transition to democratic institutions was
slow and not consistently convincing. The first three presidents all
ended their terms of office in unhappy style, and even the next two, the

    -       
most popularly elected and democratically inclined, saw their reputa-
tions marred by scandal. The political parties of the First to Sixth
Republics had to struggle against unfair and illegal opposition waged
by the presidency, and they formed and re-formed themselves and
their principles in a manner reminiscent of Chosŏn factionalism.
Democracy was not an established East Asian tradition. In Japan, the
post-war leaders worked skilfully to create a system ‘respecting “the
imperial will” instead of the will of the people’ (Herbert Blix). In the
, Park Chung Hee’s ‘Koreanized democracy’ relied like Kim Il
Sung’s on military thuggery, and to this day the National Security Law
justifies the presence of intimidating riot police on the streets.
Crowd control and crowd manipulation have been brought to a fine
art in both Koreas. What the Seoul authorities would like the world to
remember are the pictures of the intricately choreographed displays
that opened and closed the Olympics of  or the huge, happy mul-
titude filling City Hall (Square) when South Korea did so well in the
World Cup of . What they would prefer it to forget is the sight of
Chun Doo Hwan’s armed police firing tear gas into massed ranks of
protesting students on  June . Crowds periodically celebrate
and demonstrate in North Korean cities too. Western observers may
be inclined to write off all mass gatherings there as politically ordered,
although the grief of thousands of mourners weeping publicly at the
death of their Great Leader on  July  was undoubtedly sincere.
Displays of public emotion have long been familiar in Korea. The
crowds who lined the streets to witness Queen Min’s bier pass by on
 November  cloaked their feelings in silence, in striking contrast
to those who marched on  March  or  April . Of course,
modern as well as past authorities are bound to try and prevent the
expression of improperly motivated feeling. But as Mencius conceded,
in the last resort the people have the right to express complaints with
force. If suffering, over and beyond simple hardship, really becomes
insupportable, Heaven might back their demands for a change in poli-
cy, even of ruler. In the , the Kim ‘dynasty’ seems to have crushed
its citizens’ bodies and spirits beyond even the possibility of righteous
rebellion. In the , however, the minjung movement, involving what
Kenneth Wells calls a ‘struggle over legitimacy’, became an expression
of populist nationalism heedless of establishment policy. Enthusiasm
for Park Chung Hee’s Saemaŭl Movement waned after  as govern-
ment direction increased and corruption spread, and country people
were learning to use their voice. The countdown to Kwangju, where
peaceful crowd control was lost with awful results, gathered pace.

                  
 The reliance on foreign support
Any reader who has stuck with me thus far won’t be surprised to be told
yet again how important foreign relations were, this time to the two
republics desperately trying to recover dignity and international stand-
ing in the second half of the twentieth century. After the Armistice both
the  and the  remained dependent on Great Powers, the former
on the  and Japan, the latter on the  and China. Recognition of
inevitability nevertheless failed to dispel embarrassing implications of
‘serving the great’, made all the worse by resentment at recent ill-
treatment by all four. Self-strengthening (zijiang) had been a target of
nineteenth-century Chinese politicians. Nearly a century later, Koreans
were more realistic than to deny their need of foreign aid. But speedy
self-reliance, otherwise known as the right to political independence,
was something both Koreas aspired to and might be pursued with their
own agendas for modernization. It had served the Japanese well in the
Meiji era. Now both Kim Il Sung and Park Chung Hee used juche to
motivate their people; Kim Il Sung went further and turned it into a
weapon of thought control.
The United States and the Soviet Union polarized the Cold War
world, including post-Armistice Korea. The two Koreas, sucked into
the ideological rivalry, aligned themselves with Washington and
Moscow without any sense of deep-rooted enthusiasm. For all the
benefits the Western powers had brought in the late Chosŏn, their own
political antipathies were even then an added irritation to the peninsula,
already embroiled in the traditional Sino-Japanese struggle. Now, iron-
ically, Western hegemonism and East Asia’s instinctive aversion to it
revived the status of the traditional team leaders of the Eastern ‘bloc’,
the Chinese.
Immediately after the Armistice, China wrote off the ’s war
debts and offered economic assistance to its ally, a gesture with partic-
ular significance since the  refused to waive repayment of its own
loans to China. In the context of their growing rivalry, the two commu-
nist giants competed for influence by helping to rebuild North Korea’s
heavy industrial base. Kim Il Sung took advantage of both and carefully
avoided committing himself to either, though historical, cultural and
ethnic linkages gave China the edge, and as Soviet influence dwindled
it was Beijing that remained as the ’s principal supporter in inter-
national affairs. Cold War and Korean War alignments had thrown the
 willy-nilly into partnership with the Republic of China (Taiwan),
two repressive regimes that struggled to create a favourable image
abroad. Eventually, the success of the Seoul Olympics persuaded the

    -       
world that South Korea’s economic ‘miracle’ could not be ignored, and
the  began to shake itself free of diplomatic reliance on Japan, the
 and Taiwan. Relations improved with Russia, and even more with
communist China. Roh Tae Woo refused to join in international
sanctions against China after Tiananmen (), and following further
contacts made during the Asian Games of , the China Chamber of
International Commerce and the Korea Trade Promotion Corporation
opened permanent trade offices in Seoul and Beijing. In Chinese uni-
versity dormitories South Korean students, who could afford to pay
the fees, replaced North Koreans, who couldn’t. And in  Seoul
switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Not surpris-
ingly, China’s self-interested show of even-handedness towards the two
Koreas led to strains with the North. P’yŏngyang was especially incensed
when the high-level defector Hwang Jangyŏp, the brains behind Kim Il
Sung’s juche ideology, escaped to South Korea via Beijing and the
Philippines in . On the other hand, it may have been secretly
relieved in late  that Beijing took the lead in trying to act as broker
to defuse tension with the United States.
Park’s efforts to restore relations with Japan brought economic
benefit to the South, but won little popular support and failed to heal
rifts. Putting up memorials to Yi Sunsin and Queen Min could not
mitigate public concern that the Japanese apology for its past ill-treat-
ment of Korea contained in the Treaty of Basic Relations of  was
inadequate. Rights of residence and education guaranteed to Koreans
in Japan failed to solve anti-Korean discrimination. And the agreed
-mile fishing limits were so vague in respect of the disputed Tokto
islands that arguments over sovereignty remained unresolved and broke
out again in  and . Further apologies for past wrongs made in
 and  by the prime ministers Keizō Obuchi and Junichirō
Koizumi were still deemed insufficient. Despite an olive branch held
out by President Roh Tae Woo in , reminding both sides that good
relations had been quickly restored and long enjoyed after the Imjin
Waeran, the story of Korean–Japanese relations continued to be a
roller-coaster. A summit between Kim Young Sam and Prime Minister
Ryūtarō Hashimoto in  pledged to use sporting and cultural links
to strengthen regional peace. But in  Seoul objected to accounts of
World War Two in Japanese school textbooks and to Koizumi’s visit to
the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, a focus of nationalism where
Japan’s war dead are honoured. Contrary to many expectations, the
sharing of the World Cup in  was managed without rancour. But in
 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade published a pamphlet
insisting that the Sea of Japan be co-termed the East Sea (a more

                  
ancient name) in international usage, saying that ‘it is inappropriate to
name the sea area surrounded by many countries after one particular
country’. And a fortnight after Koizumi had again outraged Korean and
Chinese sensitivities by feeling ‘refreshed’ when offering the New Year’s
Day prayers of  at the Yasukuni Shrine, South Korea ruffled the
waters once more by announcing a series of postage stamps featuring
the Tokto islands, prompting both countries to reiterate their claim to
these rocky outcrops.
Like China, Japan tried to keep diplomatic and commercial doors
open to the North as well as profiting from economic commitment to
South Korea, and the United States found Tokyo a useful intermediary
for communicating with P’yŏngyang. The large Korean communities in
Japan included many northerners favourable to the communist regime,
which came to depend on the money they sent to their relatives back
home. But the firing of the Taep’o-dong  missile over Japan in August
 severely strained Japan’s own efforts at detachment from the
internecine Korean dispute. In September  an unprecedented visit
to P’yŏngyang by Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi gained a promise
from Kim Jong Il of an indefinite moratorium on missile testing.

  

Government and the arts

Both the  and the  politicized arts and culture, using them to
promote nationhood and cement their own legitimacy, but whereas the
effect in the North was to constrain artists almost unremittingly, the
situation of their counterparts in the South developed and progressed
throughout the military dictatorships and into the democratic era. In
 an annual folk festival was introduced in every province, though
it soon became apparent that authenticity was not the main criterion
for winning performances: sanitized versions of masked dance drama,
for instance, endeavoured to deflect social criticism by cutting out
scenes satirizing the ruling class. Park Chung Hee regarded cultural
development as an essential part of economic reconstruction, and as he
tried to swing ordinary people behind him, a succession of measures
created an impression of his personal concern for Korean culture.
They also gave him a means of directing the nation’s thinking about
social groups, traditional activities and their economic potential. In
 the Cultural Properties Protection Law was introduced. With
this, the regime laid claim to the protection of national cultural treas-
ures, which it classified under the headings of Tangible Cultural

    -       
Assets, Intangible Cultural Assets, Folk Cultural Properties, and
Monuments (Picture Essay ). Inspiration for the system followed
pioneering research and lobbying by the journalist Ye Yŏnghae and
others. (The Japanese Diet had introduced a similar measure in ,
so here was another example of Park’s admiration for Japanese mod-
els.) Four years later the Japanese government was persuaded to return
cultural assets removed from Korea by the colonial government. A
Ministry of Culture and Information was created in , and the
Culture and Arts Promotion Law of  was accompanied by a five-
year plan for cultural development, the first statement of long-term
strategy and part of a greater economic plan. It included the inaugura-
tion of the Korea Culture and Arts Foundation in , the introduc-
tion of the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund, and the formation of
the Korea Motion Picture Promotion (Commission). The translation
of traditional Korean literature from Chinese characters into han’gŭl
was speeded up, and in  the Academy of Korean Studies was
opened. All these were positive measures. Perversely, however, they
stiffened the pride of patriots involved in the minjung movement, and
emboldened their criticism of official censorship of the arts.
In both  and , cultural sites and assets were safeguarded,
and new monuments and shrines sprang up. Those with potential for
political advantage, such as the Tan’gun shrine and the birthplaces of
Admiral Yi Sunsin and Kim Il Sung, were singled out for particular
refurbishment. In the , archaeological research was encouraged
and a new building constructed for the Central Historical Museum
(). In the , universities were encouraged to pursue archae-
ology, and many formed museums to display their finds. A new home
for the National Museum of Korea, surmounted by a traditional-style
pagoda, went up in the grounds of the Kyŏngbŏk Palace in , and
from  onwards replacements were constructed for its six provincial
branches dating from the First Republic. This time, instead of being
identical products of image-driven cultural policy, they boasted indi-
vidual and imaginative designs reflecting their regional and historical
character. In Seoul itself, the Museum courted controversy. It outgrew
its purpose-built home, which was handed over to the National Folk
Art Museum in , and moved into the nearby colonial-era Capitol
Building. This, though spacious and handsome, was not ideally suited
for the requirements of a great museum. Nevertheless, when Kim
Young Sam’s government demolished it in a demonstrative fit of
nationalism in  many defenders spoke up for it, especially from
abroad. A Korean architectural firm won the competition to design a
successor, which would place it among the world’s top museums.

                  
 Making long-stem bamboo pipes

The Cultural Properties Protection Law () revived and encouraged

folk crafts incorporating traditional skills. Some of these represented
nationwide customs, others aspects of regional culture. All were threat-
ened by the imperatives of mass production and global taste and the use
of modern tools and manufacturing techniques. Nowadays it is rare to
see anyone smoke a long pipe, but they continue to be made for sale as
collector’s pieces and tourist souvenirs.
In Chosŏn Korea three lengths of pipe were smoked, the longest (per-
haps up to  cm) by the oldest and the shortest by the youngest members
of society. A pipe was tucked into the belt at the waist, where a tobacco
pouch also carried a flint and a bundle of dry herbs as lighting equipment.
The quality of a man’s pipe was a mark of his wealth and standing. The
stem was of polished bamboo, into which were fixed a mouthpiece at one
end and a bowl at the other. The metals of which these were made and the
intricacy of their decoration were marks of the owner’s opulence. Most
prized were black copper and white bronze, with inlay of gold, silver,
porcelain, jade or cloisonné. On cheaper pipes, mouthpiece and bowl
might be made of soapstone instead of precious metal, and carving, paint-
ing or burning used to provide a degree of decoration.


(Opened in October , the new National Museum is claimed to be
the sixth largest in the world.)
Both regimes, viewing culture as a legitimate means of social con-
trol, imposed restrictions on artistic freedom and were guilty of perse-
cuting individuals who overstepped the mark. In the , heavy
emphasis was laid on Socialist Realism in art, and scenes of smiling
steel workers, self-sacrificing soldiers and peasants greeting their Great
Leader replicated the sort of thing being produced by artists in the
. In the , when Chosŏn Ilbo inaugurated the Modern Artists’
Invitational Exhibitions in , the government was concerned by the
number of pictures that displayed people’s sufferings and launched its
own National Art Exhibition series in , a vain continuation of the
Government-General’s policy of promoting anodyne subjects and
styles to try to restrain artists from expressing their personal feelings.
By now the Korean avant-garde movement was in full swing, forcefully
expressing anger at twentieth-century experiences. Hwang Yŏngyŏp’s
‘Human Being’ series, for example, symbolized the shackles of colo-
nialism and war, and also of modern technology (Picture Essay ).
Hwang escaped retribution, but others were not so lucky. The com-
posers Kim Sunnam (–) and Yun Isang had gone to North
Korea and Paris in  and  respectively. Neither would ever
return to the . (Actually Yun did, in a manner of speaking. He was
kidnapped from Berlin in  by the  and taken to Seoul, where
he was tried for sedition and imprisoned. He was freed following inter-
national protests, went back to Germany and became a naturalized
citizen. He declined to accept a later invitation to visit Seoul.) The
work of the outstanding poet Chŏng Chiyong (b. ), believed to
have died in the Korean War, was proscribed from  until .
His crime was to have belonged to the communist Korean Proletarian
Artists’ Federation during the colonial period.
The Fifth Republic (–) saw a broadening in the official
definition of culture to embrace modern and contemporary arts. No
fewer than eleven pieces of statutory legislation were enacted, cover-
ing subjects as far apart as broadcasting and the preservation of tra-
ditional temples, and including the Cultural Properties Protection
Act of . The same year saw the announcement of a five-year plan
for enhancing local culture. It was progress. But in promoting what it
called ‘sound’ culture and condemning ‘harmful’, ‘pornographic’ or
‘low’ culture, the nanny state was still motivated more by political
correctness than by ethical considerations: in  riot police closed
down a play entitled Maech’un (‘Prostitution’), part of the popular
madanggŭk drama movement by students aiming to break free of

                  
conventional theatrical traditions. Not until Roh Tae Woo’s presidency,
at the start of the Sixth Republic, did state control of the arts visibly
begin to relax. The first ever minister of culture, Lee Oyoung, was
nominated in . A well-known writer on many subjects ranging
from philosophy to fiction, Lee was concerned to try and strengthen
the position of traditional arts amid the changing values of the inter-
national world. In October of that year he permitted a group of musicians
to attend a Pan-Korea Reunification Festival in P’yŏngyang – the
only one of its kind ever to be held – and in December North Korean
musicians paid a return visit to Seoul.
Kim Young Sam emphasized the social and economic value of
national and regional culture, and his government’s five-year cultural
plan () gave regional authorities and amateur organizations more
autonomy over cultural policy, removed earlier restrictions on arts bod-
ies and encouraged international cultural exchange. Under his regime,
the criterion for official support became the excellence of the product
as determined by the consumer rather than by government agencies.
Emphasis was placed on youth culture and lifelong learning, and a
Korean National University for the Arts was established. In  the
university entrance-examination system was revised, placing more
value for the first time on interpretation than rote learning, and
encouraging the younger generation to express its own opinions. The
Cultural Welfare Implementation Plan of  allocated more govern-
ment funding for cultural (including sports) facilities to counter ‘neg-
ative problems resulting from society’s rapid economic development’.
Kim Daejung’s inaugural address on  February  defined
four themes in relation to cultural policy: the development of nation-
al culture and arts, the globalization of national culture, the nurture of
the cultural industry and cultural exchange with the . Like Park
Chung Hee, Kim saw the link between culture and the economy, and
in reaffirming Kim Young Sam’s optimistic view of the arts in all
forms, he particularly stressed their role in getting Korea on its feet
again after the financial collapse of . And, his sense of national-
ism and every Korean’s goal of eventual reunification lurking not far
behind, he saw the part it could play in his hoped-for détente with the
North (the so-called ‘sunshine policy’). He set up the Korea Culture
and Content Agency (), a think-tank of cultural policy adminis-
trators, to advise the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and to promote
the development of film, animation, cartoon,  games and pop music
within the entertainment industry. He authorized the importing of
Japanese films for the first time, but moved more cautiously in
response to  free-trade complaints about Park Chung Hee’s law of

    -       
 Hwang Yŏngyŏp, Human Being

Hwang Yŏngyŏp,
Human Being, , oil on
paper, . × . cm.

Hwang Yŏngyŏp was born in P’yŏngyang on  December , and

was enrolled in the Fine Art College there when the Korean War broke
out in . His formative years were marked successively by colonial-
ism, communism and military brutality, and his work continually
reflects the scars that these etched on his psyche. In  he graduated
from Hŏngik University in Seoul, where he had studied under Kim
Whanki. The formative influence of Picasso on Whanki’s work is plain
to see in Hwang’s abstract expressionist painting. So too is his admira-
tion for Park Seugun, in whose pictures the figures of country folk are
recognizably but crudely drawn and permanently struggle to free them-
selves from enveloping textures of muted colour. Like Park, Hwang has
been described as a ‘lonely artist’, though he did belong to a small group
of six, the Engagement Group, which sought to escape from convention
in the s.
In keeping with Korean tradition, Hwang’s style is notable for its use
of line, monochrome and subsequently colour. In his early pictures the
symbolic shapes of his figures, like those of Park Seugun, lay semi-con-
cealed beneath rather oppressive blankets of colour, and by the time
they escaped into greater visibility in the monochromes of the early
s they were already enmeshed in the geometrical shapes and web-
like lines that would define, for Hwang, the ensnared, struggling nature
of human existence through the rest of the century. By this time Hwang


was confronting and denouncing Park Chung Hee’s repressive regime
and expressing sympathy for fellow artists in the North. Art, he said,
must criticize reality, even at the risk of the artist’s isolation.
Hwang defines his professional mission as the affirmation of human
dignity in the face of constant adversity. Shaman-like, he seeks to cast
out the despair and bondage of the past through his art. His ‘Human
Being’ series, on which he has worked continually for more than 
years, exemplifies man’s struggle to break the shackles that bind him, be
they political, military, economic or technological. It is a theme not
much suited to traditional Korean ink or watercolour, and Hwang has
worked principally in oils. The subjects of the series are generic, and
portray neither individuality nor personal characteristics. He has not
sought to create a peculiarly Korean art genre, though his later pictures,
with themes such as My Village and Shaman, do reflect the strength of
Korean nationalism. He opposes narrow fundamentalism, even going so
far as to liken minjung populism to the restrictive outlook of North
Korean juche, yet in both style and subject matter his work is imbued
with Korean-ness.


, under which cinemas were still obliged to show Korean films on
 days of the year.
What we see from the brief survey above is that every president
from Park onwards has recognized the value of his nation’s culture to
its – and his own – fortunes, and has responded accordingly. From a
cultural to overall annual budget ratio of less than . per cent in the
s, government expenditure rose to . per cent in , . per
cent in  and . per cent in . Of course, money for the arts
did not necessarily mean either respect for artists or concern for their
public. Park Chung Hee built the huge National Theater on Seoul’s
Namsan, which opened on  October , and Chun Doo Hwan
began the Seoul Arts Center () in  (Picture Essay ). They
patted themselves on the back at the creation of such symbols of
national pride: ordinary people, who had not been consulted, were less
sure. Namsan was not well served by public transport, and as for the
location of the  in Kangnam, it lay well south of usual theatre-going
haunts and few Seoulites were even sure how to get there. Meanwhile,
money was lavished on the same kind of bureaucratic ostentation in the
. P’yŏngyang opened the grand Mansudae Arts Theatre in ,
housing the eponymous Arts Ensemble, which performed Chinese-
style revolutionary operas. Generally speaking, however, the complex
was used more often for political meetings than for popular cultural
events.
The military dictatorships in both South and North invested a
high percentage of their cultural expenditure in grandiose building
schemes and spectacular displays of music, dance and drama. Only
under the influence of the ’s democratization process in the s,
however, did it really become possible to speak of a vibrant national
culture. Then, the sense of artistic liberation was welcomed, even if it
was not hard to find critics in a society with a wide generation gap who
feared that the term ‘minjung culture’ had taken on a new meaning –
that of young people’s pop culture – and that the older, more refined
arts of the literati were increasingly being sidelined; or that in the new,
increasingly affluent society, everybody was now middle class, and the
old-style minjung culture of the rural peasantry – folk-songs as sung in
the fields, popular entertainments as enjoyed in the village square,
shamanistic rites as performed in answer to a community’s heartfelt
needs – had been transformed into concert-hall versions.
Because Korean governments on both sides of the  emphasized
the political role of culture, there were few opportunities for extra-
governmental arts sponsorship. In the , however, an important excep-
tion existed in its National Commission for  (). Founded

                  
in ,  may be termed one of the oldest of arts organizations in
modern Korea, and as an international grant agency it enjoyed a unique
status and independence. Its non-political career officers developed an
expertise that politicians could not match, and they were not afraid to
express differences of opinion with government even during its most
authoritarian periods. Generally content with the governments’ own
efforts in the fields of education and science,  did nevertheless
offer financial vouchers redeemable against its own resources to cash-
strapped schools and hospitals. Its main efforts, however, went into the
preservation and encouragement of traditional culture. The develop-
ment of cultural agencies in Korea after  was in keeping with a
worldwide appeal from , and in  three Korean treasures
were added to its World Heritage list for the first time: the Royal
Ancestral Shrine in Seoul, Pulguk-sa and the Sokkuram Grotto in
Kyŏngju, and the set of Tripitaka printing blocks preserved at Haein-sa.
Among corporate sponsors of the arts the great chaebŏl led the way
in the Sixth Republic. Some pulled in their horns after the economic
collapse of , and cultural organizations claim that it has never been
easy to attract money from them, though Kim Daejung’s government
took measures to stimulate their renewed support. Most active were
Samsung, Hyundai and Daewoo. In  Samsung opened the Hoam
Museum at Yong’in to show off its priceless art treasures, based on its
founder Lee Byung-chull’s collection. Ten years later it established a
gallery in central Seoul and a Korean gallery at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London, and in  it initiated prizes for literature and
traditional music. In  Hoam was superseded by the Leeum
Museum complex in the Yongsan district of Seoul, built to the innova-
tive design of three foreign architects. Hyundai’s Asan Foundation and
the Daewoo Corporation demonstrated a more offbeat concern for cul-
tural values by creating an annual Filial Piety Award () and fund-
ing the intellectual journal Tradition and Modernity. Nor have ‘green’
issues been neglected. Like many countries, South Korea now encour-
ages private enterprise to join with government in preserving important
aspects of its environment, whether the natural habitat of migrating
birds or buildings of historical importance. The first project undertaken
by the Korean National Trust, launched in , was the restoration of
the traditional roof-tile house of the late Choi Sun-u, a former director
of the National Museum.

    -       
 The Seoul Arts Center; The Whanki Museum
Pride in cultural characteristics and technological prowess shines out in
modern Korean architecture. On the campus of the Seoul Arts Center
(below), for example, the fine concert hall built for Chun Doo Hwan and
completed in  is shaped like a fan, and the even bigger opera house
behind it, commissioned by Roh Tae Woo and finished in , like a
traditional conical hat. By contrast, Mario Botta’s Kyobo Tower ()
dominates the Kangnam skyline by virtue of its very height ( m.).
But size is not everything. In the modest Whanki Museum (, oppo-
site), the Korean-American architect Kyu Sung Woo combined the spirit
of tradition and modernity, the feeling for p’ungsu with the forms
favoured by Korea’s leading abstract artist Kim Whanki. It is an innova-
tive and sensitive construction, a building that fits into its background
on Pugak Mountain as country homesteads once nestled into folds in the
hills, simultaneously complementing and enhancing the famous works
of art it contains; a combination of yin and yang, the natural and the
artificial, the rounded and the straight, the abstract and the physical.
Two rounded tops to an end wall evoke the shoulders of the meibyŏng
vase (see Picture Essay ), the epitome to Kim of his country’s cultural
heritage and a shape that was central to the art of his early period.
Beneath the eaves a line of small windows, and below them a design of
light and dark tiles, anticipate the patterns he created in the early s
as he explored the possibilities of dots and squares. Inside is a cool com-
bination of light, space and proportion. Staircases, galleries and show-
rooms rise around a central atrium, making skilful use of natural light
shining through effectively placed openings. Space has been carefully


planned, walls appropriate for large and small works, and floors for free-
standing showcases displaying papier-mâché creations from the late
s and early s.
Kim Whanki’s fascination with the avant-garde and the use of colour
began during his education in Japan, and when he returned to Korea in
 he helped to form the Freedom Group of abstract artists. Through
the s his work was semi- representational, drawing on human, nat-
ural and still-life subjects. Between  and  he studied in Paris,
and after his return to Seoul he concentrated on symbols traditionally
loved by Koreans: the moon, cranes, clouds, mountains and the ceram-
ic vase that reminded him of his first appreciation of beauty. In 
Kim moved to New York, where he remained until his death. Here his
work became more experimental and more abstract. He painted in
gouache, in oil on newspaper and, later on, fabric. The preoccupation
with blue that marked his middle period gave way to a wider range of
colour. And gradually he surrendered himself to the tiny dots, encased
in squares, out of which so many of his later paintings were construct-
ed. Each one was painted with thoughtful care, and though they could
not, in Kim’s view, compare with the stars in the night sky, each encap-
sulated the ancient oriental symbol of the universe, the round earth on
the background of the square heavens. Richness of colour and depth of
texture distinguish Kim Whanki’s work, and are shown off to perfection
against the plainness of the museum’s layout and decoration.


 Government and religion
A theme throughout this book has been the role of religion and ideology
in the shaping of the nation – Buddhism, shamanism, Neo-
Confucianism, Christianity, Marxism. Successive states have patronized
them and their associated institutions for their perceived protective and
strengthening powers, even though they have not been averse to chal-
lenging or resisting official policy. The reader may reasonably wonder
where they feature in the story of modern and contemporary Korea.
Although both Buddhist and Christian organizations were nomi-
nally tolerated in the  after , persecution of their followers
occurred and drove believers underground. Christians were blamed for
compromising the success of the North’s war efforts. The atheistic
state philosophy of juche was supposed to cater for everybody’s spiritu-
al as well as material needs. The only rightful recipients of worship
were Kim Il Sung and his son. In the , President Park’s attempts to
invoke virtues such as loyalty, filial piety and self-sacrifice in the serv-
ice of the state were reminiscent of Chiang Kai Shek’s ill-fated attempt
to revive Confucianism in China’s New Life Movement of . The
churches spoke out bravely against corruption and oppression and
enjoyed rapid growth as they took up human-rights issues and public-
ity was given to ‘minjung theology’. Catholics received a boost to their
morale when Pope John Paul  visited Korea in  and canonized
 late Chosŏn martyrs. The event was particularly significant given
that Cardinal Kim Souhwan (b. ) was unflinching in his defence of
democracy against the prevailing dictatorship. Apologists claim that
Protestant Christianity scaled the peak of its fortunes around  with
 million church members, or roughly a quarter of the population.
Dispassionate observers put the figure at  to  million. Many of these
were associated with the new religious sects that proliferated especially
in poorer regions. As the need for political criticism declined through
the s, more orthodox churches turned to championing ecological
and humanitarian causes. The Korean Roman Catholic Church, with
an  membership of around . million, helped to found a hospital
in North Korea, opened in  at Rason, North Hamgyŏng province.
In December  it launched a campaign against the death penalty in
the .
South Korean leaders, searching for a preferably native ideology
that might counter the force of the ’s juche, were obliged to adopt
an even-handed approach to Christianity and Buddhism, which had
roughly equal numbers of adherents and powerful international back-
ers. Shamanism was a possible candidate: it had ancient Korean roots

                  
and still enjoyed popular support in towns as well as rural areas.
Banned in the North, practising shamans were still numerous in the
South (estimated at , in ), and although they were official-
ly condemned as perpetuating old-fashioned superstition, an attempt
was made to update shamanism into a new universal cosmic philosophy
of Korean origin. To many Koreans, however, the new Pentecostal
churches seemed to offer the same kind of services in a more up-to-
date format. In the mid-s they attracted international attention,
even if mainstream Christian churches did regard them with caution.
Meanwhile, intellectual debate among Koreans was focused on a
revival of interest in Confucianism and its applications in increasingly
liberal times. The ingrained traditions associated with filial piety, the
work ethic, sense of duty, and corporate and social responsibility were
all trotted out as explanations for the success of Korean capitalism, and
at a time when neither China nor Japan seemed to subscribe officially
to any strong moral or spiritual system, and when North Korea’s
philosophy of self-reliance had patently failed, it seemed as if South
Korea was bidding for leadership of East Asia in regard to ethical
politics. Then came the financial crisis of the autumn of , the
strict terms of the  rescue package, revelations of institutional
corruption and the shaming of the chaebŏl system. The fickle praise of
the wider world temporarily turned to scorn. Ironically, however, it
was the very Confucian virtues of self-sacrifice and determination
that set the country on the swift path to recovery, and the denunciation
of corruption in high places that rose to a crescendo in  was deeply
rooted in the Confucian ethos.

     

Painting
In South Korea, it was as if artists emerged from a box in , looked
around at their devastated environment and the brighter lights shining
abroad, and used their brushes to vent decades of pent-up emotion.
Hwang Yŏngyŏp found that oils and abstract art, besides being ‘mod-
ern’, provided the most suitable medium for expressing the suffering of
recent decades. Despite his intense nationalism, he would stick with
oils all his life, even after the s when he turned to more graphic
depictions of traditional Korean subjects. Like others, his teacher Kim
Whanki, who had trained in Japan, left for Paris after the Korean War
and later moved on to the . Whanki’s early abstract work had
expressed his admiration for the Western avant-garde, but during a

    -       
return stay in Seoul (–) he concentrated on expressing his
strong love of oriental culture. In the work of Kim Kichang, the source
of determination and anger was more personal, namely resentment at
the fact that he was virtually deaf and dumb. As the Park government
affirmed its commitment to Korean traditional culture, painters like
Kim with a strong feeling for Korean history experienced a returning
sense of relief, and enjoyed the luxury denied to them by the Japanese
of exploring their native traditions. In the s some found minimal-
ist styles appropriate for plumbing their depths and expressing their
love of Korean paper, brush and ink. But if the quasi-Daoist quest for
unification of the world of man and nature, and if Lee Ufan’s (b. )
and Park Seobo’s (b. ) study of the properties of the calligraphic
line, and Song Sunam’s (b. ) and Suh Seok’s (b. ) experiments
with oriental ink, were typical of a fairly introspective, scholarly mood,
that was to change amid the turmoil that followed the killing of Park
Chung Hee and the Kwangju massacre. While ink painting (sumukhwa)
continued to transport aficionados to a more spiritual plane, and the
properties of traditional Korean paper (hanji) inspired Park Seobo and
others, another avenue was being opened up. The stirring of minjung
priorities during the s produced ‘art with a message’ (minjung
misul), the contemporary interpretation of traditional subject matter
with popular rather than literati appeal. It took a lead from the great
genre paintings of the past and found the rediscovery of colour refresh-
ing, especially the brightness of the five-colour tanch’ŏng system. If the
colours of the family figures by Park Seugun (–) were muted
and almost self-conscious, those of shamans by Park Sangkwang
(–) were positively exuberant. The dominance of monochrome
ink painting was being superseded.
The s were characterized by widespread artistic experimenta-
tion, even anarchy, as the young ‘Orange Tribe’ generation used
Western styles of satirical, pop and action art to express criticism of a
rapidly changing social and cultural environment. In the hands of seri-
ous artists, fascination with hanji now developed into elaborate collage
and papier-mâché compositions. Installation and video art, some of it
highly inventive, was led by Paik Nam-june (‒). Paik had
moved to the United States after studying in Japan and Germany, and,
having first been trained as a musician and gained his h in aesthetics,
made his name in the s as a media and performance artist. In
contrast to Hwang Yŏngyŏp, Paik was intent on exploring means of
humanizing technology and the electronic medium. In his TV Bra for
Living Sculpture (), an assemblage of video-tubes, televisions,
Plexiglas, boxes, vinyl straps, rheostat, foot switches, cables, copper

                  
wire and a cello, the musician Charlotte Moorman gained wide atten-
tion by playing the instrument with miniature  sets on her breasts. In
later years Paik’s attention turned to financial themes: his My Faust -
Economics () comprised a neo-Gothic temple made of paper
money, encasing  television screens on which international currency
symbols continually changed, with a scattering of coins on the ground
in front of it. His obituarist in the London Times called him ‘one of the
very few artists who single-handedly changed the course and tone of
art in the th century’. Another reflection of changing times was
Kim Min’s and Choi Moon’s Tourist Project (), an imaginative
and amusing moving montage employing slides of well-known world
tourist sites, a screen made of white feathers, an electric fan and a tape
of The Flight of the Bumble Bee. Yet amidst the cultural confusion, even
young Korean artists living and working abroad continued to display
the power of their traditional ethnic roots. Tom Lee (b. ) moved to
New York when he was ten. In Reverberating Bell he interpreted the
sound escaping through the acoustic tube characteristic of the Korean
bell, and to calm his traumatized mental state after the attacks on the
World Trade Center in New York on  September  he turned to a
similar theme in ‘Arcanum Series’, a set of explorations painted on linen
and based on an abstract realization of Sokkuram and a Korean bell.
The first Korean artist to exhibit on the post-war world stage was
Park Seobo, at the second Paris Biennale of , and in  the foun-
dation of the National Museum for Contemporary Art () provid-
ed Korean art with an international forum of its own, one that would
play a leading part in sending it abroad and hosting outstanding exhi-
bitions from abroad. Korea made its first appearance at the Venice
Biennale in , when T’ou – Spirit of the Korean People by Jheon See-
cheon (b. ) provided a reminder of the terracotta figurines of the
Samguk period as well as of Anthony Gormley’s Field (). The
same year saw the introduction of the Kwangju Biennale, and among
the multitude of festivals encouraged by the government’s devolution
of cultural organization the Kŏchang International Theatre Festival
(established ) acquired a regional reputation and the Pusan
International Film Festival (established ) quickly became one of
the world’s most prestigious cinematic events. In  it showed films
from North Korea.
Pride in past characteristics and achievements is one thing; know-
ing how to assess the new evidence of cultural awareness that pours out
month by month from Korean artists working at home and abroad is
quite another. ‘Korean artists’, according to the critic Lee Doo-shik,
‘are struggling to respond to trends towards globalization while at the

    -       
 Song Shiyŏp, The Sound of Creation
In keeping with the principles adopted in Communist China (and before
that the Soviet Union), where Mao Zedong’s talks at the Yenan Forum
on Literature and Art in  achieved scriptural status, North Korean
art had to serve the masses by reflecting scenes and activities familiar to
them and their masters by bringing home political messages that people
could not fail to understand and obey. From gigantic statues down to
humble paper-cuts, subjects extolled the virtues of self-sacrifice,
unremitting effort, and cheerfulness and optimism in confronting
obstacles. Ordinary workers took their place alongside Stalin, Mao and
Kim Il Sung in the artistic pantheon. The West knew the style as
Socialist Realism and deemed it dull, repetitive and probably counter-
productive. It seemed to be confined in scope, and predictable and naive
in message. Chinese and Koreans were less critical and found more to
admire in it. Top-class artists, whether on the operatic stage or in the
potter’s studio, were able to show that they had not suddenly lost their
skills, even if individualism did have to give way for the time being to
conformism; in traditional times oriental painters had not drawn upon
such a wide range of natural or social subjects as those in the West; and
after the humiliations suffered by their countries in the early twentieth
century some of them were glad to sacrifice the self-expressionism they
had been introduced to by the West and Japan in return for the respect

Song Shiyŏp, The Sound of Creation, c. .


now paid to them, nominally at least, by their leaders. Nationalism, too,
was only thinly disguised in the supposedly universal socialist philosophy.
In what was called the ‘juche realism’ of North Korean art, traditional
ink continued to be preferred to oils, silk and mulberry paper to canvas.
Women appeared not only in blue dungarees but also in Korean hanbok
dress. Landscapes placed enormous construction sites alongside loca-
tions of national historic importance and views of the Diamond
Mountains. Jane Portal finds a parallel here with the ‘true view’ aims of
Chŏng Sŏn and fellow artists in the eighteenth century.
Song Shiyŏp (b. ) came from Hamgyŏng province and was
trained at the P’yŏngyang Fine Art University. Appointed a Merit Artist
in , his subjects included the newly built Tan’gun Mausoleum ()
and Kim Jong Il’s claimed birthplace on Mount Paektu (). The
Sound of Creation was acquired in P’yŏngyang for the British Museum
in .


same time maintaining a sense of their own regional tradition.’ In his
view Korea’s contemporary art movement has been overly dependent
on Western ideas and too uniform in approach. Kim Young-uk would
not go quite as far, but admits that ‘we must consider what it means to
be Korean. That is, we must identify what is contemporary Korean
art.’ So what does make Korean art Korean? Pak Yong-suk tries to
hijack the most famous principle of traditional Chinese painting, iden-
tified by Xie He in the sixth century  as qiyun shengdong (Kor. kiun
saengdong, ‘spirit resonance’), claiming that it first appeared on Koguryŏ
tomb murals. Korean brush aesthetics, she says, are divided into the ink
tradition that associated the literati with the transcendent force of
nature, and the colour tradition that depicted the human world and its
routine activities. The generation of energy that gives painting its vital-
ity is like taming a horse, something Koguryeans knew all about.
Others see Korean-ness in art as an awareness of human beings and
nature working together. It takes form in Chang Woosung’s modernist
approach to traditional landscape or flower-and-bird painting. It is
shaped by an approach to minimalist art that explores materials and
their qualities beyond what man does with them. The semi-abstract ink
paintings of Suh Seok also refer back to Korean tradition and are
imbued with a distinctive calligraphic quality. In the Line and From
Point series of Lee Ufan, and Park Seobo’s Ecriture series, the quest
ends in complete abstraction. Nature is not only physical, but spatial
and temporal as well. Its depiction is not to be confused with reproduc-
ing the so-called realism of a visually perceived scene, but with the
examination of the interaction of yin and yang in both space and time.
According to Park Seobo, ‘Koreans intrinsically possess a minimalist
tendency’. They see monochrome work as more natural and intuitive.
The principal medium of Korean painting is ink, and artists unite with
it in striving for spirituality: ‘The Korean concept of beauty is less
objective than subjective, less rational than ethnic in character’ (Yu
June-sang).
Artists in South Korea confess to having little idea of the work of
their colleagues in the North, and although the  acquired some
paintings by  artists around  they were not put on show.
Rather more is known abroad. Western and Japanese collectors have
been able to make purchases in P’yŏngyang (Picture Essay ), and
exhibitions have been held in Tokyo, New York and London.
Professional artists in the North belong to national and regional organ-
izations that monitor and assess their work, and make recommenda-
tions for acquisition by the National Art Gallery (Chosŏn Misul
Pangmulgwan). Most important of these is the Korean Artists’

                  
Federation, formed in , with sections for painters, writers and
composers, whose role as educators in socialist society was quickly rec-
ognized after Liberation. Artistic prowess became associated with
political awards, the most important being the title People’s Artist
(Inmin yesulga), which also conferred social status. As in Maoist China,
much art in the s and ’s was characterized by monumentalism,
whether the enormous bronze statues of Kim Il Sung or huge paint-
ings of revolutionary events used to decorate public buildings. Artists
who found themselves north of the th parallel in  had been
trained in Japan, P’yŏngyang and Seoul. They had shown in the Sŏnjŏn
National Art Exhibitions, and favoured the same subjects and styles as
their erstwhile colleagues south of it. Among them were Chŏng Onnyŏ
(b. ), North Korea’s leading female artist; Kim Kiman (b. ),
brother of Kim Kichang; Kim Chugyŏng (–), a prolific oil
painter who was the first director of P’yŏngyang Art College in ;
and the renowned printmaker Pae Unsŏng (–). Despite the
emphasis on Socialist Realism and the importance of glorifying the
state, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and the juche philosophy, not all
paintings are political in nature. Landscapes of the Diamond
Mountains, Mount Paektu and the Kaesŏng region, flower-and-bird
subjects, and portraits of women and children in traditional Korean
dress are all popular. Standards are high, but the tight imposition of
state control means that in contrast to the dramatic changes taking
place in the South, little stylistic evolution has been possible. Juche and
individual creativity do not mix.

Music
The fortunes of traditional Korean music after  followed altogether
a different kind of upward curve in the  from that enjoyed by paint-
ing. The music for the annual rites at the Chongmyo Royal Ancestral
Shrine was the first Intangible Cultural Asset to be designated in ,
along with p’ansori, four masked dance dramas and a female song-and-
dance genre. In the s scholars and artistes at the National Classical
Music Institute (situated today at the Seoul Arts Center and renamed
the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts) brought
performances of court music and dance to a high standard of perfec-
tion and played it before visiting state dignitaries. Individual musicians
like the kayagŭm player Hwang Byungki (b. ), taegŭm player Lee
Sangkyu (b. ) and folk singer Kim Sohee enjoyed strong reputa-
tions, and the government sponsored performance trips abroad.
Musicians attending the Durham Oriental Music Festival series between

    -       
 and  were asked by the organizers not to make any conces-
sions to supposed foreign taste. Audiences whose expectations were
based solely on the fan dances performed by the Little Angels of
Korea, already well known in the West, were surprised – though not
unpleasantly so – by what they heard, and in due course Korean music
was introduced to the  Promenade Concerts and the Edinburgh
Festival. Korean classical music is quite unlike that of China, Japan or
any other country. Played by an ensemble of plucked and bowed
strings, flutes, reeds and percussion, it has complexities of sonority,
tempo and mode that give it a unique textural richness and colour.
When played by a solo instrument it has a minimalism akin to that of
monochrome ink painting. In particular, the plucked strings of the
kŏmun’go make positive use of dying notes and the silence that binds
them in the way that the calligrapher uses the failing ink at the end of
his brush strokes and the blank space on the paper that links them in a
dynamic tension. The player isolates himself from his surroundings
and seeks the Dao. It is not, and never was intended to be, music for the
masses. That is why, as I found during my early visits to Korea, classical
music was not widely appreciated, in contrast to the raucous, intoxicat-
ing cacophony of nong’ak associated with the still unspoilt farming
routines in the countryside. The minjung movement was always more
likely to popularize farmers’ music, masked dramas and the market-
place theatre of p’ansori than scholars’ classical music. Nong’ak became
associated with the nationalist appeal of the percussion group
SamulNori, formed in , and tapped into a rhythmic violence that
was recognized worldwide and witnessed again from the Korean
drummers Tokaebi Storm at the Edinburgh Festival of .
But Hwang Byungki showed that there was scope for modernizing
high-art music. Using memories of his own youth and stories of
Korea’s past glory as inspiration, he broke with precedent during the
s and began to compose new pieces in traditional style. While
rooting his music firmly in the Korean soil, he later collaborated with
the Western composer John Cage and performer Evelyn Glennie, and
in his hands and those of like-minded composers, ‘modern tradition-
al’ Korean music began to flourish. In the s, Hwang recalls, no
more than  kayagŭms were built each year: fifty years later, between
, and , were being turned out. In the early s there were
two traditional orchestras in South Korea: thirty years on there were
upward of twenty. The number of university colleges teaching tradi-
tional music increased correspondingly, and freshmen now entered
with higher standards than ever before. In  a group of composers
including Yi Kŏnyong (b. ) drew on folk melodies to write music,

                  
they said, for Koreans rather than Westerners. Calling themselves the
‘Third Generation’, they aimed to make traditional music accessible to
ordinary Koreans in updated form. Still more transformation occurred
during what Hwang describes as the decade of broad diversity, the
s. This eclectic age also brought crossover music – Korean music
played on Western instruments and vice versa – a -hour radio station
devoted to traditional music, and traditional tunes harmonized and
adapted for Western tuning methods. The latter came through North
Korean influence. Refugee musicians arriving in the South from the
 earned good money in Seoul, where students found their playing
styles easier to master, and by the end of the decade even the previous
ban on playing North Korean tunes had been lifted.
In North Korea, says Keith Howard, ‘no musical production [is]
possible in public or at any professional level outside state institutions’.
Every aspect of musical creativity, from subject matter to composition
and performance style, conforms to juche rules. If these stifle personal-
ity they nevertheless encourage high standards, and audiences particu-
larly enjoy ‘revolutionary’ and ‘people’s operas’. The story lines, like
the themes of popular songs, may be repetitively concerned with the
qualities and achievements of the two Kims, but the collective groups
responsible for writing them incorporate references to well-known folk
songs and traditional tunes.

Literature
Among the delicate and sometimes provocative themes explored by
modern South Korean authors have been emancipation from the tra-
ditions of the Chosŏn period, such as the subordination of women;
experiences under occupation and the anguish and possibilities
accompanying liberation; the social and mental effects of the
North–South polarization; the strains accompanying rapid economic
growth; and the struggle for political freedom and recognition of
human rights. With the curtailment of freedom after the  April
Uprising (see p. ) and the banning of overt political activity through
the s and ’s, writing became a substitute forum for expressing
concerns. Issues of sovereignty, both national and personal, became
something of an obsession, and because so much writing was con-
cerned with Korean issues, translation into English was slow to happen
and Korean literature remained of scant interest to the outside world.
Poets experimented with modernism as well as preserving tradi-
tional forms. Kevin O’Rourke, a long-time Irish resident of Korea and
professor of literature at Kyunghee University, has accused them of

    -       
being too abstract, moral and intellectual, and wished that they would
rediscover the passion and physical focus of Yi Kyubo. But the dissi-
dent poet Kim Chiha (b. ) seemed to have his feet on the ground.
His father was tortured as a communist, and he himself spent six years
in jail for writing poems such as ‘Five Thieves’ (), a satire on the
rapaciousness of the ruling classes. Abroad, he was nominated for the
Nobel Prize. Another who surely wrote from the depths of personal
experience was Ch’ŏn Sang Pyŏng (–). Tortured and made
impotent by the  in , he suffered a mental breakdown that
left him with ‘the heart of a child, and a child’s fragility’ (Brother
Anthony). His wife, Mok Sun Ok, supported him from the proceeds of
a small café in Insadong named Kwi-ch’ŏn (‘Back to Heaven’), while
constant drinking ate away at his liver. Even when medical opinion
wrote him off in  he lived for a further five years. Perhaps direct-
ness, rather than O’Rourke’s wished-for emotion, sums up the style of
Ch’ŏn’s poetry, yet passionate he certainly was, in his love of nature, his
preference for simplicity and his gratitude for life.

I’ll go back to heaven again.

Hand in hand with the dew
That melts at a touch of the dawning day,
I’ll go back to heaven again.
With the dusk, together, just we two,
At a sign from a cloud after playing on the slopes
I’ll go back to heaven again.
At the end of my outing to this beautiful world
I’ll go back and say: It was beautiful . . .

Literature also expressed renewed pride in Korea’s past and the

best of its own traditions, and writers ‘struggle[d] to cultivate the spirit
and determination of the Korean people’ (Kim Byong-ik). Outstanding
novelists included Pak Kyung-ree (b. ), whose epic historical tale
The Earth () took  years to write; Lee Oyoung (b. ), profes-
sor of literature at Ewha University, whose novella The General’s Beard
() displayed his interest in the interaction of different cultures, and
later achieved international acclaim for his skill at uniting them visually
in the thrilling cultural performance of the opening and closing cere-
monies of the  Olympic Games; Cho Chŏngnae (b. ), who
tackled issues of ideological and personal rivalry in South Chŏlla
between  and the Korean War in his ten-volume The T’aebaek
Mountains (); Yi Munyŏl, whose fictionalized account of the

                  
nineteenth-century poet Kim Sakkat (The Poet, ) raised profound
questions linked to Korean tradition and modernization; and Yi Inhwa
(b. ), whose novel Who Can Say What I Am? won the first Writers’
World Literature Award in . By the end of the decade young writ-
ers, openly professing that to them the sufferings of the past were
ancient history, turned to more universal topics such as feminism, sex,
ecological issues and popular culture. Theirs was ‘literature of the new
generation’.
For all the struggle demanded of South Korean writers, the task
confronting their colleagues in the North could scarcely have been
greater. There, writing was no longer for entertainment, for juche
demanded and ensured that art serve ideology. According to one of
Kim Il Sung’s famous dicta, authors were to be ‘engineers of the
human soul’, not mirrors to its infinite variety and capacity for individ-
uality. What they were to create was a people faithful to the Great
Leader and dedicated to his view of social revolution. Luckily for
him, Hong Myŏnghŭi, described by Kang Young-Zu as ‘Korea’s finest
historical novelist’, had passed the age of having creative ambition, and
found his political loyalty rewarded in September  by his appoint-
ment as a vice-premier. One who failed the test was Kim’s biographer,
Han Sŏrya (b. ). After his purge in  there was no let-up in the
outpouring of writing eulogizing Kim and his son, but it was now
attributed to anonymous Creative Groups that also depicted them in
visual art and films. Drawing, inevitably, on the same range of subject
matter as writers in the South, the authors of short stories, novels,
plays and operas in the  dwelt on the sufferings of the twentieth
century, but gave every story a positive twist with examples of heroism,
self-sacrifice and patriotism. Readers and audiences, whether or not
they were aware of the constraints under which they were written,
undoubtedly found satisfaction and enjoyment in them. Stephen
Epstein concludes that ‘perhaps the most salient feature of North
Korean literature in contrast to its southern counterpart is its eternal
optimism’, a finding shared by Keith Howard with regard to popular
songs. Both disagree with the frequent view of critics that the manda-
tory depiction of triumph over hardship through self-reliance defies
characterization and means a complete masking of reality, and see in
the short stories and popular songs of the s an underlying tenden-
cy to reveal the strains of the decade, in the face of which literature and
music provide psychological comfort.

    -       
 Cinema
In January  Ch’oe Ŭnhŭi was kidnapped by North Korean agents
in Hong Kong. (Nothing very surprising in that: kidnapping features
large in modern Korean history. Victims of hit squads from both North
and South range from the opposition politician Kim Daejung, seized in
Japan in July , to the avant-garde painter Yi Ŭngno, the composer
Yun Isang, and hundreds of anonymous suspected dissidents on both
sides of the . A teenage girl made the headlines in , when Kim
Jong Il admitted that agents had kidnapped ordinary Japanese citizens
in the s and ’s and taken them back to North Korea to teach
Japanese language and culture to its trainee spies. Most of them,
including thirteen-year-old Megumi Yokata, had since died.) Ch’oe
Ŭnhŭi was a glamorous actress, the ex-wife of South Korea’s leading
film director Shin Sang’ok (‒), who already had some  titles
to his credit. She was taken to P’yŏngyang to satisfy the ‘collector’
instinct of the Great Leader’s film-loving son Kim Jong Il and to act as
bait for her former husband. In June he too was seized, and both of
them were eventually set to work in the Korean Film Studio. Perhaps
Kim was trying to practise what he already preached. Five years earlier,
he had published Yŏnghwa yesul ron (‘The Theory of Cinematic Art’),
a book that came to enjoy the same degree of scriptural veneration in
North Korea as did Mao Zedong’s famous Talks at the Yenan Forum on
Literature and Art () in China. In the book, Kim urged workers in
the film industry to interpret working-class experience and to take the
principle of self-reliance to heart. In this case, self-reliance meant
acquiring a leading director and actress ready-made. Over the course of
the next eight years Shin made seven films in the Socialist Realist
mould and won awards in Moscow and Prague. The couple became
trusted favourites of the Kims, father and son. They were showered with
expensive gifts, and permitted to travel to Eastern Europe on business.
Then, on  March , they slipped their minders in Vienna and
escaped to the  Embassy.
The plots of Korean films had never yet lived up to the real-life
drama of Ch’oe Ŭnhŭi’s story. Both the  and the  recognized
the propaganda value of cinema, and after  the nationalistic and
social value of film-making took precedence over artistic or economic
considerations. Stories centred on resistance to the Japanese invaders,
the horrors of the Korean War, the continuing suffering of the people
under either communist or American-oppressed rule, and the inevitabil-
ity of reunification under the appropriately proper regime. Those from
the North emphasized the role of women in the revolutionary struggle,

                  
and in both North and South class hierarchy was treated as right and
proper. But film-makers demonstrated their courage in conveying dis-
sident political messages as well as the words of their sponsors. In 
the  director Yi Kyuhwan made a version of Ch’unhyang-jŏn.
Depending on one’s point of view, the heroine Ch’unhyang may be seen
as a paragon of filial piety and loyalty, but also – in a minjung context –
as a symbol of class and female oppression. Shin Sang’ok filmed the
same story in both South and North Korea, and in the latter version he
daringly managed to draw out the power of the Confucian virtues. In
Hong Kiltong (), too, the first full-length colour film made in South
Korea, audiences could recognize the popular novel’s underlying theme
of political and social injustice. And in the North, Cho Kyŏngsun’s
Bellflower () defended the regime’s system of social stratification
while cleverly exposing its limitations and abuses.
By the s high-quality South Korean films were winning inter-
national recognition, even if the universal themes they addressed con-
tinued to be set in the particular context of recent Korean suffering,
such as the Korean War (Spring in My Hometown and Taebaek
Mountains), comfort women (The Murmuring) and North Korean sub-
version (Swiri). The classic  version of Na Un’gyu’s strongly
nationalistic Arirang was revived more than once, and a new version of
the story was shown to audiences in both Seoul and P’yŏngyang in
. Cinema was a principal component of the so-called Korean wave
(Hallyu), a taste for Korean popular culture that swept over East and
South-East Asia from the late s onwards and had hit the  by
. This remarkable phenomenon also incorporated films for the
small screen –  soap operas – as well as popular music, comic books,
electronic games and dress items.

    -       
:     
Few people can have debated their origins, identity, and characteristics
as long or as publicly as the Koreans have done since . A combina-
tion of ethnic and national pride, intensified since  by the
P’yŏngyang and Seoul regimes’ need to legitimize their right to the
whole peninsula, has nurtured something of a national obsession. Pride
in perceived virtues, such as the group solidarity exhibited in kye rural
organizations, or the dutifulness of the wife popularized in the
Ch’unhyang story, has been matched by fervent denial of negative
practices in earlier society, like ritual suicide and honour killings. One
of the chief areas explored, exploited and strengthened in the hunt for
a definition has been Korean culture, both traditional and modern. For
example, ’s Main Currents of Korean Thought () was ‘dedicat-
ed to seeking [the] real character of Korean culture’; and the spring
 issue of Korea Journal was devoted to ‘How Korean is Korean
Culture? The Quest for National Identity’. Having read the answer
from Korea, Chinese, Western and African perspectives, readers might
still have been left with a feeling of uncertainty. The trouble is, of
course, that culture is too vague and too enormous a concept to reduce
to easy definition. This book alone has ranged across a spectrum of
often controversial topics, from inexplicable burial practices in neolithic
times to political control over modern music and dance. It has looked
at single creations by individual craftsmen and movements by groups
of artists reflecting broad social upheavals. And yet it has barely
scratched the surface. Where, their admirers might say, is its recogni-
tion of fine wooden furniture, or decorative knots, or Buddhist dance,
or the Korean love of mountain climbing or gastronomy?
Modern Koreans are inclined to speak of their special shaping as a
people by the psychological and physical suffering their nation has
endured. They call it their han, an untranslatable and perhaps indefin-
able word. They also boast of their peculiar ability to recognize and
respond to beauty, a power they call mŏt. Kevin O’Rourke would evi-
dently prefer them to stop analysing and express themselves more
spontaneously. ‘Mŏt is universal. What distinguishes Korean mŏt from
mŏt elsewhere in the world is the Korean attitude to beauty. The
Korean artist . . . looks to moral rather than physical beauty; his con-
cern is with the universal rather than the particular. The approach is
conceptual, the emphasis is moral.’ It is an attribute of their Confucian
heritage. Ch’ŏn Sang Pyŏng’s life was the very personification of han,
yet his delight in the natural world defies rationalization except as a
manifestation of mŏt.

                  
 Park Chung Hee’s first five-year cultural plan spoke unashamedly,
even perhaps with pride after the cultural cleansing of the colonial
period, of ‘creating a new national culture and a cultural identity by
establishing a nationalistic perception on Korean history’. Both he and
Kim Il Sung, understanding Korea’s past role as a lynchpin of East
Asian civilization, spoke of self-reliance, and if juche was never going
to set the region alight, vestiges of Confucian thinking persisted in the
 and seemed to be on the verge of reinvigoration in the . In
 Kim Kwangŏk noted that ‘Confucian activities are becoming
more and more widespread among the younger generations’. And in
 the Seoul newspaper Tonga Ilbo and the Beijing Renmin Ribao
organized a conference on the theme of Confucianism and political
development within what they perceived as an evolving regional frame-
work. In particular, the South Korean chaebŏl conglomerate corporations
were hailed as modern incarnations of traditional Confucian capitalist
structures. But as the morning clear-up begins from the night before’s
frenzied youth spending spree under the neon lights of Seoul’s
Myŏngdong shopping centre; as the Hyundai Group chairman Chung
Monghun, hounded by corporate scandal, commits suicide in August
; and as riot police come under Molotov-cocktail fire three
months later from trade unionists in Seoul protesting against restric-
tive labour laws, the cold dawn of the twenty-first century sheds a
rather different, more speculative light. Even so, Lee Jaehyuck could
still write in the summer of  that ‘the spirit of Confucianism, if
not its explicit pedagogic content, is still alive all over contemporary
Korean society’.
Park Chung Hee’s promotion of han’gŭl and the move towards uni-
versal education in the  after  meant the retreat of elitist yang-
ban culture, and the message went out that true national culture was to
be found in popular traditional arts such as masked dance, farmers’
music and p’ansori. But in a political context culture functioned better
as a means of criticism than of indoctrination, even if it was not until
the s that Koreans really experienced the freedom to discover
worldwide cultures for themselves and to experiment radically with
their own. In the , meanwhile, education meant unremitting ide-
ological pressure, and exploited the arts powerfully for this purpose.
Painting was imbued with Socialist Realism. Dramatic productions,
like that of Celebration (Kyŏngch’uk Daehoe, ), proclaimed revolu-
tionary themes. The message of Kim Jong Il’s Theory of Cinematic Art
was that ‘writers and performers must have a firm understanding of
the role of class in the characterization of our enemies in order to
depict clearly their reactionary nature and their inherent vulnerability.

    -       
Our enemies must be portrayed accurately.’ The final nails were being
hammered into the coffin of ‘art for art’s sake’.
Those who look for indicators of Korean identity and its strength,
whether at individual or national level, might think to find them in
the remarkable emotion poured out over the reuniting of relatives ‘lost’
across the , or the persistence of the  government in trying to
get mapmakers to use the term ‘East Sea’ rather than ‘Sea of Japan’.
But a more subtle suggestion comes from Kang Woobang (U-bang):
‘Few Korean art works are as perfectly finished as the art works in
China or Japan. However, I find them even more satisfying because,
instead of perfection, I can detect a sense of humor, freedom and
beguiling innocence.’ Here he echoes Yanagi Soetsu’s discovery of the
‘beauty of loneliness’ in Korean ceramics, what he later re-evaluated as
the ‘beauty of naturalness’. Kim Byong-ryol notes the ‘beauty of
“improvisation” [as] an underlying characteristic of Korean traditional
arts’, and likens flexibility in architectural styles to deliberate asymme-
try in music and literati painting. And Godfrey Gompertz also appreci-
ates the deliberate lack of exactitude in the lion on the lid of a Koryŏ
celadon incense-burner:

A self-respecting Chinese lion would surely have been seated

squarely in the centre, but here we are dealing with a wayward
Korean beast, who refuses to do exactly as he is told: when
viewed from above, he is seen to be sitting well over to one
side of the lid, a position which was doubtless as comfortable
as it was unorthodox!

Perhaps, then, the definition and strength of Korean-ness is related

to a distrust of being cast in either a Chinese or a Japanese mould, or
of being either pretentious or predictable. Perhaps, on the other hand,
it is something only a Korean can understand, and an empathetic for-
eigner who tries to analyse Korean society and its culture is liable to
appear patronizing if and when he fails to get the whole picture. If so,
then Lee Hye-ku (p. ) was leading me up the garden path back in
, and that would certainly not have been in his nature. We have got
to make the attempt, provided we keep our wits about us as we do so.
After all, how successful were Yi Yinhwa or Yi Munyŏl in their
attempts to conjure up the atmosphere of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Korea? Was Korea ever a country as Isabella Bishop or Lillias
Underwood saw it through the eyes of Victorian lady and Presbyterian
missionary? Were the early peninsular peoples ever as Japanese anthro-
pologists thought them to be in their efforts to shape modern Korea in

                  
their own image? We simply don’t know. We can’t really tell whether
Mira Stout has got the Korea of living memory right in A Thousand
Chestnut Trees: when it was published in  Koreans and so-called
Korean experts around the world argued hard over the accuracy of the
book’s circumstantial detail. Some things, of course, are certain. The
portrayal of North Korea in the James Bond movie Die Another Day
() is plainly fictitious, even if that country does have a leadership
capable of starving its own people and threatening the world’s most
powerful nation with nuclear blackmail. We know that M*A*S*H is
fictitious, even though the South Korean riot police did fire tear gas to
dispel student crowds protesting against the continued American pres-
ence on their soil. We know that the brilliantly choreographed shows
that opened and closed the World Cup of , and the serried ranks
of smiling girls and boys singing in adulation to their Dear Leader in
P’yŏngyang, bear as much relation to authentic popular culture as the
Reverend Moon’s massed weddings did to traditional Buddhist or
Christian rites, even though spectacle, colour, music and dance really
are an essential component of the Korean world-view, past and present.
What it all amounts to is that whoever or whatever we are, histori-
an, novelist, poet or politician, trying to encapsulate in words the spir-
it of a proud nation with a long and varied history is like fishing for the
image of the moon reflected in a pond, for as the Dao De Jing puts it:
‘The Way that can be told is not the true Way.’

    -       
 Sources and Further Reading


Covell, Jon, Japan’s Hidden History: Korean Impact on Japanese Culture (Seoul, )
Goepper, Roger, and Roderick Whitfield, Treasures from Korea (London, )
Han Woo-keun, The History of Korea (Seoul, )
Kim Donguk, History of Korean Literature (Tokyo, )
Lee Ki-Baik (Yi Kibaek), A New History of Korea, trans. Edward Wagner (Seoul, )
Lee, Peter H., Anthology of Korean Literature (Honolulu, , )
–––, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization,  vols (New York, –)
–––, and Theodore de Bary, eds, Sources of Korean Tradition, vol. : From Early Times
through the Sixteenth Century (New York, )
McKillop, Beth, Korean Art and Design (London, )
Nahm, Andrew, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Seoul, )
Portal, Jane, Korea: Art and Archaeology (London, )
Pratt, Keith, Korean Music: Its History and Its Interpretation (London, )
–––, and Richard Rutt, Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Richmond, Surrey, )
Rutt, Richard, Korean Works and Days (Seoul, )
–––, The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo (Berkeley, , )
Sohn Pow-key, Kim Chol-choon and Hong Yi-sup, The History of Korea (Seoul, )
Song Bang-song, Source Readings in Korean Music (Seoul, )
Tennant, Roger, A History of Korea (London, )
Twitchett, D., and J. K. Fairbank, eds, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge, –)
Udal, Martin, Times Past in Korea (London, )
Various authors, ‘Korea’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London and New York,
), vol. , pp. –


Hong, Wontack, Paekche of Korea and the Origin of Yamato Japan (Seoul, )
Pai, Hyung Il, and T. Tangherlini, eds, Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity
(Berkeley, , )
Palais, James, ‘Nationalism, Good or Bad?’, in Nationalism and the Construction of Korean
Identity, ed. Hyung Il Pai and T. Tangherlini (Berkeley, , ), pp. ‒
Robinson, Michael, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, – (Seattle, , and
London, )
Wells, Kenneth, New God, New Nation: Protestants and Self-Reconstruction Nationalism in
Korea, – (Sydney, )
––, ed., South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence (Honolulu,
, )


 :      
Bailey, Lisa, ‘Bronze Metalwork’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London and
New York, ), vol. , pp. ‒
Barnes, Gina L., The Rise of Civilization in East Asia (London, )
–––, State Formation in Korea (Richmond, Surrey, )
Holcombe, Charles, The Genesis of East Asia,  BC–AD  (Honolulu, , )
Kim Won-yong, Art and Archaeology of Ancient Korea (Seoul, )
Nelson, Sarah, The Archaeology of Korea (Cambridge, )
Pai Hyungil, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography,
and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge, , )

 :  ,  ‒

Anon., La Montagne de dix milles Bouddhas (Paris, )
Picken, Lawrence, Music from the Tang Court (Oxford, )
Steinhardt, Nancy, ‘The Monastery Hōryūji: Architectural Forms of Early Buddhism in
Japan’, in Washizuka Hiromitsu, Park Youngbok and Kang Woo-bang, Transmitting
the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan (New York, )
Washizuka Hiromitsu, Park Youngbok and Kang Woo-bang, Transmitting the Forms of
Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan (New York, ), pp. ‒
Yang Han-sung and Jan Yun-hua, The Hye Ch’o Diary: Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five
Regions of India (Seoul, n. d.)

 : ̆, ‒

Condit, Jonathan, Music of the Korean Renaissance (Cambridge, )
Duncan, John, The Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle, )
Gompertz, Godfrey, ‘Hsu Ching’s Visit to Korea in ’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic
Society,  (–) [London, ], n. p.
Kim Kumja Paik et al., Goryeo Dynasty: Korea’s Age of Enlightenment (San Francisco, )
Kim Won-yong, Art and Archaeology of Ancient Korea (Seoul, )
Rogers, Michael, ‘National Consciousness in Medieval Korea’, in China Among Equals: The
Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, th–th Centuries, ed. Morris Rossabi (Berkeley,
, ), pp. ‒
Shultz, Edward, Scholars and Generals: Military Rule in Medieval Korea (Honolulu, , )

 :   -̆, ‒

Ch’oe Wan-su, Youngsook Pak and Roderick Whitfield, Korean True-View Landscape:
Paintings by Chŏng Sŏn (–) (London, )
Choi Byonghyon, trans., The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the
Japanese Invasion of Korea, – (Berkeley, , )
Chun Hae-jong, ‘Sino-Korean Tributary Relations in the Ch’ing Period’, in The Chinese
World Order, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge, , ), pp. ‒
Clark, Donald, ‘Sino-Korean Tributary Relations under the Ming’, in The Cambridge
History of China, vol. , pt  (Cambridge, ), pp. ‒
de Bary, W. T., and JaHyun Kim Haboush, eds, The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea
(New York, )
Ha Taehung, Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin (Seoul, )
Jungmann, Berlind, Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in th Century Japanese Nanga

                      
 (Princeton, , )
Kalton, Michael, The Four–Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous
Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought (New York, )
Kim Haboush, JaHyun, The Confucian Kingship in Korea (New York, )
–––, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng (Berkeley, , )
Kim Hongnam, ed., Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendour and Simplicity (New
York, )
Kim-Renaud, Young-Key, ed., King Sejong the Great: The Light of Fifteenth-Century Korea
(Washington, , )
Ledyard, Gari, The Korean Language Reform of  (Seoul, )
Lewis, James B., Frontier Contact between Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan (London, )
Provine, Robert, Essays on Sino-Korean Musicology: Early Sources for Korean Ritual Music
(Seoul, )
Sohn Pokee, Social History of the Early Chosŏn Dynasty (Seoul, )
Turnbull, Stephen, Samurai Invasion: Japan’s Korean War, – (London, )
Wagner, Edward, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea (Cambridge, ,
)
–––, ‘Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century Korea: Some Observations from a 
Seoul Census Register’, Occasional Papers on Korea (Cambridge, , April )
Yi In-hwa, Everlasting Empire, trans. Yu Young-nan (New York, )

 :   , ‒

Various authors, ‘Portraits in the Joseon Dynasty: Style and Function’, Korea Journal, ⁄
(Seoul, ), pp. ‒
Deuchler, Martina, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology
(Cambridge, , )
Janelli, Roger, and Dawnhee Janelli, Ancestor Worship and Korean Society (Stanford, , )
Kang Woobang, The World of Nectar Ritual Painting (Seoul, )
Karlsson, Anders, The Hong Ky’ŏngnae Rebellion, –: Conflict between Central
Power and Local Society in th Century Korea (Stockholm, )
Kim Haboush, JaHyun, and Martina Deuchler, eds, Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn
Korea (Cambridge, , )
Robinson, Michael, ‘Perceptions of Confucianism in Twentieth-Century Korea’, in The
East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and its Modern Adaptation, ed. Gilbert Rozman
(Princeton, , ), pp. ‒
Setton, Mark, Chong YagYong: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism (New York,
)
Underwood, Lillias, Fifteen Years Among the Topknots (New York, )
Yi Mun-yŏl, The Poet, trans. Chong-hwa Chung and Brother Anthony (London )
Zo Za-yong’, ‘Symbolism in Korean Folk Paintings’, in Traditional Korean Painting, ed.
Korean National Commission for  (Seoul, ), pp. ‒

 : ,   , ‒

Baker, Donald, ‘Sirhak Medicine: Measles, Smallpox and Chŏng Tasan’, Korean Studies,
 (Honolulu, , ), pp. ‒
Bishop, Isabella Bird, Korea and her Neighbours (London, , reprinted )
Chandra, Vipam, Imperialism, Resistance and Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea:
Enlightenment and the Independence Club (Berkeley, , )
Choe, Ching Young, The Rule of the Taewŏn’gun, – (Cambridge, , )
Conroy, Hilary, The Japanese Seizure of Korea, – (Philadelphia, )

                
Harrington, F. H., God Mammon and the Japanese (Madison, , , reprinted )
Kim, K.-H., The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order: Korea, Japan and the Chinese
Empire, – (Berkeley and Los Angeles, )
Kim, C. I. Eugene, and K.-H. Kim, Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, –
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, )
Korea Branch Royal Asiatic Society, reprint, The Korean Repository (–) (Seoul, )
Ledyard, Gari, ‘Cartography in Korea’, in The History of Cartography: Vol. , Book :
Cartography in the Traditional East Asian and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley
and David Woodword (Chicago, )
Palais, James B., Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea (Cambridge, , )
Pratt, Keith, Old Seoul (Hong Kong, )
Sands, William, At the Court of Korea: Undiplomatic Memories (reprinted London, )
Schmid, André, Korea Between Empires, – (New York, )
Underwood, Peter, Samuel Moffett and Norman Sibley, eds, First Encounters: Korea,
‒ (Seoul, ) [a collection of early photographs]

 :   , ‒

Ahn, Choong-sik, The Story of Western Music in Korea: A Social History, ‒
(eBookstand Books, )
Clark, Donald, Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, ‒ (Norwalk,
, )
de Ceuster, Koen, ‘Colonized Mind and Historical Consciousness in the Case of Yun
Ch’iho’, Bochumer Jahrbuch zür Ostasienforschung,  (), pp. ‒
Gragert, Edwin, Land Ownership under Colonial Rule: Korea’s Japanese Experience,
– (Honolulu, , )
Han, Manyoung, Kugak: Studies in Korean Traditional Music (Seoul, )
Hicks, George, The Comfort Women: Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces
(St Leonards, , )
Howard, Keith, ed., True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (London, )
Kim, Youngna, ‘Artistic Trends in Korean Painting during the s’, in War, Occupation
and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, –, ed. M. J. Mayo and J. T. Rimer
(Honolulu, , ), pp. ‒
–––, th Century Korean Art (London, )
Robinson, Michael, ‘Mass Media and Popular Control in s Korea: Cultural Control,
Identity and Colonial Hegemony’, in Suh Daesook, Korean Studies: New Pacific
Currents (Honolulu, , ), pp. ‒
Shin, G. W., and Michael Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, , )
Yŏm Sangsŏp, Three Generations, trans. Yu Young-nan (New York, )

 :   , ‒

Anthony of Taizé, Brother, Midang: The Early Lyrics of So Chong Ju (London, )
Cumings, Bruce, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate
Regimes, – (Princeton, , )
––, The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, – (Princeton, ,
)
Goncharov, S. N., J. W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the
Korean War (Stanford, , )
Hastings, Max, The Korean War (London, )
Stueck, William, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History
(Princeton, , )

                      
West, Philip, and Suh Jimoon, eds, Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’: The Korean War
through Literature and Art (New York and London, )
Whelan, Richard, Drawing the Line: The Korean War, – (London, )

 : - 

Abelmann, Nancy, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Discontent (Berkeley, , )
Anthony of Taizé, Brother, and Young-moo, trans., Back to Heaven, Selected Poems of Ch’ŏn
Sang Pyŏng (New York and Paris, )
Blix, Herbert, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York, )
Cumings, Bruce, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York and London, )
–––, North Korea: Another Country (New York, )
Gills, Barry, Korea versus Korea: A Case of Contested Legitimacy (London, )
Hesselink, Nathan, ed., Contemporary Directions: Korean Folk Music Engaging the Twentieth
Century and Beyond (Berkeley, , )
Howard, Keith, ‘Juche and Culture: What’s New?’, in North Korea in a New World Order,
ed. Hazel Smith et al. (Basingstoke, ), pp. ‒
Kang U-bang, ‘The Charm of Anomaly in Korean Art’, Koreana, / (), pp. ‒
Kang Young-Zu, ‘Hong Myŏng-hŭi: Korea’s Finest Historical Novelist’, Korea Journal,
/ (), pp. –
Kim Byong-ik, ‘Modern Korean Literature: Its Past, Present and Future’, Koreana, /
(), pp. ‒
Kim Youngna, ‘Korean Arts and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century’, in Korea
Briefing, –, ed. Oh Kongdan (New York and London, ), pp. ‒
–––, Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea (Seoul, )
Kim Young-uk, Lee Doo-shik and Yu June-sang, ‘Korean Art on the World Stage: Where
Does It Fit In?’, Koreana, / (), pp. ‒
Lee Hyangjin, ‘Ch’unhyangjon: Cinematic Texts of the Era of Division’, Review of Korean
Studies, / (), pp. ‒
–––, Contemporary Korean Cinema: Culture, Identity and Politics (Manchester, )
Lee Jaehyuck, ‘Rational Renderings of Confucian Relationships in Contemporary Korea’,
Korea Journal, / (), pp. ‒
Oberdorfer, Don, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York, )
O’Rourke, Kevin, ‘Demythologizing Mŏt’, Koreana, / (), pp. ‒
Pak Yong-suk, ‘What Makes Korean Paintings Korean?’, Koreana, / (), pp. ‒
Petrov, Leonid, ‘Restoring the Glorious Past: North Korean Juche Historiography and
Goguryeo’, Review of Korean Studies, / (), pp. ‒
Portal, Jane, Art under Control in North Korea (London, )
–––, and Beth McKillop, eds, North Korean Culture and Society (London, )
Rozman, Gilbert, ed., The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation
(Princeton, , )
Wells, Kenneth, ed., South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence
(Honolulu, )

                
 Discography

This discography is by Keith Howard.

Anthology of Korean Music ‒ () [Recordings of court and folk music by the Seoul
Ensemble]. M People --
Anthology of Korean Traditional Folksongs (Han’guk minyo taejŏn) () [ compact discs;
-page book, in Korean ( pages, including song texts) and English ( pages)]
The Deep-Rooted Tree Sanjo Collection (Ppuri kip’ŭn namu sanjo chŏnjip) () [Wonderful
recordings by senior musicians, many of whom have now died, of sanjo schools for
kayagŭm (-stringed zither), kŏmun’go (six-stringed zither), taegŭm (transverse flute),
p’iri (oboe), ajaeng (bowed zither) and haegŭm (fiddle). Accompanied by a -page
illustrated book containing complete musical transcriptions and introductory articles
in both Korean and English]. Reissued on  in  and , The Deep-Rooted
Tree/King Records --
From Korea: P’ansori, the Art of the Cosmic Voice (). World Music Gallery  ()
Kayagŭm Masterpieces by Hwang Byung-ki () [Hwang’s compositions]. Originally issued
on  in ,  and . Sung Eum ‒ (four s)
Kimsohee Chunghyangka (Kim Sohŭi Ch’unhyangga wanch’ang) () [Reissues of s of a
complete repertory performance. Kim was the greatest female p’ansori singer of the
twentieth century]. Seoul Records -- (six s)
Korean Court Music () [Recordings and notes by John Levy featuring musicians from
the National Center]. Lyrichord . . Reissued as  ()
Korean Social and Folk Music () [Recordings and notes by John Levy]. Lyrichord
 ()
Korean Traditional Music (Han’guk ŭi chŏnt’ong ŭmak) ( and ) [Subtitled ‘Music
for the st Century’, assorted repertory including court, folk and new compositions].
Korean Broadcasting System -‒ and Hae Dong ‒ ( s)


 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the British Academy and the Korea Foundation for generous grants that con-
tributed to the funding of my research. Many individuals have also been generous and patient in
giving me help, and I particularly thank Brother Anthony of Taizé (An Sonjae), Prof. Bill
Callahan, Ms Choi Eunju, Chu Sangon, Pastor Hahn Manyoung, Dr James Hoare, Kwon Huh,
Prof. Hwang Byungki, Ms Khayoung Kim, Prof. Yersu Kim, Prof. Youngna Kim, Prof. Lee
Chae-suk, Lee Chul Soon, Ms Green Lee, Lim Ju-Youn, Prof. Sang-Oh Lim, National
Assemblyman Dr Park Jin, Jane Portal, Prof. Shin Bok-ryong, Ms Son Kyung Nyun, Chang-kee
Sung, Yim Hak Soon and Yeoik Yun. Professors Donald Baker and Donald Clark have read the
whole text and made valuable comments and corrections, and Drs Keith Howard, Hyunsook
Lee, James Lewis, Richard Rutt and Peter Dent have done the same for sections in draft, but
I alone am responsible for any errors that remain. Keith Howard generously supplied the
Discography (opposite).
Quotations on the following pages are reproduced with thanks to the appropriate pub-
lishers and/or copyright holders: p. , Peter H. Lee, Anthology of Korean Literature: From
Early Times to the Nineteenth Century (© University of Hawai’i Press, ); pp. , ‒,
Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, vol.  (© Columbia University Press,
); p. , Richard Rutt, A Biography of James Scarth Gale and His History of the Korean
People (© Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, Seoul, ); p. , Brother Anthony of
Taizé, Midang: The Early Lyrics of So Chong Ju (Forest/, ); pp. ‒, Philip
West and Suh Ji-moon, eds, Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’: The Korean War through Literature
and Art (M. E. Sharpe, ); p. , Brother Anthony of Taizé and Young-moo Kim, Back
to Heaven: Selected Poems of Ch’ŏn Sang Pyŏng (Cornell/ Publishing, ). In some
instances, despite strenuous efforts, I have been unable to contact authors and possible copy-
right holders, and to them I apologize.

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative
material and/or permission to reproduce it: photo C. H. Ahn: p. ; photos courtesy of the
author: pp. , , , ; British Museum, London: pp. , ; courtesy of the Design
and Imaging Unit, Durham University: maps on pp. , ; Kansŏng Museum, Seoul: p. 
(Nat. Treas. no. ); photo T. B. Kim: p. ; Korean Overseas Information Service: pp. ,
, , , , ; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (formerly the Hoam Art Museum): pp.
, ; National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (Ethnographic Collections): p. ;
National Museum of Korea, Seoul: pp.  (Nat. Treas. no. ),  (Nat. Treas. no. ), 
(Nat. Treas. no. ), , , , ,  (Nat. Treas. no. ), ; Seoul National University
Museum: p. ; photo Yonhap News Agency: p. ; photo Hwang Yŏngyŏp: p. .


 Index

The suffix –sa (Jap. –ji) indicates Temple.

A more detailed index may be obtained on request from the author: [email protected]

academies, , , , , , ,  Chajang, , 
–,  Autumn Harvest Uprising, the Chang Myŏn, 
Kukcha-gam,  (), , , – Chang Pogo, 
Sŏnggyun-gwan (Confucian), Chang Woosung, , 
, , ,  Beijing, , , , , , Changdŏk Palace, , 
T’aehakkam, ,  , , , , , , Changsu, King (Koguryŏ), ,
agriculture, , , , , , ; see also Dadu , 
, , , , , , bells, , , , , , –, Cheju island, , , , ,
 ,  
Akhak kweibŏm, , ,  Bethell, Ernest,  Cheju Rising (), , , 
Allen, Horace, , , ,  Bishop, Isabella Bird, , , Chijŭng, King (Silla), 
America, , –, , , ,  Chin, polity, 
, , –, , , Bohai, , , , , ; China, –, – passim,
, , ff., – see also Parhae (pre-Han) –, , (Han)
passim, , , ff.,  books, , , , , , , , –, , (Northern and
American Military Govt, , , , , , , , , Southern dynasties) –,
,  , , , , , , , , –, , , (Sui-
An Ch’angho, , – , , ,  Tang) , –, , –
An Chunggŭn, ,  brick, , , , , ,  passim, , , , , –,
Anapchi, , ,  bronze, , , , , , , , –, , ,
Andong Kims, , , , , , , , , , , (Song/Liao/Jin/Yuan) ,
, ,  ,  , –, , –, , ,
Annexation, the (), , , Buddhism, , , , , , , , , , (Ming) ,
, , – passim, , ff., , , , , , , , , – passim,
,  , , , , , , (Qing) , –, , ,
April  Uprising, the (), , , , , –,  , –, , ,
, ,  introduction of, , ,  (Republican) , , ,
Arirang, –,  Lamaist,  , , (People’s Republic)
Armistice, the (), , , , persecution of,  , , , , ff. ,
, –, , , –, schools of, –, , ,  , , , , , ,
,  burial customs, –, , –, , , , , 
armour, , , , , , , , ; see also tombs Chindŏk, Queen (Silla), , ,
 , 
art exhibitions, , ,  calendar, the, , , , , , Chinhan, confederation, , ,
Hyŏpchŏn,   
Kukchŏn,  calligraphy, , –, , , Chinhŭng, King (Silla), , ,
Kwangju Biennale,  , , ,  
Mijŏn, ,  Capitol Building, the, , Chinkam, 
Modern Artists’ Invitational, –, ,  Chinul, , 
 Censorate, the, , ,  Chiphyŏn-jŏn, , , 
National (–),  chaebŏl, , , , , , Cho Mansik, , 
Senten (Kor. Sŏnjŏn), , , , , ,  Chŏn Hyŏngp’il, , , 


Chŏng Mongju, –, ,  , , , , , , , Lesser Northerners, 
Chŏng Sŏn, , ‒, ,  , –, , , , New Teaching (Soron), ,
Chŏng Tojŏn, , , ,  ; see also Neo- 
Chŏng Yagyŏng, , , – Confucianism Northern Learning (Pukhak),
Chŏng Yakchŏn, ,  constitutions , 
Chŏngjo, King (Chosŏn), , ,  Northerners (Pugin), 
, , –, , , Meiji, ,  Old Teaching (Noron), ,
, , , , , , , ,  , , 
, , ,  Yusin, ,  Principle (Pyŏkp’a), , ,
Chosŏn Ilbo, , ,  copper, , , , , , , , , , , 
Christianity, Christians, , , ,  Realist (Sip’a), , , ,
–, , , ; see also cotton, ,  
missionaries Court Music Office , the (Yi Southerners (Namin), ,
and post-  politics, Wangjik Aakpu), , , , 
  Westerners (Sŏin), , ,
in ,  crowns, , , –, ,  
in Korea –,  curfew, , –,  festivals, , , , –, 
introduction of, ,  filial piety, , , , , ,
Korean Roman Catholics, Dadu, , , ,  , , , , 
, , , ,  Daewoo Corporation, the,  film, , , , , ,
Korean Protestants, , daggers, , , , ,  –
– dance, , , , , , , , folk art, , , , , 
persecutions and martyrs, , , , , , , folk religion, , , , ,
, , , –, ,  ; see also festivals
,  Ch’ŏyong, , , , , food, , , , , , ,
under Japanese colonialism,  fortresses, , , , , , 
, ,  masked, , , , , , Foulk, George, , , 
Chun Doo Hwan, , , , , , ,  Four-Seven debate, the, , 
, , ,  Declaration of Independence,
Ch’oe Chegong, ,  the (), , , ,  games, , , , , , 
Ch’oe Cheu, –,  , the, , , , ,  Gaozong, (Tang) Emperor, ,
Ch’oe Chiwŏn,  dolmens, ,  , , 
Ch’oe dictatorship, the, , ff. , , , , , , , , genealogies, , 
Ch’oe Namsŏn, , , , , , , chap. , passim, Germany, , , , ,
, , ,  –, , , , , , 
Ch’oe Sŭngno, , ,  , ; see also juche ginseng, , , , 
Ch’ŏlchong, King (Chosŏn), , cultural policy, , , , glass, , , 
, , , ,  , –, –, ,  gold, , , , , , , ,
Ch’ŏn Sang Pyŏng, ,  economic development,  –, , , , , , ,
Ch’ŏndo-gyo, , , , , famine in, ,  , , 
 foreign policy, , –, , Great Britain, , , , 
Ch’ŏnt’ae-jong, ,   Great Han (Taehan) Empire, the,
Ch’ungyŏl, King (Koryŏ),  foundation, ,  , , , , 
Ch’unhyang, –, , , nuclear development, ,
 – Haein-sa, , –, 
clans, , , , , , , , political system, , ff. Hague Peace Conference, The
; see also Andong Kims, dress, clothing, , , , , , (), , , , 
P’unyang Chos, Yŏhung Mins , , , , , , , Hamel, Hendrik, 
commanderies, Chinese, , , , , , ,  han, , 
, ; see also Lelang drugs, , ,  Han river, , , , , , ,
communism, communists, , , , , 
, , , , , , Eighth Army, , , ,  Han Sŏrya, , , 
, – passim, , , Elite Patrols, ,  han’gŭl, , , , , ,
, , , ,  , , , , , ,
Company Law, the (), , factionalism, , , ff., , , –, , 
 , ,  Hansŏng (Seoul), , , , ,
Confucian Classics, the, , , factions, , ,  
, , , , , , Dogmatist; see Principle Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, , , ,
,  Easterners (Tongin), , , , , , , , ,
Confucianism, –, , , ,  , 


Hŏ Hŏn, ,  also Imjin Waeran, Wa , , , 
Hodge, Lt-Gen. John, ,  Jiandao Incident, the (), , Ko Hŭidong, , 
Hong Kyŏngnae, ,  ,  Koguryŏ, , , , , , ff.,
Hong Yŏngsik, ,  juche, , –, , , , – passim, , , , ,
Hong-giltong-jŏn, ,  , , , , ,  , , , , , , ,
Hŏnjong, King (Chosŏn), , June  Incident, the (),  , , , , 
, , ,  June Uprising, the (),  Kojong, King (Koryŏ), , ,
hostages, , , ,  Jurchen, the, , , ,  
Hulbert, Homer, , , , Kojong, King and Emperor
 Kabo reforms, , , –, (Chosŏn), , , chap. , pas-
Hunmin chŏng’ŭm, ,   sim, , , , , 
Hwabaek, the, ,  Kaehwadang, , , –, kolp’um, , , –
Hwang Yŏngyŏp, , , ,  Konishi Yukinaga, , , ,
–, , ,  Kaesŏng, , , chap.  passim, 
Hwangnyŏng-sa, , , , , , , , , , , Korean Central Intelligence
,   Agency, the (), , ,
Hwaŏm-jong,  Kang Sehwang, ,  , 
hwarang, , ,  Kanghwa island, , , , Korean Communist Party, the,
Hwasŏng castle, , –,  , , , , ,  , , , 
Hye Ch’o,  Kapsin coup, the (), , Korean Conspiracy Trial (),
Hyegyŏng, Lady, , ,  –, ,  , , 
Hyundai Group, the, , , Kaya, , , , , , , , Korean People’s Army, the, ,
 , , ,  , 
Khitan, the, , , , , , Korean People’s Republic, the,
Ich’adon,  , , , ,  , , 
Imjin Waeran (Imjin wars, Kija, –, , ,  Korean Proletarian Artists’
–), , , –, , Kim Chŏnghŭi, – Federation, the, , , ,
, ,  Kim Chŏngp’il, , ,  
Imo Incident, the (), , Kim Chunggun, , – Korean Provisional Govt, the,
,  Kim Daejch’ung, , , , , , , , , , ,
Independence Club, the, , , , , , , , , 
, , , ,   Korean Repository, The, , ,
Independence Gate, the, , Kim Hongdo, , – , 
–,  Kim Hongjip, , ,  Korean War, the, , , , ,
Injong, King (Koryŏ), , , Kim Il Sung, , , , , , , , – passim,
,  , , , , , , , , , , , 
Inoue Kaoru, Count, , , , , , , , , Korean Workers’ Party, the, ,
 , , , , , , , 
iron, , , , , , , , , , ,  Koryŏsa, , 
, , , , ,  Kim Inmun, , ,  Kublai Khan, , ff.
Iryŏn, , , , , ,  Kim Jong Il, , , , , Kŭmgang-san, , , , ,
Itō Hirobumi, , , , , , , , , , , , 
  Kungnaesŏng, , , , , ,
Kim Kichang, , ,  
Japan, –, – passim, , Kim Kisu,  Kungye, , , 
(Yayoi) , (Kofun/Yamato) Kim Ku, , ,  kwangdae, , , , , 
, , , , , , , , Kim Kyusik,  Kwanggaet’o, King (Koguryŏ),
, –,  (Nara) , , , Kim Okkyun, , , ,  , , , 
, , , , , (Heian) , Kim Pusik, , , , –, Kwangjong, King (Koryŏ), ,
(Kamakura) , –,  , 
(Ashikaga) , (civil Kim Sakkat, ,  Kwangju Incident (), ,
war/Tokugawa) –, , Kim Sohee, , ,  –
, , , –, , Kim Sŏngsu, , , , , Kwangju massacre (), , ,
(Meiji) , ff., ff., ,  , , 
, , , (post-Meiji) Kim Ünho, , ,  kye, , 
chap. , passim, , , , Kim Whanki, , , ,  Kyo-jong, 
, , –, , , Kim Young Sam, , , , Kyŏn Hwŏn, , , , 
, , , , , , , , , , ,  Kyŏngbok Palace, , , ,
, , –, , , Kim Yusin, , ,  , , , , , 
, , , , ; see kisaeng, , , , –, Kyŏngju, , , , , , ,

 
 chap.  passim, , , , , ; see also names of individ- , , , , chap. ,
, , ,  ual monks passim, , , , ,
Munmu, King (Unified Silla), , , , , 
Lee Oyoung, ,  , , , , , ,  newspapers, , , , ,
Lee Ufan, ,  Muryŏng, King (Paekche), , , , 
Lelang, , , , , , , , , , , –
, , ,  museums and galleries, , , O-gyo (Five Teachings), , 
Li Hongzhang, , , , ,  Old Chosŏn (Ko Chosŏn), ,
 Central Historical Museum , , , 
literature, , , –, , , (P’yŏngyang), ,  Olympic Games, the, , ,
, , –, –, , Chōsen Sōtokufu Museum, , , , , , 
, , –; see also , 
poetry Hoam,  Paekche, , , , , –
Kansŏng, ,  passim, , , , , , ,
MacArthur, General Douglas, National Art Gallery , 
, , , , –, (P’yŏngyang),  Paektu, Mount, , , , ,
, ,  National Folk Art Museum, 
Maeil Sinbo, , ; see also  Paik Nam-june, –
Taehan Maeil Sinbo National Museum for painting, –, –, , ff.,
Mahan confederation, , ,  Contemporary Art, , , –, , , –,
Manchukuo, ,   –, ; see also folk art
Manchuria, , , , , , , National Museum of Korea, abstract, , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 
, , , , , , , , , , , ,  avant-garde, , , ,
, , , , , , Whanki, – , 
, , , , , , music, –, , , , –, , ch’aekkori, –
,  , , , , , , Chinese styles, , –,
Mao Zedong, , , , , –, , , , , 
,  , , , , , , figure, , , 
March First Movement, the, , , , –, , , flower-and-bird, , ,
ff.,  , –, , ,  , , 
markets, , , , , , aak, , , ,  Four Gentlemen, 
,  court, , , –,  genre, , , , , ,
Marxism, , ,  hyangak, ,  , , 
medicine, , , , , minyo (folk), , , , ink, , , , , ,
, , , , ,  ,  
Mencius, , , , , , nong’ak (farmers’), ,  landscape, , –, –,
 p’ansori, , –, , , , , , , 
merchants, , , , , , , , , ,  murals, –, , –, ,
, , , , , , sanjo, , ,  , , 
,  tangak, , , , ,  oil, , , , , ,
Min, Queen, , , , , musical instruments, , , , , 
, , , , , , , , , , , –, , portrait, , –, , ,
, , , , ,  ,  , , , –, 
Min Yŏngik, , ,  kayagŭm, , , , , p’yŏngsaeng-do, , 
Minami Jirō, , ,  ,  sehwa, 
minjung, , , , , , kŏmun’go, , , , , , Socialist Realism and, ,
, , ,  ,  , –, , 
minjung movement, , ,  Myoch’ŏng, , , ,  sweet dew (kamno-jŏng),
missionaries, , , ,  –, 
Catholic, , , ,  Na Un’gyu, ,  symbolism in, , , ,
Jesuit, , , , , , Naisen Ittai, , , –,  , , , 
 National Security Law, the ‘true view’, , –, ,
Protestant, , , , , (), , , , , , , ,  t’aenghwa,
,   –, 
Mo Yunsuk,  nationalism, ff., – passim, Pak Chega, , , 
Mongols, the, , , , ff., , , , , , Pak Hŏnyŏng, , , 
–, ,  ff., , ff., , , Pak Yŏnghyo, , , 
monks, , , , , , , , , , ,  paper, , , , , , ,
, , , , , , Neo-Confucianism, , , , , 

                
Parhae, –, , , , , , domestic, ,  , 
 Four Rites,  Paejae, , 
Park Chung Hee, , , , , nectar (namjangsa), – Royal English School, the,
, , –, , , Roh Moo-hyun, ,  , 
, , , , , , Roh Tae Woo, , , –, Sejo, King (Chosŏn), , 
, , , ,  , ,  Sejong, King (Chosŏn), ,
Park Sangkwang,  , , , , , , chap. –, , 
Park Seobo, , , , , , passim, –, , , shamans, shamanism, , , ,
 –, , , , ; see , , , , , , ,
Park Seugun, , ,  also constitutions, Korean , , , , –,
People’s Committees, , , War , , , , , 
,  cultural development, – Shin Sang’ok, , 
poetry, , , , , , , passim, –,  Shintō, , , 
–, , – cultural preservation policy, shrines, , , , , ,
hyangga,  , – , , , 
sijo, , ,  democratic era, –, –, Confucian, 
police, Japanese military, ,  Royal Ancestral, , , ,
, , , , , , economic crisis (), , , , 
,  –, , ,  silk, , , , , , , ,
Pŏphŭng, King (Silla), , , , economic development, , , 
  Silla, , , – passim, ,
porcelain, , , , –, elections, , , , , , , , , , , 
, , , ,   sillok, , , , 
celadon, , ,  foundation, ,  silver, , , , , , , ,
inlaid celadon, , – military dictatorship, , , , , , , , 
meibyŏng, ,  –, ,  Sin Ch’aeho, , 
white, ,  relations with America, , Sin Yunbŏk, 
pottery, , , –, ,  , , – Sin’ganhoe, 
chŭlmun, ,  relations with China, ,  Sinminhoe, , , , 
mumun, ,  relations with , , , Sinmun, King (Unified Silla),
punch’ŏng, –,  –,  , , 
wajil,  relations with Japan, , , Sino-Japanese War, the (–),
printing, , –, , –, , – –, , , 
, , ,  Roosevelt, Franklin D., ,  sirhak, , –, , , ,
Pulguk-sa, , , –, , , Russia, , , , , , –, , , , ,
,  , , , , , ; , , , , , ,
Pusan, , , , , , see also  , 
, , , , , , Russo-Japanese War, the slaves, slavery, , , , ,
,  (–), , –, , , , , , , ,
Puyŏ, , , , ,   , , , , , 
Pyŏnhan confederation, ,  Ryūkyū kingdom, , , , Sŏ Chaep’il, , , , ,
p’ungsu, , , ,  , ,  , 
P’unyang Chos, , , , Sŏ Chŏngju, 
 sadae, , ,  Sŏn, , , , , , 
Sadaedang, ,  Sŏng, King (Paekche), , 
railways, , , , , , Sado, Crown Prince, , , Sŏngdŏk, King (Unified Silla),
, ,  –, ,  , , , , , 
Rhee, Syngman (Yi Sŭngman), Saemaŭl Undong, , , , Sŏngjong, King (Koryŏ), –,
, , , , , , ,  , , 
, , , , , , Saitō Makoto, , ,  sŏwŏn, , , , , 
, , , ,  Samguk sagi, , , , , , Stalin, Joseph, , , ,
rice, , , , , , ,  , , , , , ,
, , , ,  Samguk yusa, , , , , , , 
rites, ritual, , , , , , , , ,  students, –, , , , ,
, , , , , , , Samsung Corporation, the, , , , , , , ,
, , , , ,  , , , , , ,
–, , , ,  schools, , , , , , , 
ancestral, , , , , , , , , , , Suh Seok, , 
 , , ; see also sŏwŏn Sunjong, Emperor, , , ,
capping, ,  English Interpreters’, the, 

 
Taehan Maeil Sinbo,  T’aejo, King (Chosŏn), , , Yalu river, , , , , , ,
Taewŏn’gun, the, , , chap. , , ,  , , , , , , ,
, passim T’aejo, King (Koryŏ), , , , , , , ,
Taft-Katsura Memorandum ,  Yan, state, , , , , , 
(),  T’ongni-gimu Amun, ,  Yang Kit’ak, , 
Taizong, (Tang) Emperor, , yangban, , , , ,
,  Ugaki Kazushige, ,  –, , , , ,
Tan’gun, , , , , , , ŭibyŏng, , , , , , , , chap. , passim, ,
, , , , ,  ,  , , , , , ,
tanch’ŏng, , ,  Üich’ŏn, ,  
Ten Injunctions (Ch’oe ŭigwe, 7, 8‒9 Yejong, King (Koryŏ), , ,
Chunghŏn),  Üisang,  , 
Ten Injunctions (Wang Kŏn), , Ülchi Mundŏk, ,  Yi Cha’gyŏm, , , 
,  United Nations Organization, Yi Chungsŏp, , 
Terauchi Masatake, , , the (), chap. , passim, Yi Hwang, , 
,  –,  Yi I, , 
Tohwa-sŏ, , , , , , Korean National Yi Inhwa, , , 
, , ,  Commission for, –,  Yi Insŏng, 
Tŏksu Palace, , , , , , ,  Yi Kwangsu, , , , ,
, ,  universities, , , , , , 
Tokto islands, , ,  , , , , , , Yi Kyubo, , , 
tombs, , –, –, , –, ,  Yi Munyŏl, , , 
–, , , , ,  –Soviet Commission, the, Yi Saek, , , 
Tonga Ilbo, , , , , – Yi Sangbŏm, , , 
 , , , , , , , Yi Sŏnggye, , , , –,
Tonghak Rebellion, the , , , , , , , , , , 
(–), , , –, , ,  Yi Sunsin, – passim, ,
 , , 
Tongnip Sinmun, , , , Vietnam, , , , , , Yi Wanyong, , , , ,
  
Treaties, , ,  von Möllendorff, Paul-Georg, Yŏ Unhyŏng, , , , 
of Amity and Commerce ,  Yŏhung Mins, , , 
(), ,  Yongbi ŏch’ŏn ga, , 
of Annexation (), , Wa, , , ,  Yŏngjo, King (Chosŏn), , ,
, ,  Waeber, Karl,  , , , , , ,
Basic Relations (), , Wang Kŏn, , , –, , , 
,  ,  Yŏngju-sa, , 
Chemulp’o (),  Wanggŏmsŏng, ,  Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn Rising, the
Hansŏng (),  War Memorial, the National, (), , 
Kanghwa (), ,  , , , ,  Yu Kilchun, , 
Portsmouth (),  weapons, , , , , , , Yu Sŏngnyong, , , ,
Protectorate (), , , ,  , 
, ,  Wiman, –, , ,  Yuan Shikai, , , , 
Protocol (), ,  Wiman Chosŏn, , , , , Yul-jong, 
Shanyuan (),   Yun Ch’iho, , , , ,
Shimonoseki, (), , women, , , , , , , , –
,  , , , , , , Yun Isang, , , , ,
Tianjin (), , , , , , , , , , 
 ; see also kisaeng
tribute, , , , , , –, comfort women, ,  Zhou Wenmu, Fr, 
, ,  Wŏn Buddhism,  Zhu Xi, , , , , ,
tribute system, the, , , , Wŏnhyo, , ,  
, , – Woo, Kyu Sung,  Zo Za-yong, 
Tripitaka, the, , –, , Wu, (Tang) Empress, , –

Truman, Harry S., , –, Xianbei, , , 
, ,  Xiongnu, , 
Tsushima, , , ,  Xu Jing, –, , , , 
turtle boats, , – Xuanzong, (Tang) Emperor, ,
, 

                