Goguryeo

A stockade on contested land

formationDrafted from Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905)

Jumong, the archer-son whose own flight from Buyeo this region's Buyeo record follows in detail, gathered new followers as he travelled south and settled at last in Jol-bon, where in 37 BC he built a capital enclosed by a heavy stockade, with storehouses and a prison to match. He named his new kingdom Goguryeo, joining his own family name to that of a mountain in the homeland he had left behind.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Sohan Dsouza · CC BY-SA 4.0

A kingdom built on land China had already claimed

The territory Jumong settled belonged, at least on paper, to China: it formed part of a province the Han emperor had established more than forty years earlier. Rather than seize it all at once, Jumong's young kingdom absorbed the province gradually, and China - which held these frontier lands only loosely - appears to have tolerated a native ruler capable of keeping the peninsula's wilder inhabitants in check, so long as he continued to acknowledge Chinese suzerainty in form if not always in substance.

Five clans, one throne

Goguryeo's own people traced their origin to five distinct groups - the So-ro-bu, Chŭl-lo-bu, Sun-no-bu, Kwan-no-bu and Kye-ro-bu - of whom the So-ro-bu supplied the earliest kings before the Kye-ro-bu line took over the throne in later generations. Jumong himself secured his own position peacefully rather than by further conquest, marrying the daughter of Jol-bon's own ruling family and leaving the existing social order largely undisturbed once he held it.

A frugal people with a violent code

The kingdom's early customs, as later observers recorded them, combined severity with ceremony: thieves paid twelvefold restitution, ordinary criminals were executed on the spot with their families enslaved, and the death of a great man was sometimes marked by burying servants alive alongside him. Within two years of his own founding, Jumong turned this same disciplined society outward, beginning in 35 BC a series of conquests that would grow his stockaded capital into a kingdom capable of resisting the full weight of Chinese power for the next seven centuries.

A reign that outlasted its own heir

expansionDrafted from Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905)

By the time Goguryeo's sixth king, T'aejo, sat on the throne, the young kingdom had shifted from consolidating its own founding territory to actively pressing outward against China itself. T'aejo made common cause with the Ye-măk people to his east, and together the two launched repeated raids across Goguryeo's own northern border into Chinese territory - not conquest in any settled sense, but a sustained demonstration that the frontier no longer belonged to China alone to patrol.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Unknown · Public domain

A reign long enough to exhaust its own heir

T'aejo's own rule became, by Korean record, the longest ever held by any monarch on the peninsula: ninety-four years on the throne, a span so extraordinary that in his sixty-ninth year he handed day-to-day administration to his brother Su-seung rather than continue managing every affair personally. Su-seung proved just as ambitious as the king he served, continuing the alliance with the Ye-măk and the raids on Chinese territory - but also, less loyally, attempting to build a faction against his own brother, an effort that came to nothing.

An heir who waited a lifetime for his turn

When T'aejo finally died, his own heir apparent ascended the throne at the advanced age of seventy-six, in AD 147 - a wait so long that one of the new king's first acts was to have executed the officials who had once criticised him for trying to unseat his elderly predecessor early. Whatever T'aejo's own reign had cost his successor in patience, it left Goguryeo a kingdom that had spent nearly a century testing China's frontier defenses and finding them, again and again, unable to hold.

Tam-dok

peakDrafted from Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905)

Goguryeo's reigning king died in 392 and his son Tam-dok took the throne with none of his predecessors' old agreements considered binding any longer. He spent the next twenty years doing what no earlier Goguryeo king had managed for long: winning decisively on every frontier at once.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Rolfmueller · CC BY-SA 3.0

A fortress taken by seven paths

Tam-dok opened his reign by attacking Baekje outright, seizing ten of its towns before turning north to punish the Khitan tribes and then swinging back south again for the fortress of Kwang-nu - an almost unapproachable stronghold on a sea-girt rock. Goguryeo's soldiers besieged it for twenty days before finding seven separate paths up the cliffs, then stormed it by simultaneous assault from all seven at once. When word of the fortress's fall reached the Baekje court, resistance in the field was abandoned outright; Baekje's king could do nothing but bar his own capital's gates and wait.

A decree that made a kingdom Buddhist

Tam-dok was as devoted to Buddhism as his father had been - Goguryeo had formally adopted the religion as a government undertaking twenty years earlier, in 372 - and he pushed the commitment further than any king before him, decreeing that all the people of Goguryeo should adopt the Buddhist faith and building nine more monasteries in the capital at P'yŭng-yang in the years that followed. Between the building program and the military campaigns, his reign fixed both the kingdom's religious character and its territorial reach for the generation after him.

A frontier drawn seven hundred li wide

Not every year of the reign went Goguryeo's way. In 399 the northern kingdom of Yŭn, suspicious of Goguryeo's growing strength, sent an army of thirty thousand men that seized the frontier fortresses of Sin-sŭng and Nam-so and pushed the border back by some seven hundred li, carrying off thousands of households as captives in the process. It was a serious loss, but not a fatal one - Goguryeo absorbed it without the kind of collapse that had followed earlier defeats, a measure of how much stronger the kingdom Tam-dok commanded had already become compared to the one his father had left him.

A son invested by the emperor he had once defied

Tam-dok died in 413, after twenty-one years on the throne, and was succeeded by his son Kö-ryŭn. Where Tam-dok had built his reign on independent military success, Kö-ryŭn opened his by formally accepting investiture from the Chinese emperor - a symbolic submission that nonetheless kept the peace between Goguryeo and its powerful neighbor for as long as it was observed, and the same courtesy China extended to Baekje's own king two years later.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · EditQ · CC BY-SA 4.0

Three bags of rice

peakDrafted from Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905)

In 612 the Sui emperor launched what stands as one of the largest invasion forces in the history of premodern warfare against Goguryeo - an army recorded at over a million men, advancing on multiple routes toward the Yalu River. A detachment of roughly three hundred thousand troops under General Yu Jung-mun was tasked with marching directly on P'yongyang, on the assumption that so vast a force needed no support from the rest.

A spy who came disguised as surrender

Goguryeo's general Eulji Mundeok travelled into the Chinese camp under a pretense of submission, ostensibly to negotiate terms but in fact to assess the invaders' true strength. The emperor nearly had him killed on the spot, then let him go, then changed his mind again - too late, as Eulji had already slipped past the Chinese pickets and could not be overtaken. What he had learned proved decisive: each Chinese soldier had been issued three bags of rice to carry on the march, under threat of death for discarding any of it, and most had simply buried the surplus rather than carry the weight - leaving the army's generals believing their men were far better supplied than they actually were.

National Museum of Korea, Seoul · Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Gary Lee Todd · CC0

A retreat that was really an ambush

Eulji drew the invading force deep into Goguryeo territory through repeated feigned withdrawals, then, once the Chinese army had crossed the Salsu river exhausted and low on provisions, sent a second, more convincing offer of surrender. The Chinese general, reasoning that his own supplies could not sustain a siege of the capital, accepted and turned his army back toward the Yalu - directly into a prepared ambush that struck from the forests on both sides of the road before his forces had gone a mile.

A million men, a few thousand survivors

The retreat became a rout, and the rout a slaughter that covered four hundred and fifty li in a single day and night of flight. Of the three hundred thousand men who had crossed the Yalu into Goguryeo territory under General Yu, only twenty-seven hundred made it back across the river alive. The Sui emperor, enraged, imprisoned the general responsible - a punishment that changed nothing about the scale of the defeat, or the fact that Goguryeo had just destroyed one of the largest armies ever assembled against it almost without pitched battle at all.

Two brothers and a severed head

endDrafted from Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905)

Yeon Gaesomun - a man of formidable build and reputation, said by tradition to wear five swords at once and to ride over the prostrated bodies of his own subjects in state - assassinated Goguryeo's reigning king in 642, cutting the body in two and installing a compliant nephew, Chang, in his place. He first invited to a feast every official he suspected of plotting against him and killed them there before turning on the king himself, securing for his own family the real power behind a throne that would answer to no one else for the following quarter century.

An iron chancellor's death opens the field

For years Yeon Gaesomun's own force of will held Goguryeo's defenses together against renewed pressure from Tang China. When he finally died of natural causes, the kingdom lost the one figure capable of directing its war effort - and inherited, in his place, two sons who shared their father's ferocity without any of his restraint. Nam-seong, the elder, assumed his father's office, only to have his younger brother Nam-geun seize it while he was away on other business.

A brother's defection opens the gates

Nam-seong fled to the Yalu River and, rather than accept his own displacement, placed himself at the head of the border tribes under his command and defected outright to the Tang emperor, who made him governor-general of Liao-tung and set him to work turning his own former countrymen's tribal allies into instruments of Chinese revenge. The defection cost Goguryeo its one great frontier ally and handed China an implacable new enemy who knew the kingdom's own defenses intimately.

A month-long siege, a suicide, and twenty thousand captives

Combined Tang and Silla forces converged on P'yongyang, and after a month of siege the king's own officials came out under a flag of truce to negotiate surrender. Nam-geun, knowing what fate awaited the man responsible for his father's legacy crumbling, made one final attempt to break the besieging army by force; when it failed, he cut his own throat rather than be taken. The victorious Chinese general carried the king, his two sons, a number of officials, many of Nam-geun's own relatives and a large company of P'yongyang's own residents back to China - twenty thousand captives in total, closing a kingdom that had held the frontier against China for seven hundred and five years under twenty-eight kings.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Wikimapia contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0