Gojoseon (Old Joseon)

A bear, a tiger and a tree

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

Tradition places Korea's first kingdom in the twenty-fifth year of the legendary Chinese emperor Yao - 2332 BC by later reckoning - when a divine being's son, Whan-ung, descended from heaven to a mountain in what is now P'yŭng-an province with three thousand spirit companions, gathered them beneath an ancient tree, and proclaimed himself ruler of a kingdom he governed through spirit ministers of wind, rain and cloud.

Two animals, one patient enough to become human

Whan-ung's own transition from spirit to human ruler came through a story every Korean schoolchild would later learn: a tiger and a bear, both longing to become human, were told to eat garlic and mugwort and remain hidden from sunlight for three times seven days. The tiger's patience failed and it left the cave early, still a tiger. The bear endured the full term and emerged a woman, whose wish for a child Whan-ung answered himself. Her son, cradled beneath the same tree where his father had first proclaimed his kingdom, was found and made king by the wild tribes of the peninsula. This was Tan-gun, "Lord of the Pak-tal Tree."

A teacher for nine wild tribes

The peoples Tan-gun found - nine tribes the tradition calls the Ku-i, living on gathered fruit and wearing woven grass, sheltering under trees in summer and in dug-out shelters in winter - received from him the rudiments of settled civilization: the relationship of ruler and subject, the rite of marriage, the arts of cooking and building, and the practice of farming fields their ancestors had only foraged. He made P'yŭngyang his capital, a city that would remain the kingdom's seat through everything that followed.

A reign no single lifetime could hold

Tradition credits Tan-gun's own dynasty with lasting more than a thousand years, down to the arrival of a Chinese sage named Gija around 1122 BC - a span far beyond any one man's natural life, which suggests that the name itself may describe a line of native rulers rather than a single founder who somehow reigned across fourteen centuries. Whatever the truth of any one figure within it, the tradition agrees on this much: Korea's political history, by its own reckoning, opens with a kingdom already old by the time anyone thought to write its story down.

A refugee sage's five thousand followers

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

Gija was, by his own family's account, a prince of the Shang royal house, uncle and advisor to the dynasty's last and most infamous ruler

• a tyrant whose court, tradition insists, included a fox spirit disguised as a beautiful concubine and whose cruelties toward his own subjects were legendary even before the dynasty that produced them fell. When a rebel army overthrew the Shang and founded the Zhou dynasty in its place, Gija - the sole survivor of the three ministers who had tried to restrain the old regime's excesses - refused the new emperor's offer of high office out of loyalty to the fallen house he had served.

A colonizer's careful preparation

Rather than serve the dynasty that had destroyed his own family's kingdom, Gija chose exile, and prepared for it with unusual foresight. He gathered roughly five thousand followers - not merely soldiers, but men trained to teach farming, silk cultivation, weaving, medicine, music and a hundred other useful trades - and led them east into the Korean peninsula, settling eventually at P'yŭngyang, the same city that had served as Tan-gun's own capital.

A code that fit the people it was written for

Gija's laws were short and pointed directly at the failings of the society he found: murder answered with death by the same method as the crime, brawling fined in grain, theft punished by enslavement redeemable through payment. Rather than govern through his own five thousand followers alone, he trained local men for administrative office, adapted his teaching to the Korean language rather than imposing his own, and is credited - though the evidence has not survived - with reducing that language to writing for the first time.

A kingship granted, not demanded

China's new Zhou emperor made Gija king of Joseon, but pointedly did not require his allegiance as a vassal in doing so - permitting him even to send envoys to honor the tombs of the fallen Shang dynasty he had once served. The kingdom Gija built this way endured, by tradition, for nearly a thousand years, the single longest-lived experiment in Korea's own ancient history, before a very different kind of guest undid everything it had built.

A guest's hospitality repaid

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

Wiman arrived in Joseon as a fugitive, one of many refugees fleeing after his own commander's failed bid for independence from Han China collapsed. King Gi-jun, the reigning descendant of Gija's own line, took him in without suspicion, granting him a hundred li of land along the northern frontier in exchange for service as a border guard against exactly the kind of threat Wiman himself represented.

A warning that was really an invasion

Wiman spent his years on the frontier building his own following from Chinese refugees and local tribesmen loyal to him personally rather than to the king who had sheltered him. When he judged his own strength sufficient, he sent word to Gi-jun that a vast Chinese army was advancing in four columns and that he, Wiman, must rush his own forces to the capital to serve as the king's bodyguard. By the time Gi-jun understood the deception, Wiman's army was already at the gates. Gi-jun fled downriver by boat with what treasure he could load in time, the last representative of Gija's line abandoning the capital his ancestor had ruled for close to a millennium.

A kingdom built on the same skill that stole it

Wiman proved as capable a ruler as he had been a schemer, holding together a coalition of Chinese refugees and native tribes through the same combination of firmness and calculated generosity that had won him Gi-jun's trust in the first place. Under his own rule the kingdom reached its greatest extent - stretching into Liao-tung, encompassing the whole of northern and eastern Korea, and reaching south to the Han River - bringing surrounding tribal chieftains to his court and using them, in turn, to conduct diplomacy with China itself.

A strength that could not be passed down

What Wiman's kingdom depended on was never institutional; it was the personal judgment of one man who knew exactly when to tighten his grip on the tribes around him and when to loosen it. That judgment did not survive him. His grandson U-gu inherited every ambition his grandfather had shown and none of the tact - and the kingdom's fortunes would prove, within two generations of its founding by treachery, to rest on foundations no sturdier than the men who happened to be sitting on the throne.

Two generals who could not stop quarreling

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

U-gu inherited Wiman's ambition without his grandfather's restraint. He gathered refugees and malcontents around his own court, cut off diplomatic relations with the Han emperor, and blocked neighbouring tribes from sending their customary embassies across the border into China - provocations that Emperor Wu could not simply overlook, whatever their actual cause. When an imperial envoy sent to remonstrate with U-gu returned empty-handed after the king refused to yield, the frontier tribe responsible for escorting him killed the envoy on his own return journey - an act U-gu had not ordered, but one the emperor held him responsible for regardless.

An army scattered, then a war that could not be avoided

In 107 BC Han forces invaded under two generals, and the opening engagement went badly for the empire: U-gu's own defenders broke the invading column, which took ten days simply to rally into an orderly retreat. Frightened by his own success and its likely consequences, U-gu sent his son to China as a hostage along with five thousand horses and an escort of ten thousand troops - an offer of submission undone almost immediately when the accompanying Chinese envoy demanded the escort disarm before crossing the border, and the prince, suspecting a trap, fled back to his father's capital instead.

A siege prolonged by its own commanders' quarrel

The two Han generals renewed their invasion with a larger force, crossed the border unopposed, and laid siege to P'yŭngyang - a siege that dragged on for months in large part because the generals spent as much energy accusing each other of treason as they spent prosecuting the war itself. One general was recalled to China in disgrace and executed; the other continued the siege alone through the following summer.

A city taken by its own traitors, not by the enemy

What finally ended the siege was betrayal from within rather than victory from without. A conspirator inside the city assassinated U-gu himself; even after the king's death the people refused to surrender until a second traitor opened the gates to the besieging army, and the enraged citizens tore that man to pieces before he could reach the safety of the Chinese camp. The kingdom Wiman had built on one act of treachery ended, eighty-eight years later, on two acts of treachery committed by his own subjects - a symmetry Korean chroniclers would go on to note for centuries afterward.