Goryeo

Ten rules for a son

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

Wang-gön did not seek the throne he ended up on. As Kung-ye's cruelty toward his own family turned the army and the officials against him, those same officials carried Wang-gön to the palace by force over his own objections and proclaimed him king in Kung-ye's place — a general who had spent years deliberately requesting distant postings to avoid exactly the kind of prominence that made a ruler's favorite a target. The following year he moved the permanent capital to Song-do, his own home city, and began the work of turning a warlord's territory into an administered kingdom.

Two rivals absorbed, one throne secured

Wang-gön inherited a peninsula still split three ways. Silla's own last king abdicated to him without a fight in 935; Later Baekje's founder, Kyŏn Hwŏn, deposed by his own son, defected to Wang-gön's side and rode in his army the following year against the kingdom he had built, which fell within months. By 936 Wang-gön held, for the first time since Silla's own brief unification centuries before, a peninsula without a serious rival on it.

Ten rules against the mistakes of one man's reign

Sensing his own end approaching in 942, Wang-gön set down ten rules for his heir: honor Buddhism but build no more monasteries; let a worthy younger son take the throne if the eldest proves unfit; never trust Kitan; honor P'yŭng-yang as the old capital; keep the army's loyalty; and, above all, stay always ready for emergencies. He died the same year having named his own instincts, more than any law, as the thing he most wanted his successors to keep.

A dam broken in a wooded valley

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

Kitan power tested Koryŏ repeatedly in the early eleventh century. In 1010 an invading army burned the capital's palaces and common houses outright while the king fled south, at one point escaping an assassination plot arranged by a governor who had decided to sell him out. The kingdom survived only through a mix of diplomatic bluff — a letter claiming the king had merely gone on a provincial tour rather than fled — and a string of northern victories that cut down thousands of the retreating Kitan army as it recrossed the Yalu.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Kim Hong-do · Public domain

A general who read the ground

The peace that followed did not last. Kitan armies returned in 1016, 1017 and again in 1018, this time a hundred thousand strong under Gen. So Son-ryŭng. Koryŏ met them with two hundred thousand men under Gen. Kang Kam-ch'an, a general the source describes as small, plain and carelessly dressed, but shrewd enough to turn terrain into a weapon: he had a dam built across a wooded valley, let the water build up behind it, drew the Kitan army into the valley below, and then had the dam torn open. The flood swept away hundreds of the enemy outright and threw the rest into a panic that Koryŏ's own numbers finished.

A retreat that became a rout

Gen. So tried again the following year, feinting a withdrawal while secretly pushing toward the capital, but found every point defended and was forced back to Yŭng-byŭn and then to a final stand at Kwiju. There a providential south wind turned the battle decisively: it drove dust into Kitan faces and lent force to Koryŏ arrows, and the Kitan line broke and fled with Koryŏ troops in full pursuit across the Sŏk-ch'ŭn brook and the fields beyond, littering the ground with Kitan dead. Only a few thousand exhausted survivors, Gen. So among them, made it back across the Yalu — what the source calls the worst defeat Kitan ever suffered at Koryŏ's hands.

A hero's welcome, and a name changed to mark it

Kang Kam-ch'an returned to Song-do laden with captured banners and plunder, and the king met him in person, presented him eight golden flowers with his own hands, and renamed the meeting place "Place of Lofty Righteousness" in his honor. Kang received six honorary titles and the revenue of three hundred houses when he retired the following year — remembered ever after, despite his unassuming appearance, as the "Pillar of Koryŏ."

Mountains high

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

The king who ruled Koryŏ through the 1160s favored Buddhist monasteries over his own government and civil officials over the military men who guarded him, and the resentment that built up among the generals broke in a single afternoon in 1170.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Lightbearer03 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A slap that started a massacre

At a royal outing to a monastery, a civil official of comparatively low rank struck a military officer in the king's own presence. The insult was smoothed over in the moment, but once the royal party had dispersed, the assembled generals turned their palace guards loose on the two most senior civil officials present, killing them on the spot

• one of them dragged out from behind the king's own bed to die. What followed was not a targeted purge but a general slaughter: officials were identified by their civil dress and cut down in the streets, proclamations called for killing anyone found in civil garments, and by the end of it fifty more officials and twenty eunuchs had been executed, their heads set on pikes. The chronicler's own phrase for the result was that the dead lay in piles "mountains high."

A king exiled, a brother enthroned

General Chŏng Chung-bu emerged as the coup's leading figure. He demolished the houses of the dead and disgraced civil officials outright - the origin, the source notes, of the later custom of tearing down the home of anyone convicted of a serious crime against the crown - and concluded that the king himself was beyond saving. He had the king exiled to an island in Kyŏngsang province, exiled the crown prince to a separate island, and put the king's own brother on the throne in 1171. Every office of state was filled with military men from that point on; a civil official who wished to keep any standing at all married his own daughter into a general's family and made a show of contentment with the new order.

A pond, a kettle, and a body recovered by a swimming monk

The old order's last chance died with the exiled king himself. When word reached the capital that he had traveled as far as Kyŏngju, Chŏng sent General Yi Eui-mun to eliminate him for good. After killing some two hundred of the ex-king's remaining guard, Yi took the former monarch to the edge of a monastery pond and crushed his ribs in his own arms, killing him instantly; the body was folded into two kettles placed mouth to mouth and sunk in the pond. Yi returned to the capital loaded with honors for it. A monk who was a skilled swimmer later recovered the body and gave it proper burial - the only mercy the whole episode records.

A niece turned back at the gate

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

The generation after the 1170 coup passed through a rapid succession of military strongmen, each one eventually overthrown by the next, until General Ch'oe Ch'ung-hŏn seized power in 1196 and founded a family dictatorship that would outlast four kings.

A favorite too greedy to survive

By the 1190s power had settled on General Yi Eui-mun, who used his position as court favorite to usurp every leading office and to serve as the king's own procurer, forcibly bringing young women to the palace for the monarch's use. Ch'oe Ch'ung-hŏn judged this intolerable, and with his brother at his side surrounded the palace, killed Yi Eui-mun and his circle outright, and drove out the king's own illegitimate sons who had taken refuge as monks. Two years later Ch'oe deposed the old king himself, exiling the crown prince and his wife to Kanghwa Island with no warning at all - the couple bundled onto horses in a cold rainstorm and hurried away the same day - and put the deposed king's brother on the throne instead.

A brother stopped at the palace gate

Ch'oe's own reputation for personal integrity survived an attempt by his brother to abuse the family's new power. The brother forced the reigning king to take his own daughter as queen, requiring the banishment of a wife the king was genuinely attached to. When Ch'oe learned of it, he confronted his brother privately and ordered him to abandon the scheme, since their family was not high-born enough to supply a queen. His brother agreed, then reversed himself the next day and struck their own mother to the floor when she protested. Ch'oe gathered an armed guard and rode to the palace gate himself; when his niece arrived in her wedding chair to be installed as queen, he physically barred her entry. A fight broke out between the two brothers' retainers, Ch'oe's men won it, and he pursued his own brother down and killed him. The rightful queen was restored to her place the same day.

A slave revolt drowned in the river

The reign that followed was six years of continuous unrest. Enslaved people organized at a monastery outside the capital, arguing openly that high station was not a decree of heaven and that a general as low-born as Ch'oe himself proved anyone could rise - and planned to seize and burn the ownership deeds that bound them. Ch'oe's agents betrayed the plot before it could be carried out; a hundred of the conspirators were captured, had stones tied around their necks, and were drowned in the river. Provincial uprisings broke out across the south regardless, in some places killing thousands who refused to join them, and the unrest continued past the old king's death in 1205 into the reign of his successor - the family dictatorship Ch'oe had founded now the one fixed point in a kingdom that could agree on almost nothing else.

Noblewomen wading through mud

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

The first Mongol invasion, in 1231, ended the way most Mongol campaigns of the era did: a siege the defenders could not break, humiliating tribute demands, and a Mongol residency planted at Song-do to make sure the terms held. One provincial fortress commander, Pak Sŏ at Kuju, held out against every siege engine and forged surrender letter the Mongols threw at him, drawing praise even from the enemy general who had failed to take his walls — but his stand could not undo the settlement the court itself had already accepted.

A dictator's gamble

Neither the king nor his officials believed the trouble was over, and the military dictator Ch'oe U moved first: over the objections of courtiers he silenced by killing a few of them outright, he loaded his own household onto government carts and relocated to Kang-wha Island, threatening death for anyone who spoke against the removal. The king followed within the year. The crossing, made in the depth of the rainy season, left the royal procession mired axle-deep, noblewomen wading barefoot through mud with bundles balanced on their heads, the whole column's wailing audible for miles.

An island the Mongols could never take

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Bernard Gagnon · CC0

The retreat to Kang-wha bought Koryŏ's court nearly four decades of physical safety at the price of everything beyond the strait itself. Mongol armies returned again and again, ravaging the mainland, demanding the king's own person at their court, and razing what remained of Song-do's palaces outright — but a narrow channel of water was enough to stop them cold, since, as the source notes flatly, the Mongols were no seamen. Popular insurrections rose against Mongol occupation across the mainland even as the court itself sat safely out of reach, and successive Mongol khans spent years alternating between diplomacy and threat in an effort to draw the king back onto solid ground they could actually hold.

A peace bought by returning to the mainland

The arrangement could not last forever, and the price of ending it was the very thing Ch'oe U had refused to give up: the king's own return to an exposed capital, under terms that left Koryŏ a Mongol son-in-law state for the rest of the century, its princes married to Mongol princesses and its own military strength bent, before long, toward campaigns the Mongols wanted fought rather than ones Koryŏ chose for itself.

An army put to a vote

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

By 1388 the king had settled on a plan every reasonable adviser at his own court considered ruinous: an invasion of Ming territory in Liao-tung, launched while Japanese raiders were ravaging the south and the kingdom's own finances lay in disarray. Gen. Yi T'ă-jo, named lieutenant-general of the expedition, argued against it point by point — a small country should not attack a great one, summer rains would flood the campaign and spoil the army's bows, and stripping troops from the south would invite disaster there. The king's only answer was a threat: the next man who spoke against the war would lose his head.

A river crossed, and a line drawn

Gen. Yi obeyed anyway, leading nearly forty thousand troops north and across the Yalu to Wi-ha Island, where he made camp rather than press further into Chinese territory. Desertions began almost immediately. Rumors reached the court that Yi himself had fled, but when a second general was sent to check, he found Yi still at his post, weeping openly over what he called the certain destruction of Koryŏ if the campaign continued.

A question put to the soldiers, not the king

Rather than appeal again to a king who had already threatened his life for objecting, Yi turned to the army itself. He and his fellow general laid the choice before the assembled troops directly: stay and be swept away by the rising floods that summer had brought, or turn back and remove the commander-in-chief who had forced this war on them. The soldiers answered with open acclaim. Mounted on a white horse, bow in hand, Yi watched his own army turn south behind him — not toward the Ming border he had been ordered to cross, but toward the capital whose king had never expected his own instrument of war to become the instrument of his undoing.

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

A capital taken, a throne made and unmade

Yi's return to Song-do ended the campaign and effectively ended the king's own authority in the same stroke. Within months the king was banished and a new one installed under Yi's own supervision, the first in a rapid sequence of enthronements and depositions that left no doubt about where real power in Koryŏ now rested — with a general who still, for the moment, stopped short of taking the throne himself.

Blood on a stone bridge

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

Kongyang, the seventh descendant of a king seventeen generations back, was raised to the throne in 1389 at Gen. Yi's own choosing — a deliberate move to put a genuine member of the royal line back in nominal power after a run of kings the Chinese emperor himself had refused to formally recognize. It changed little in practice. The real argument playing out at court was no longer about who sat on the throne, but whether the Wang dynasty would be allowed to continue in any form at all, and Koryŏ's last great loyalist, Chŏng Mong-ju, was the one obstacle standing in the way of settling that question by force.

Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (1905) · Yi Han-cheol · Public domain

A bridge that still remembers

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

Yi's own son, later known by his title T'ă-jong, recognized that nothing could move forward while Chŏng Mong-ju lived, and arranged to have him struck down with stones on Sŏn-juk bridge as he returned home from a banquet where he had gone specifically to judge, by his host's face, whether the rumors of danger were true. Tradition holds that a dark stain remains on the bridge's central stone to this day, turning a deeper red whenever rain falls — a mute accusation, the source says, against the men who killed him.

A king with nothing left to hold

With Chŏng Mong-ju gone, resistance to Yi collapsed outright. His own son had the murdered man's friends banished, confiscated his property, and silenced what remained of the opposition; even the king's own sons, who had sided against Yi, were sent into exile. Officials pressed Kongyang into swearing a formal oath of eternal friendship with the man who had just orphaned his own court of allies, an arrangement so lopsided that the king performed it by proxy rather than in person rather than face Yi directly.

A throne given up rather than taken

Stripped of his sons, his ministers and his own freedom of action, Kongyang watched the pressure to abdicate build past the point where resistance served any purpose. He handed the royal seals to Gen. Yi T'ă-jo without a final confrontation, retired first to Wŏn-ju and then to more distant exile, and died three years later. A dynasty that had begun with officials forcing an unwilling general onto the throne in 918 ended in 1392 the same way it started — with the court's own choice, made for a ruler who did not have to fight for it.