Goryeo

Ten rules for a son

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

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

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

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.

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."

Noblewomen wading through mud

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

A bridge that still remembers

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.