Later Baekje

A child who nursed from a tiger

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

Kyŏn Hwŏn was born Yi, a name he changed to Kyŏn at fifteen, and rose through Silla's own army step by step before the kingdom's collapsing authority gave him a wider field. Tradition traced his fierce nature to infancy: left alone in a field while his father worked and his mother labored nearby, the story goes, a tiger came upon him and let him nurse from her rather than harm him. Whatever the truth of the legend, by the 890s Kyŏn Hwŏn had thrown off his own allegiance to Silla outright, gathering "desperate criminals, outlaws and other disaffected persons" around him and beginning the conquest of the south and west. Within a month he commanded five thousand men.

A title claimed, then walked back

Having seized the district of Mu-ju, Kyŏn Hwŏn proclaimed himself King of Southern Silla — and then, judging he had overreached, quietly modified the title to the more modest "Master of Men and Horses." The retreat cost him nothing in practice; his own following kept growing regardless of what he called himself, fed by a Silla court too consumed by its own corruption to organize a real response.

A revolt becomes a kingdom

Four years later, in 897, Kyŏn Hwŏn judged his own position secure enough to formalize it. He established a permanent headquarters at Wan-san, in what is now Chŏn-ju, and named his kingdom New Baekje — reviving, on the same southwestern ground, the name of a state Silla and Tang had destroyed together two and a half centuries before. The revival was more than sentiment: it gave his revolt a historical claim of its own, one distinct from the northern rebellion a rival bandit leader named Kung-ye was building at the same time out of Goguryeo's own former territory.

A feast at Po-sŏk

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

By the mid-920s Kyŏn Hwŏn was fighting a war on two fronts, pressing Wang-gön's rising Koryŏ in the north while keeping up an offensive campaign against Silla itself. The Silla war went the better of the two: in 927 Kyŏn Hwŏn burned and pillaged his way toward Silla's own capital, and while Silla's envoy was still on the road begging Koryŏ for help, he slipped inside the city gates at the head of a picked band of men.

A capital taken without a battle

The timing could not have been worse for Silla. The king, his son, the queen and the court were feasting at the Po-sŏk summer house when word of the attack arrived, and there was no time left to organize a defense. The king and queen fled the palace without attendants; Kyŏn Hwŏn's men seized the palace women and looted the treasury before a relief force of ten thousand Koryŏ troops could arrive — too late to prevent any of it. The king was run down and forced to take his own life.

A kingdom installed, then abandoned to its fate

Rather than annex Silla outright, Kyŏn Hwŏn appointed a relative of the dead king, Kyŏngsun, to the throne he had just emptied, and withdrew south with his own army loaded with plunder. It was the furthest Later Baekje's power over its rival would ever reach: a Silla king killed, a capital sacked, and a puppet installed by a former Silla soldier who had spent the previous decade building a kingdom out of his own rebellion against the throne he had just humbled.

A victory that cost Kyŏn Hwŏn a friend at Song-do

The raid bought Later Baekje little beyond plunder and reputation. Wang-gön, who had answered Silla's own call for aid, took the atrocity as confirmation that no compromise with Kyŏn Hwŏn was possible, and the two men's letters to each other in its aftermath read less like rival kings than like enemies who had stopped pretending otherwise. The war between them, already years old, only hardened from that point on.

A father imprisoned by his own son

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

Kyŏn Hwŏn had more than ten sons by his many concubines, and of them all he loved his fourth, Keum-gang, best — robust, intelligent, and, in his father's eyes, fit to inherit a kingdom his elder brothers had done more to help win. In 935 Kyŏn Hwŏn passed over his own eldest son, Sin-geum, and named Keum-gang his successor instead. The decision broke the kingdom Kyŏn Hwŏn had spent decades building.

A conspiracy answered by a father's imprisonment

Sin-geum did not accept his disinheritance quietly. He led a conspiracy that seized his own father, had Keum-gang put to death, and installed himself on the throne — leaving Kyŏn Hwŏn imprisoned in Keum-san monastery, doubly humiliated by a throne now "insecure" without the "masterly genius" that had built it in the first place. For three months the old warlord sat confined by his own son's guards.

An escape, and a surrender to the enemy of a lifetime

Kyŏn Hwŏn did not stay imprisoned. He got his guards drunk, escaped to Ka-ju, and from there sent a letter to Wang-gön — the rival he had fought for the better part of thirty years — surrendering himself and asking for asylum against his own son. Wang-gön granted it without hesitation, sending a warship and a high official to escort the old man to Koryŏ's own capital, where he was housed, staffed and granted the revenues of an entire prefecture. The founder of Later Baekje spent his final months as an honored guest of the kingdom he had spent his life trying to destroy.

A father's army against a son's

The reckoning came quickly. As 936 opened, Wang-gön marched south at the head of eighty-seven thousand men, with Kyŏn Hwŏn himself riding in the invading army against the son who had deposed him. Sin-geum's remaining force, holed up in a mountain fortress, was hunted down and destroyed — thirty-two hundred men taken, fifty-seven hundred killed. Sin-geum's two younger brothers, who had helped drive their father from power, were executed; Sin-geum himself, judged less culpable, was spared. Kyŏn Hwŏn did not live to see much of the aftermath: he died on the field itself, the source says, of chagrin that Sin-geum had escaped the same fate as his own two brothers. Later Baekje, the kingdom he had carved out of a collapsing Silla thirty-nine years before, ended with him.