2.4: Did Kija Move Eastwards to Found Old Chosŏn?

Those aristocrats did not necessarily stay put, however. The Book of Documents preserves a long lecture that marks one of the starting points of Korean history. The last Shang king had several advisors who tried to correct his alleged wickedness; one was Prince Ji (Jizi), or Kija in Korean. Kija left the area after the Zhou conquest and later returned to lecture the Zhou king, giving him “The Great Plan” for governance. A thousand years after the conquest, Chinese texts include stories that when Kija left Zhou, he established or was enfeoffed in a domain in the Liaodong peninsula or southern Manchuria, founding a dynasty there, called Chosŏn.⁸ The last Korean dynasty, established in A.D. 1392, named itself Chosŏn and identified even more with Kija, and some prominent families claimed descent from him in the late nineteenth century. But did Kija really establish a state called Chosŏn? Did he move to Manchuria? Did he even exist?

Just as Chinese scholars began to doubt the existence of the Xia and Shang in the early twentieth century, Korean scholars started to question the transmitted records about Kija in the Book of History and later accounts. They found that by AD 1100, the Koryŏ dynasty had established official Kija worship, probably for reasons similar to the Zhou adoption of Heaven, that is, to justify its attempt to conquer Manchuria. Koryŏ looked back to the glorious Koguryŏ, whose people were said to have worshipped Kija in about AD 500 – but the first report of that comes from four centuries later. Korean doubters of antiquity proposed that perhaps Kija had been enfeoffed elsewhere in Zhou, and that then the Qin and Han regimes invented the story of his eastern migration to justify their attacks on southern Manchuria.

Historian Jae-hoon Shim has recently argued that the preserved records – oracle bones and bronze vessel inscriptions that the early twentieth century scholars did not have – show that Kija indeed existed, really did ally with Shang, and moved somewhere eastward with his people in the early Zhou. But he had no relationship to “Chosŏn,” which appears in texts only from about 400 BC, as a tribe northwest of the Liaodong peninsula. Han-period scholars invented the legend that the Prince Ji went east and founded Kija Chosŏn; some peninsula+ regimes adopted it to legitimate military campaigns; and Korean scholars in about AD 1000 avidly adopted it to claim a close connection with the great tradition of the Classics and Confucians. But there is no evidence of a “Kija Chosŏn” that gave birth to the Korean nation. Rather, the Manchurian area included a number of different groups of people for a long time.⁹ It played an important role in East Asian history.