6.2: Koguryŏ’s East Asia

On the mainland, the military commanders who defeated the Yellow Turbans did not disperse their armies, but became warlords. In 191, one looted and burned the imperial capital at Luoyang, including its imperial and private libraries. Five years later, thirteen warlords had carved up the Han empire. One of them, Cao Cao, acting for the Han heir, won control of north China – about half of empire’s people – and managed a reasonable semblance of governance. When Cao Cao died, his son deposed the Han monarch and declared his own dynasty, the CaoWei (220-265). Two other regimes formed: the Shu-Han (221-263) in Sichuan, and the Wu (222-280) centered on Nanjing on the Yangzi River.³ These are the (Chinese) Three Kingdoms.

The Han empire and the Xiongnu confederacy had always developed in tandem. As the Han imperial bureaucratic order broke up, so too the Xiongnu confederation shattered into clans and tribes. Qiang Tibetans moved into Han territory, and settlers in the West abandoned by the Han regime joined them. A new nomadic power, the Xianbei, arose in northeastern Manchuria. Changes in the steppe sent mounted warriors out from bases in Central Asia and the northern steppe into the Yellow River area and down towards the Yangzi. The horsemen clashed and cooperated with the sedentary agricultural aristocracy developing out of the Han clans.

The longest lasting dynasty in the period was the first and largest of the (Korean) Three Kingdoms, Koguryŏ (c. 37 BC - AD 668). Koguryŏ chiefs had clashed with the Han empire and subjugated the people along the eastern coast of the peninsula. In AD 200 Koguryŏ built a capital in the upper Yalu River valley (now Jilin province in China), and by expanding along the Yalu, threatened Cao-Wei in two ways. First, Cao-Wei had occupied the Lelang and Daifang commanderies in 236-38 to benefit from trade with the southern peninsula, but Koguryŏ now controlled trade routes. Second, Koguryŏ established diplomatic relations with Cao-Wei’s southern-mainland rivals, Wu and Shu. As we will see below, Cao-Wei welcomed an alliance with Queen Himiko of Wa in the archipelago, and in 245, its soldiers destroyed the Koguryŏ capital. The fifty years it took for the regime to recover gave its rival confederacies in the peninsula, the Samhan, a breathing space.

Twenty years after the Cao-Wei victory over Koguryŏ, in 265, a general usurped the CaoWei throne, founded the Western Jin, and defeated Wu and Shu. Western Jin unified much of the former Han territory (but not the far west); and took over Lelang and Daifang on the northern Korean peninsula, but shifted its entrepot for East Asian trade westward to the Liaodong peninsula. With the trading center further away, the Samhan turned to diplomacy: Chinhan and Mahan sent a dozen missions to Jin between 276 and 291, for instance, each including between three and twenty-nine of the towns that made up the Samhan confederations. It may have been precisely to gain leverage in trade that the town chiefs acquiesced in increasing centralization. The Samhan confederations became kingdoms. By 372, King Kŭnch’ogo was offering tribute to Eastern Jin as the monarch of Paekche, not the confederation head of Mahan. Ten years later Maripkan Naemul offered tribute to Eastern Jin as the monarch of Silla, not just the head of the Chinhan confederacy. (If he existed at all. Naemul is traditionally said to have reigned from 356 to 402, but he may be a myth constructed out of a scrap of a text preserved in Tang sources.)⁴

Did I say offering tribute to Eastern Jin? Yes – for the general who had founded Western Jin failed to create a stable regime. Rather than reestablishing a meritocratic system of recruiting officials, he appointed 50 members of his own clan to government. Naturally, upon his demise, they began viciously fighting one another. All sides hired professional cavalry – men who had grown up with horses, within and along the Han northern border. So it is hardly surprising that in 304, a Xiongnu general declared an independent state in north China. Over the next 12 years he captured both the old Han capitals of Luoyang and Chang’an, and the Western Jin leadership fled south. (Since the general’s mother, he claimed, descended from Liu Bang in one of the many Han-Xiongnu diplomatic marriage alliances, he initially called his new state “Han.”) Eastern Jin held only the area south of the Huai River. The Gongsun family, ensconced in the Liaodong peninsula, took over the Lelang commandery and divided it to form the Daifang commandery in about 189. From then on, warfare was endemic, and court politics became more murderous than ever. From about 300 to 589, for three and half centuries, thirty-seven mainland dynasties named in the histories came and went, twenty-two of them from the steppe and Manchuria, -- not to speak of many clans who evaded control entirely, or who strove for dominance but quickly failed. No dynasty held power for long.

In this dangerous situation, the northern regimes worried about Koguryŏ, and the southern regimes welcomed diplomats from afar as signs of their legitimacy. Koguryŏ had re-emerged under King Mich’ŏn (r. 300-330). He annexed Lelang and Daifang, the remaining former Han-imperial commanderies, in 313. From then until 668, it was Koguryŏ military pressure that gave urgency to East Asian alliances and state formation in the peninsula and archipelago. Archaeologists have found over 300 Korguryŏ in Liaoning, including the Liaodong peninsula: 70 mountain fortresses, over 200 tombs, and even a stone quarry.⁵ Like the Zhou warring states, the various polities alternately allied and fought with one another at the same time as their chiefs fought for supremacy among one another and for control of land, labor, and prestige goods.

Koguryŏ King Kwanggaet’o (r. 391— 413) expanded the realm considerably. Imitating mainland rulers, he took a reign name (Yŏngnak 永樂 “Perpetual Happiness”). (Kwanggaet’o’s full title was 國岡上廣開土境平安好太王.) We know about his achievements because his son, Changsu “The Long-Lived” (r. 413-499) recounted them on a stele, an inscribed stone monument he set up in 414. Kwanggaet’o fought a regime further north in Manchuria; then to support Silla fought Wa troops (probably allied with Kaya) and Paekche; and then fought the northern regime of Puyŏ, where legend claims his ancestors had come from.

Kwanggaet’o’s aggression stimulated alliances and state formation. Paekche developed in the Mahan area. After building quite a large walled city (recently excavated), it first appears in a written record when King Kŭnch’ogo contacted the Jin state in 372. In 396, when Koguryŏ took 58 Paekche forts and was besieging the capital, Paekche King Asin sent his son directly to Wa, a regime in the archipelago, to request assistance.

In about 400, Koguryŏ demolished one Kaya regime, and conquered northern Paekche, enabling King Changsu to move the Koguryŏ capital further south from the Yalu River valley to Pyongyang on the peninsula. There, riziculture fed a larger army, which pushed Paekche yet further south. Paekche and Silla allied against Koguryŏ in 433, and from about 400 to 500, Silla and Wa also joined forces. Once Silla had gained enough strength to push Koguryŏ back up the coast, it dropped Wa, which allied with Paekche instead. Each regime also sought diplomatic support from the various mainland dynasties. Kaya, for instance, sent a mission to Southern Qi on the mainland in 479. The shifting alliances alone make one’s head spin.

But it is still more complex than that. Until about 1600, Korean historians assumed that the Samhan confederations of towns (Mahan, Chinhan, and Pyŏnhan) had developed into the Three Kingdoms (Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla): a nice, simple, storyline, but wrong: it was the Kaya states (not counted as one of the Three Kingdoms) that developed in the Pyŏnhan area. The confusion was natural, because borders changed frequently, as kings fought one another and struggled to command local chiefs and groups. In what historian Park Cheun Soo calls the “mutual interaction model,” many small chiefs traded and fought and allied, across the water and up and down the peninsula. Pressure from Koguryŏ’s powerful armies led independent chiefs to seek alliances.

Texts cannot trace the process of state formation accurately, because most were written far away or long afterwards, and some tell outright lies. King Kwanggaet’o’s stele dates to 414, and for a long time was the earliest extant text directly associated with Korean history. It is a good primary source for him, because it was written immediately after his death. (That does not mean we have to believe everything it says.) But for Koguryŏ’s earlier history, we must rely on archaeology and mainland written sources. Silla was supposedly founded in 57 BC, but there is no archaeological or mainland evidence for that. The earliest extant stone inscription from Silla was carved in 501; the first steles to mention that there was a Silla founding ancestor date to 568; and that ancestor only gets a name on a stele carved another century later.⁶ The first substantial narratives of Korean history were written (in classical Chinese) in 1145 (“History of the Three Kingdoms” Samguk sagi 三國史記, with “sagi” being the Korean pronunciation of Sima Qian’s Shiji), and 1279 (“Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms” Samguk yusa 三國遺事).

Although Japan’s process of state-building started later, its written records survive from earlier, starting with the “Record of Ancient Affairs” (Kojiki 古事記) of 712 and the “Chronicle of Japan” (Nihon Shoki 日本書紀) of 720. These histories did draw on some earlier texts (now lost), but used in isolation they are not reliable. For instance, the Nihon Shoki records that one “Empress Jingū” conquered the Kaya states in the fourth century AD, creating a colony called Mimana (“Imna” in Korean). An immense amount of ink has been spilt on this idea that “Japan” conquered part of “Korea.” Hideyoshi’s invasion of Chosŏn in 1592, and the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, make the debate emotionally and politically charged. Some Japanese and Korean scholars now agree: “the Japanese commandery of Mimana” was an administrative office for Wa envoys visiting one of the Kaya statelets.⁷ Without clear written records, it is hard to know exactly how the chiefs were interacting with one another in their quest to become more powerful kings.

For centuries there was no one “Japan,” and no one “Korea,” any more than there was one “China” after the fall of Han. Nor was there one clearly-bounded Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ethnicity or culture. Rather, armed and mounted elites dominated local producers, and pushed and shoved at each other in many configurations. Archaeology provides data that are difficult to interpret but cannot purposely lie, and those data make it quite clear that the chiefs and states of East Asia interacted in numerous ways and across numerous routes, for a long time.