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10.1: From Silla to Koryŏ

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    135143
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    New Powers in Silla

    In the last 150 years of Silla history (about 785-935), true-bone aristocratic factions put 20 kings on the throne as puppets. Certain noble families, to increase their leverage in the factional fighting, used wealth derived from land and maritime trade to gather huge private armies of slaves. That armed might increasingly determined who sat on the throne: the king became the plaything of aristocrats with military power.

    In the ninth century, the true-bone Kim and Pak clans increasingly fought one another and weakened the monarchy. Officialdom did become more diverse in terms of rank, as those who had studied in Tang or in the National University won office. But most lower elite men, of head-rank six, still had no chance to rise above lower offices. Some simply abandoned their political careers. But others, along with those with only provincial rank who had been even more thoroughly excluded from power, defected from Silla. They joined one of the new regional regimes that were beginning, by about 830, to challenge Silla, just as regional warlords in Tang China were challenging the Tang center.

    Three kinds of regional leaders ushered in the “Later Three Kingdoms period.” First were Silla generals from high-ranking families. The first major rebellion against Silla was headed by a true-bone Kim general angry because his father had been passed over as king. Instead of continuing the fight at court, Commander-in-Chief of Ungch’ŏn Prefecture Kim Hŏnchong in 822 proclaimed his own new kingdom called “Everlasting Peace” (Chang’an, the name of the Tang capital) and his own reign-name. Word leaked out before he was ready to fight the court, because he had contacted other provincial generals, seeking allies. But the leak did not matter. Some provincial generals joined him; none fought against him; some who wished to oppose him deserted their posts because their subordinates would not fight him; and the central army had already fallen apart from disuse and a weakening tax base. Kim also found allies among lowerranking officials, even those of true-bone families. The court had to request some true-bone families to deploy their private armies to put down the rebellion, showing weakness that emboldened rivals. And Kim’s rebellion showed that there was opposition not only to the king, but to the dominance of the narrow, true-bone, capital elite.

    clipboard_e67775bc955a61c3ae0f1cb28a1a08fb2.png
    Figure 10.1. Koryŏ-period bronze mirror decorated with a ship on a stormy sea. The lobed rim is inherited from Persia via Tang mirrors. About 7” across. Source: Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.

    A second kind of regional leaders were lowlier military men authorized to deal with the pirates who had sprung up, kidnapping Silla people to sell as slaves in Tang. The Silla government authorized local leaders to protect the borders and ports, only to see them build independent power bases in the garrisons and enrich themselves through the maritime trade they protected. One such man was Chang Pojo (787-846, also known as Kungbok). Chang was a lowly Silla man who had become a minor military officer in Tang, and then made a fortune in international trade. The central Silla government authorized him to found a garrison on Wando Island to defeat the pirates – really the court was just recognizing and reinforcing power he already had as a “merchant prince” along the southwestern coast. Chang was the ideal man to control pirates, for they were cutting into his own interests in ways that he thoroughly understood. Once that was done, Chang deployed his power and wealth to give sanctuary to some court nobles in trouble, and then to back a candidate for king, successfully. He won some nice titles and the great honor of wearing court dress appropriate only for true-bone men. But aristocratic tolerance of such a person could only go so far. Chang proposed making his daughter a secondary consort of King Munsŏng, the son of the man he had enthroned. The true-bone nobility furiously objected: “How could a daughter from an island ever be fit to marry into the royal family?” Chang, in his turn became angry, and rose in rebellion. He was assassinated in about 846.2

    The third sort of regional leaders were the “castle lords.” They came from families that, excluded from court power because they had only provincial rank, built bases in their local areas. They made connections with garrisons, fortified their own estates, created large armies of slaves and peasants, and seized grain and cloth produced by the villages. Like the rebel generals, they weakened and attacked Silla’s power from within. The castle lords demanded food and grain from the villages around them, but the central government still wanted to collect its taxes as well. Farmers had to pay both the central government and from the castle lords, so many of them had no choice but to abandon their taxable fields, and either turn bandit or become slaves in the private armies of the castle lords and the maritime generals. Their plight was made worse by bad harvests in the ninth century, perhaps the result of low rainfall.3

    Famine in Silla

    Lee Kidong and other historians believe that in ordinary times, the farmers of Silla were quite prosperous. In addition to rice land, the one excavated tax register lists farmers of different strata. The wealthiest owned cattle, horses, a variety of nut-trees, and mulberry trees, as well as one or two domestic slaves per household. But in the ninth century, productivity may have been declining because the nobility and Buddhist temples were expanding their estates. Just as in late Han times, smallholders lost their independence to become mere tenants of big landowners.

    Moreover, the weather had taken a bad turn, causing hunger and famine for farmers in Tang, Silla, and perhaps even in Japan. That imperial storehouses and farmers’ bellies were empty did not stop Silla aristocrats from living the high life – at least 39 of them literally gilded their houses, covering them entirely with gold. The Silla Queen Chinsŏng made matters worse by demanding rice and cloth from farmers. When, without enough to eat themselves, they refused her demands, the Queen turned to overseas raids. One Silla sailor who was captured by Japanese troops in a raid on Tsushima in 894 told the Japanese authorities that “The grain did not ripen in our country, the warehouses are empty and the royal capital is feeling insecure, so the queen ordered us to conduct raids to get grain and cloth.”4

    Faced with such royal demands, farmers all over the country joined rebellions. The rebellions were started by the provincial elites whom true-bone families and monarchs had politically exploited and marginalized for centuries, and later led also by big landowners and strongmen. The dire situation had also created gangs of bandits, who started by raiding for food and goods, but gained in political ambition as they found no state force powerful enough to stop them.

    We have a vivid report written by Choe Chiwon, a head-rank six man who had studied and worked in Tang, witnessed the violent and destructive Huang Chao rebellion (874-884), and returned to Silla. While in office in a Silla province there, he wrote back to the Tang emperor reporting that under the “foolish” rule of Queen Chinsŏng:

    This kingdom is experiencing a great famine. Sneak thieves have arisen throughout the land. At first they behaved like greedy wolves, but now they are boasting of their great ambitions. In the beginning they hid like mice, coming out to pilfer rice chests and rifle pockets, but taking advantage of the situation they then swarmed like bees, seizing fortresses and raiding villages, so that before long their smoke and dust filled the country, ruining the weather and spoiling the harvest. The thieves at Tongnung flourish even more so that the fields cannot be plowed…. The brigands kill people like cutting up cloth and the skeletons they throw aside are piled up like a forest. What was once a gentle land has become an afflicted land…. All of the prefectures have become the lairs of brigands and the rivers and mountains have become battlefields. How is it that Heaven has visited all its disasters on Korea?5

    Choe’s answer to his last question was that the bad luck of Tang had spread, as its learning and civilization had spread earlier, infecting Silla.

    The bad luck did spread, somehow. Let’s look across East Asia. Parhae in Manchuria fell in 926. In 894, Japan stopped sending embassies to Tang. Sugawara no Michizane stopped what would have been a mission in that year; he argued that it was too dangerous, with the piracy on the seas and so many ships being taken or sunk, and it was also pointless, with the Tang itself so greatly weakened, about to collapse in 907.6 Tang could offer Silla no more support. Queen Chinsŏng tried repeatedly to send envoys to Tang, but bandits stopped every embassy on its way.

    Rebels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    In this increasingly violent situation, eighty years after the true-bone courtiers had Chang Pojo assassinated, two major rebellions against Silla took shape, and a third leader reunited the country. One historian has called the three leaders the good, the bad, and the ugly.7 “The bad” was a poor farmer turned soldier, Kyonhwan (867-936), who raised an army sufficient to sack the Silla capital in 927, kill the king and capture many high officials, and loot an incredible quantity of treasure. In 900, Kyonhwan founded a regime he called – to lean on the prestige of an earlier rival to Silla – “Latter Paekche.” He explicitly modelled himself on the Huang Chao rebellion against Tang, brutally attacking the nobility. The regime lasted until 936.

    “The ugly” came from the opposite end of the social scale: He was a Silla prince. Cut out of the succession by factional maneuvering, Prince Kungye (d. 918) had become first a monk and then a commander of a Silla army garrison. At the garrison, he gathered followers, overthrew his superior officer, and declared an independent regime: “Latter Korguryŏ.” Latter Koguryŏ followed more meritocratic practices than Silla, recruiting some men not of true-bone rank to hold high office. But Prince Kungye proved to be an utter despot who relied on terror to rule. Still the arrogant aristocrat, he showed little respect for the men who supported him. They threw him out, and as he fled, his own subjects killed him.

    His generals then chose one of their own number to succeed him: “the good.” This was Wang Kon (877-943) posthumously known as T’aejo. Latter Koguryŏ was renamed Koryŏ, and this new dynasty lasted right through the Mongol domination of Eurasia, until 1392.

    Wang Kŏn was a castle lord. He was from the Kaesong region, just north of today’s border between north and south Korea, and along the western coast. Using the profits from trade that passed through an island just off the coast, and with support from a nearby Silla garrison, he had built up his family’s private army. He joined Prince Kungye’s Latter Korguryŏ, won many battles, and became the Prince’s chief minister. With the backing of the other generals to become king of Koryŏ, he proceeded to gather support for it from as many sources as possible, while continuing to conquer territory through fighting, defeating Latter Paekche. He successfully allied with various powerful groups, and forged a new legitimacy for himself out of the ideas of the time. Then, he sponsored a new history that made Korea into a nation.8

    Koryŏ Pluralism

    How did Wang Kŏn create a successful new regime, twenty-five years before Song reunified the mainland? Like Sui and Tang, he drew in existing powers and organizations, and drew on existing ideas and beliefs, developing both the ideas and the organization further.

    First, Wang Kŏn set up his capital in his home town, rather than in the old Silla capital. That emphasized his status as a local magnate or castle lord, so he could gain the support of other such families. Those castle lords were proud and powerful, unwilling to give up their autonomy, but Wang courted them successfully. He established marriage connections with at least twenty such families, and gave others his surname to establish fictive kin connections.

    Second, he originally maintained friendly relations with the remnant Silla regime as he fought against the peasant regime of Latter Paekche. In 930 and 934 he won decisive battles against Latter Paekche, aided by an internal father-son fight. The peasant founder Kyonhwon, having earned the enmity of one of his sons and lost control to him, came over to Wang Kŏn’s side and helped him to defeat the movement he himself had founded. Wang Kŏn now had the support of one of his former chief rivals, from the low end of the social scale.

    Third, he exercised restraint when in 935 Silla’s last king surrendered to Wang Kŏn. He incorporated the elite of Silla, rather than alienating them with bloody retribution as Kyonhwon had done. Wang Kŏn married a Silla princess, and unlike in Chang Pojo’s time, the former royal family had to accept him. He treated the nobility well, making many of them officials in his new government. He himself married and hired so many Paks that their prominence may account for the appearance in the first histories of Silla (written down in Koryŏ times), of the oldest mythical ancestor yet, Pak Hyŏkkŏse, the founder of Silla who hatched from an egg and gave off light, and of many very early Silla queens (dating to before Silla people even used surnames) who said to have been Paks.9 So he had support from the upper end of the social scale, too.

    Fourth, Wang Kŏn was lucky in that the Parhae regime in the north, the old rival to Silla, was defeated by the Khitan Liao as they expanded their power on the mainland. He took advantage of his luck by welcoming the many members of Parhae’s ruling class who fled southward, even giving them land to live by. The new Koryŏ regime thus incorporated the independent castle lords, the rival latter Paekche leader, the old Silla nobility, and the Parhae nobility. Wang made the most of luck by welcoming elite refugees instead of making enemies of them.

    And fifth, Koryŏ reversed Silla’s style of recruitment into officialdom. Silla had preferred hiring from the royal clans of Kim and Pak; Koryŏ worked to avoid hiring members of his own, now royal, Wang clan, to overcome Silla’s rigidly hereditary system. In 958 Koryŏ introduced a state examination system modelled on that of Tang, shifting in the direction of meritocracy. That meant that men of lower elite ranks would not be alienated as in Silla times. Compared with Silla, Koryŏ was truly a unifying regime.

    Furthermore, as had Sui and Tang in their unification efforts, Wang Kon also drew on a number of different ways of thought to support his regime. The Mandate of Heaven ideology appeared throughout the Chinese Classics and other imported books. In the Three Kingdoms er and Silla, some ministers had used it to criticize kings, according to stories recorded later, but the kings had not been interested. Their legitimacy sprang instead from their illustrious ancestry, their display of honors and goods from overseas, their military might, and their patronage of Buddhism. Wang Kon – like the Zhou overthrowing social superiors of five centuries – may have been the first Korean ruler to employ Mandate theory. He chose the reign-title “Heavenbestowed.” A stele erected shortly after his reign contains the oldest known Korean reference to the term Heavenly Mandate. Wang also referred to the Chinese classics in his edicts, and promoted their study.

    Still, Wang Kŏn thought of himself much more as a Buddhist ruler.10 It was Buddhism to which he really felt indebted, and it became an integral part of life in Koryŏ. Buddhist festivals shaped the year, temples were built everywhere, and the state sponsored Buddhist institutions, which promised in turn to protect it.

    Wang Kŏn also believed in a third force: the spirits of his native land. This Korean Shinto included imported ideas about fengshui (“wind and water”), a spiritual technology related to divination techniques that had been first applied to the siting of graves in the mainland about AD 300. A monk, Toson, brought fengshui to Silla, combining it with other elements: the Buddhist idea of earning merit to improve one’s lot in this life or the next; the Han theory of Five phases of cosmic forces underlying political change; yin-yang theory that stressed that as a force reached its strongest point its opposite would begin to appear within it. The natural shapes of mountains and rivers affected the characters and lives of the individuals who lived there. A propitious site for a building or a tomb could channel the energy of the earth and bring good fortune. Building in a bad place brought trouble. An unlucky landscape could be healed by building a Buddhist temple or a shrine to a deity to contain bad energy and prevent calamity.

    Toson travelled over Korea divining for the local important families, like Wang Kŏn’s father, and helping them plan construction accordingly. Each family viewed its own home territory as good, and even claimed political legitimacy on these grounds. Late Silla true-bone aristocrats had competed with one another by building pagodas at certain spots in their territories: Wang Kŏn believed that he had been able to unite the peninsula precisely because of the strength of the Kaesong area’s topography. But this kind of localist ideology cut both ways. In 1135, some courtiers wanted to move the capital closer to their own family power bases near Pyongyang. Working with the conspirators, monk Myoch’ong used geomantic arguments to try to convince the King to move the capital. When the Kaesong people won the argument, Myoch’ong’s faction turned to military rebellion, which failed. Fengshui was a powerful force in people’s thinking, alongside Buddhism, and the learning of the Classics and Confucianism. Various ways of thought co-existed in Koryŏ as in other East Asian regimes.

    Koryŏ State and Social Structure

    The new Koryŏ regime had incorporated the independent castle lords, the rival Latter Paekche leader, the old Silla nobility, and the Parhae nobility. It drew on various strands of thought and belief for its legitimation. Nonetheless, the coalition required further work.

    First, Silla aristocrats were absorbed into the Koryŏ ruling class, but did not necessarily share the same outlook as the former rebels: that difference may have led to a succession crisis in 945, when the regime was still young.11 Second, like Liu Bang, Wang Kŏn had to recognize and reward those who had supported him. It was left to the third Koryŏ ruler, King Kwangjong (r. 949-975), to suppress the castle lords in a brutal purge; to try to free slaves to pay taxes to the central government; and to institute a civil service examination system to recruit low-ranking men to staff the bureaucracy. He tried; but no sooner was he dead than another portion of the old Silla aristocracy asserted itself and took control of government.

    This was the sixth head-rank educated Confucians who had chafed at true-bone snobbishness. King Sŏngjong (981-997) sponsored them, and promoted Confucianism, hoping to increase his own authority. Sŏngjong set up a double-tiered bureaucracy, with Ministries to run affairs in the capital, and officials sent out to govern twelve provinces and about 300 counties. Officials could not govern their home areas and each posting was brief, in Legalist bureaucratic style. To further prevent officials building up power bases, they sometimes had to leave a son at the capital as a hostage, a method later used in Tokugawa Japan.

    King Sŏngjong had offered an opening to head-rank six and even provincial men, but they quickly closed ranks to keep others out. To counteract that and admit lower ranks, King Sŏngjong set up a Confucian academy and local schools, – but only the locally powerful could attend. He held civil service examinations, – but even more than in Tang, the new Koryŏ elite passed or bypassed them. As in Hei’an Japan, they could demand grants of tax-exempt land, weakening the central government’s control of revenue, and they came to control the throne.

    This meant that, once more, an aristocratic mentality prevailed: people were sorted out into boxes from birth. Koryŏ clans were classified into hereditary “orders” who specialized in serving as civil officials, as military officials, as clerks, and as soldiers.12 The common people included hereditary artisan families. Peasants were stuck in farming, often leading lives of poverty as landlords or the state took most of their grain and cloth, and demanded labor too. Slave children became slaves, who could be bought and sold. Certain hereditary professions – butchers, actors, and singers – were outcastes: necessary of course, but despised. There were occasional examples of social mobility – occasional slaves who were talented, tough, and lucky enough to rise into the ranks of the military officers; but it was very rare.

    All this was true of Tang and Hei’an as well, but in Koryŏ about thirty percent of the population was enslaved – much higher than in either China or Japan at any time, and high enough for some scholars to consider Korea a “slave society.”13 Commercialization created some social mobility in the mainland, as we shall see, but the real power of aristocracy and aristocratic thinking was not broken until the twentieth century in Korea.

    clipboard_e36546043bfa80997a627c97b51b940e2.png
    Figure 10.2. Koryŏ celadon vase with cranes, 1150-1200. Source: Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.

    Managing the Economy: an early text from the Peninsula + Manchuria

    Recently, archaeologists in the peninsula+ have excavated 430 wooden tablets with writing on them, dating from about 550 up to 1300. Some are only fragments, so in the example

    … means something came before or after the extant text

    □ means one character is illegible

    [ ] and words in square brackets are added by the historian to make the meaning clear.

    Think about what kinds of things were recorded and what kinds of questions historians could ask and answer. What material items might help answer the questions? What does the text suggest about ordinary people’s lives? Why did I put it in this spot in the textbook?

    clipboard_e62afb20e87421c6d1ef1694a91b8934e.png
    Figure 6.10. Excavated record from Korea. How does the translation tell us the earliest possible date of the record? Source: Lee SeungJae, “Old Korean Writing on Wooden Tablets,” p. 171. Used by kind permission of the author.

    Lee SeungJae has circled four examples on this broken tablet of Korean phonetic script mixed in with the Chinese characters. Such notations may have been the origin of Japanese katakana, a way of writing foreign words in Japanese that appears only after 800 or so. Lee concludes that Japanese writing developed under the influence first of Paekche and then from 660 onwards of Silla, and not just directly from Chinese texts.14


    This page titled 10.1: From Silla to Koryŏ is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Schneewind (eScholarship) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.