NEW CHŌ-SEN.
It will be remembered that the first Chinese settler and civilizer of
Corea, Ki Tsze, gave it the name of Chō-sen. Coming from violence and
war, to a land of peace which lay eastward of his old home, Ki Tsze
selected for his new dwelling-place a name at once expressive of its
outward position and his own inward emotions—Chō-sen, or Morning Calm.
For eleven centuries a part of Manchuria, including, as the Coreans
believe, the northern half of the peninsula, bore this name. From the
Christian era until the tenth century, the names of the three kingdoms,
Shinra, Hiaksai, and Kokorai, or Korai, express the divided political
condition of the country. On the fall of these petty states, the united
peninsula was called Korai. Korai existed from A.D. 934 until A.D.
1392, when the ancient name of Chō-sen was restored. Though the Coreans
often speak of their country as Korai (Gauli, or Gori), it is as the
English speak of Britain—with a patriotic feeling rather than for
accuracy. Chō-sen is still the official and popular designation of the
country. This name is at once the oldest and the newest.
The first bestowal of this name on the peninsula was in poetic mood,
and was the symbol of a peaceful triumph. The second gift of the name
was the index of a political revolution not unaccompanied with
bloodshed. The latter days of the dynasty founded by Wang were marked
by licentiousness and effeminacy in the palace, and misrule in the
country. The people hated the cruelties of their monarch, the
thirty-second of his line, and longed for a deliverer. Such a one was
Ni Taijo (Japanese, Ri Seiki), who was born in the region of
Broughton’s Bay, in the Ham-kiung province. It is said of him that from
his youth he surpassed all others in virtue, intelligence, and skill in
manly exercises. He was especially fond of hunting with the falcon.
One day, while in the woods, his favorite bird, in pursuing its quarry,
flew so far ahead that it was lost to the sight of its master.
Hastening after it the young man espied a shrine at the roadside into
which he saw his hawk fly. Entering, he found within a hermit priest.
Awed and abashed at the weird presence of the white-bearded sage, the
lad for a moment was speechless; but the old man, addressing him, said:
“What benefit is it for a youth of your abilities to be seeking a stray
falcon? A throne is a richer prize. Betake yourself at once to the
capital.”
Acting upon the hint thus given him, and leaving the falcon behind,
Taijo wended his way westward to Sunto, and entered the military
service of the king. He soon made his mark and rapidly rose to high
command, until he became lieutenant-general of the whole army. He
married and reared children, and through the espousal of his daughter
by the king, became father-in-law to his sovereign.
The influence of Taijo was now immense. While with his soldierly
abilities he won the enthusiastic regard of the army, his popularity
with the people rested solely on his virtues. Possessed of such
influence with the court, the soldiers, and the country at large, he
endeavored to reform the abuse of power and to curb the cruelties of
the king. Even to give advice to a despot is an act of bravery, but
Taijo dared to do it again and again. The king, however, refused to
follow the counsel of his father-in-law or to reform abuses. He thus
daily increased the odium in which he was held by his subjects.
Such was the state of affairs toward the end of the fourteenth century,
when everything was ripe for revolution.
In China, great events, destined to influence “the little kingdom,”
were taking place. The Mongol dynasty, even after the breaking up of
the empire founded by Genghis Khan, still held the dragon throne; but
during the later years of their reign, when harassed by enemies at
home, Corea was neglected and her tribute remained unpaid. A spasmodic
attempt to resubdue the lapsed vassal, and make Corea a Mongol castle
of refuge from impending doom, was ruined by the energy and valor of Ni
Taijo. The would-be invaders were driven back. The last Mongol emperor
fell in 1341, and the native Ming, or “Bright,” dynasty came into
power, and in 1368 was firmly established.
Their envoys being sent to Corea demanded pledges of vassalage. The
king neglected, finally refused, and ordered fresh levies to be made to
resist the impending invasion of the Chinese. In this time of gloom and
bitterness against their own monarch, the army contained but a
pitifully small number of men who could be depended on to fight the
overwhelming host of the Ming veterans. Taijo, in an address to his
followers, thus spoke to them:
“Although the order from the king must be obeyed, yet the attack upon
the Ming soldiers, with so small an army as ours, is like casting an
egg against a rock, and no one of the army will return alive. I do not
tell you this from any fear of death, but our king is too haughty. He
does not heed our advice. He has ordered out the army suddenly without
cause, paying no attention to the suffering which wives and children of
the soldiers must undergo. This is a thing I cannot bear. Let us go
back to the capital and the responsibility shall fall on my shoulders
alone.”
Thereupon the captains and soldiers being impressed with the purity of
their leader’s motives, and admiring his courage, resolved to obey his
orders and not the king’s. Arriving at Sunto, he promptly took measures
to depose the king, who was sent to Kang-wa, the island so famous in
modern as in ancient and mediæval history.
The king’s wrath was very great, and he intrigued to avenge himself.
His plot was made known, by one of his retainers, to Taijo, who, by a
counter-movement, put forth the last radical measure which, in Chinese
Asia means, for a private person, disinheritance; for a king,
deposition; and for a royal line, extinction. This act was the removal
of the tablets of the king’s ancestors from their shrine, and the issue
of an order forbidding further continuance of sacrifice to them. This
Corean and Chinese method of clapping the extinguisher upon a whole
dynasty was no sooner ordered than duly executed.
Ni Taijo was now made king, to the great delight of the people. He sent
an embassy to Nanking to notify the Ming emperor of affairs in the
“outpost state,” to tender his loyal vassalage, to seek the imperial
approval of his acts, and to beg his investiture as sovereign. This was
graciously granted. The ancient name of Chō-sen was revived, and at the
petitioner’s request conferred upon the country by the emperor, who
profited by this occasion to enforce upon the Coreans his calendar and
chronology—the reception of these being in itself alone tantamount to a
sufficient declaration of fealty. Friendship being now fully
established with the Mings, the king of Chō-sen sent a number of
youths, sons of his nobles, to Nanking to study in the imperial Chinese
college.
The dynasty thus established is still the reigning family in Corea,
though the direct line came to an end in 1864. The Coreans in their
treaty with Japan, in 1876, dated the document according to the 484th
year of Chō-sen, reckoning from the accession of Ni Taijo to the
throne. One of the first acts of the new dynasty was to make a change
in the location of the national capital. The new dynasty made choice of
the city of Han Yang, situated on the Han River, about fifty miles from
its mouth. The king enlarged the fortifications, enclosed the city with
a wall of masonry of great extent, extending over the adjacent hills
and valleys. On this wall was a rampart pierced with port-holes for
archers and over the streams were built arches of stone. He organized
the administrative system which, with slight modification, is still in
force at the present time. The city being well situated, soon grew in
extent, and hence became the seoul or capital (pronounced by the
Chinese king, as in Nanking and Peking, and the Japanese kio, as in
Kiōto and Tōkiō). He also re-divided the kingdom into eight dō or
provinces. This division still maintains. The names, formed each of two
Chinese characters joined to that of dō (circuit or province), and
approximate meanings are given below. [6] With such names of bright
omen, “the eight provinces” entered upon an era of peace and
flourishing prosperity. The people found out that something more than a
change of masters was meant by the removal of the capital to a more
central situation. Vigorous reforms were carried out, and changes were
made, not only in political administration, but in social life, and
even in religion. In all these the influence of the China of the Ming
emperors is most manifest.
Buddhism, which had penetrated into every part of the country, and had
become, in a measure, at least, the religion of the state, was now set
aside and disestablished. The Confucian ethics and the doctrines of the
Chinese sages were not only more diligently studied and propagated
under royal patronage, but were incorporated into the religion of the
state. From the early part of the fifteenth century, Confucianism
flourished until it reached the point of bigotry and intolerance; so
that when Christianity was discovered by the magistrates to be existing
among the people, it was put under the band of extirpation, and its
followers thought worthy of death.
Whatever may have been the motive for supplanting Buddhism, whether
from sincere conviction of the paramount truth of the ancient ethics,
or a desire to closely imitate the Middle Kingdom in everything, even
in religion, or to obtain easy and great wealth by confiscating the
monastery and temple lands, it is certain that the change was sweeping,
radical, and thorough. All observers testify that the cult of Shaka in
Corea is almost a shadow. On the other hand, in many cities throughout
the land, are buildings and halls erected and maintained by the
government, in which sit in honor the statues of Confucius and his
greatest disciples.
One great measure that tended to strengthen and make popular the new
religious establishment, to weaken the old faith, to give strength and
unity to the new government, to foster education and make the Corean
literary classes what they are to-day—critical scholars in Chinese—was
what Americans would call “civil service reform.” Appointment to office
on the basis of merit, as shown in the literary examinations, was made
the rule. Modelled closely upon the Chinese system, three grades of
examinations were appointed, and three degrees settled. All candidates
for military or civil rank and office must possess diplomas, granted by
the royal or provincial examiners, before appointment could be made or
salary begun. The system, which is still in vogue, is more fully
described in the chapter on education.
Among the changes in the fashion of social life, introduced under the
Ni dynasty, was the adoption of the Ming costume. To the Chinese of
to-day the Corean dress and coiffure, as seen in Peking, are subjects
for curiosity and merriment. The lack of a long queue, and the very
different cut, form, and general appearance of these eastern strangers,
strike the eye of mandarin and street laborer alike, very much as a
gentleman in knee-breeches, cocked hat, and peruke, or the peasant
costumes at Castle Garden, appear to a New Yorker, stepping from the
elevated railway, on Broadway.
Yet from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Chinese
gentleman dressed like the Corean of to-day, and the mandarin of Canton
or Nanking was as innocent of the Tartar hair-tail as is the citizen of
Seoul. The Coreans simply adhere to the fashions prevalent during the
Ming era. The Chinese, in the matter of garb, however loath foreigners
may be to credit it, are more progressive than their Corean neighbors.
To the house of Ni belongs also the greater honor of abolishing at
least two cruel customs which had their roots in superstition.
Heretofore the same rites which were so long in vogue in Japan, traces
of which were noticed even down to the seventeenth century, held
unchallenged sway in Corea. Ko-rai-chang, though not fully known in its
details, was the habit of burying old men alive. In-chei was the
offering up of human sacrifices, presumably to the gods of the
mountains and the sea. Both of these classes of rites, at once
superstitious and horrible, were anciently very frequent; nor was
Buddhism able to utterly abolish them. In the latter case, they choked
the victims to death, and then threw them into the sea. The island of
Chansan was especially noted as the place of propitiation to the gods
of the sea.
The first successors of the founder of the house of Ni held great
power, which they used for the good of the people, and hence enjoyed
great popularity. The first after Taijo reigned two years, from 1398 to
1400. Hetai-jong, who came after him, ruled eighteen years, and among
other benefits conferred, established the Sin-mun-ko, or box for the
reception of petitions addressed directly to the king. Into this
coffer, complaints and prayers from the people could lawfully and
easily be dropped. Though still kept before the gate of the royal
palace in Seoul, it is stated that access to it is now difficult. It
seems to exist more in name than in fact. Among the first diplomatic
acts of King Hetai-jong was to unite with the Chinese emperor, in a
complaint to the mikado of Japan, against the buccaneers, whom the
authorities of the latter country were unable to control. Hence the
remonstrance was only partially successful, and the evil, which was
aggravated by Corean renegades acting as pilots, grew beyond all
bounds. These rascals made a lucrative living by betraying their own
countrymen.
Siei-jong, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his father,
Hetai-jong, enjoyed a long reign of thirty-two years, during which the
fortifications of the capital were added to and strengthened. The
Manchius beyond the Ever-white Mountains were then beginning to rise in
power, and Liao Tung was disturbed by the raids of tribes from
Mongolia, which the Ming generals were unable to suppress. When the
fighting took place within fifty miles of her own boundary river,
Chō-sen became alarmed, and looked to the defence of her own frontier
and capital. In 1450, on the death of the king, who “in time of peace
prepared for war,” Mun-jong, his son, succeeded to royal power. As
usual on the accession of a new sovereign, a Chinese ambassador was
despatched from Peking, which had been the Ming capital since 1614, to
Seoul, to confer the imperial patent of investiture. This dignitary, on
his return, wrote a book recounting his travels, under the title of
“Memorandum concerning the Affairs of Chō-sen.” According to this
writer, the military frontier of Corea at that time was at the Eastern
Mountain Barrier, a few miles northwest of the present Border Gate.
Palladius, the Russian writer, also states that, during the Ming
dynasty, three grades of fortresses were erected on the territory
between the Great Wall and the Yalu River, “to guard against the
attacks of the Coreans.”
It is more in accordance with the facts to suppose that the Chinese
erected these fortifications to guard against invasion from the
Manchius and other northern tribes that were ravaging Liao Tung, rather
than against the Coreans. These defences did not avail to keep back the
invasion which came a generation or two later, and “the Corean
frontier,” which the Chinese traveller, in 1450, found much further
west than even the present “wall of stakes,” shows that the neutral
territory was then already established, and larger than it now is. Of
this strip of rich forest and ginseng land, with many well-watered and
arable valleys, once cultivated and populous, but since the fifteenth
century desolate, we shall hear again. In Chinese atlases the space is
blank, with not one village marked where, until the removal by the
Chinese government of the inhabitants westward, there was a population
of 300,000 souls. The depopulation of this large area of fertile soil
was simply a Chinese measure of military necessity, which compelled her
friendly ally Chō-sen, for her own safety, to post sentinels as far
west of her boundary river as the Eastern Mountain Barrier, described
by the imperial envoy in 1450.
The century which saw America discovered in the west, was that of
Japan’s greatest activity on the sea. On every coast within their
reach, from Tartary to Tonquin, and from Luzon to Siam, these bold
marauders were known and feared. The Chinese learned to bitterly regret
the day when the magnetic needle, invented by themselves, got into the
hands of these daring islanders. The wounded eagle that felt the shaft,
which had been feathered from his own plumes, was not more to be pitied
than the Chinese people that saw the Japanese craft steering across the
Yellow Sea to ravage and ruin their cities, guided by the compass
bought in China. They not only harried the coasts, but went far up the
rivers. In 1523, they landed even at Ningpo, and in the fight the chief
mandarin of the city was killed.
Yet, with the exception of incursions of these pirates, Chō-sen enjoyed
the sweets of peace, and two centuries slipped away in Morning Calm.
The foreign vessels from Europe which first, in 1530, touched at the
province of Bungo, in Southern Japan, may possibly have visited some
part of the Corean shores. Between 1540 and 1546 four arrivals of
“black ships” from Portugal, are known to have called at points in
Japan. It was from these the Japanese learned how to make the gunpowder
and firearms which, before the close of the century, were to be used
with such deadly effect in Corea.
Now came back to Europe accounts of China and Japan—which were found to
be the old Kathay, and Zipangu of Polo and the Franciscans—and of
“Coria,” which Polo had barely mentioned. It was from the Portuguese,
that Europe first learned of this middle land between the mighty domain
of the Mings, and the empire in the sea. Stirred by the spirit of
adventure and enterprise, and unwilling that the Iberian peninsulars
should gain all the glory, an English “Society for the Discovery of
Unknown Lands” was formed in 1555. A voyage was made as far as Novaia
Zemlia and Weigatz, but neither Corea nor Cathay was reached. Other
attempts to find a northeast passage to India failed, and Asia remained
uncircumnavigated until our own and Nordenskjöld’s day. The other
attempts to discover a northwest passage to China around the imaginary
cape, in which North America was supposed to terminate, and through the
equally fictitious straits of Anian, resulted in the discoveries of the
Cabots, and of Hudson and Frobisher—of the American continent from the
Hudson River to Greenland, but the way to China lay still around
Africa.
From Japan, the only possibility of danger during these two centuries
was likely to come. In the north, west, and south, on the main land,
hung the banners of the Ming emperors of China, and, as the tribute
enforced was very light, the protection of her great neighbor was worth
to Chō-sen far more than the presents she gave. From China there was
nothing to fear.
At first the new dynasty sent ships, embassies, and presents regularly
to Japan, which were duly received, yet not at the mikado’s palace in
Kiōto, but at the shō-gun’s court at Kamakura, twelve miles from the
site of the modern Japanese capital, Tōkiō. But as the Ashikaga family
became effeminate in life, their power waned, and rival chiefs started
up all over the country. Clan fights and chronic intestine war became
the rule in Japan. Only small areas of territory were governed from
Kamakura, while the mikado became the tool and prey of rival daimiōs.
One of these petty rulers held Tsushima, and traded at a settlement on
the Corean coast called Fusan, by means of which some intercourse was
kept up between the two countries. The Japanese government had always
made use of Tsushima in its communications with the Coreans, and the
agency at Fusan was composed almost exclusively of retainers of the
feudal lord of this island. The journey by land and sea from Seoul to
Kamakura, often consumed two or three months, and with civil wars
inland and piracy on the water, intercourse between the two countries
became less and less. The last embassy from Seoul was sent in 1460, but
after that, owing to continued intestine war, the absence of the
Coreans was not noticed by the Ashikagas, and as the Tsushima men
purposely kept their customers ignorant of the weakness of their rulers
at Kamakura and Kiōto, lest the ancient vassals should cease to fear
their old master, the Coreans remained in profound ignorance of the
real state of affairs in Japan. As they were never summoned, so they
never came. Giving themselves no further anxiety concerning the matter,
they rejoiced that such disagreeable duties were no longer incumbent
upon them. It is even said in Corean histories that their government
took the offensive, and under the reign of the king Chung-jong
(1506–1544) captured Tsushima and several other Japanese islands,
formerly tributary to Corea. Whatever fraction of truth there may be in
this assertion, it is certain that Japan afterward took ample revenge
on the score both of neglect and of reprisal.
So, under the idea that peace was to last forever, and the morning calm
never to know an evening storm, the nation relaxed all vigilance.
Expecting no danger from the east, the military resources were
neglected, the army was disorganized, and the castles were allowed to
dilapidate into ruin. The moats filled and became shallow ditches,
choked with vegetation, the walls and ramparts crumbled piecemeal, and
the barracks stood roofless. As peace wore sweeter charms, and as war
seemed less and less probable, so did all soldierly duties become more
and more irksome. The militia system was changed for the worse. The
enrolled men, instead of being called out for muster at assigned camps,
and trained to field duty and the actual evolutions of war, were
allowed to assemble at local meetings to perform only holiday
movements. The muster rolls were full of thousands of names, but off
paper the army of Corea was a phantom. The people, dismissing all
thought of possibility of war, gave themselves no concern, leaving the
matter to the army officials, who drew pay as though in actual war.
They, in turn, devoted themselves to dissipation, carousing, and
sensual indulgence. It was while the country was in such a condition
that the summons of Japan’s greatest conqueror came to them and the
Coreans learned, for the first time, of the fall of Ashikaga, and the
temper of their new master.