The Imjin War (10 page)

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By the middle of the sixteenth century Choson
Korea had moved far beyond its anxiety-ridden early years, when its continued existence was by no means assured. It was still plagued occasionally by Jurchen raids in the north and by the odd pirate attack along its southern coast. But these were now aggravating annoyances, not fundamental threats. A navy existed to strike back at the pirates, army garrisons stood in readiness along the northern frontier, and behind them all stood the might of the Ming. Sixteenth-century Choson Korea, at least by its own reckoning, was established, secure, and safe.

It was also different. Choson
Korea was the only nation in the history of the world to adopt Neo-Confucianism as its official state ideology. Nowhere else were the writings of Chu Xi and his predecessors studied so deeply, debated so heatedly, and followed so exclusively. By the mid sixteenth century this fact had served to mold thinking and affect developments on the Korean Peninsula to a more profound degree than was the case even in China.

The first observable result of this was an ongoing attempt on the part of the country’s officialdom to suppress Buddhism. One of the distin
guishing features of Chu Xi Neo-Confucianism, as opposed to the original wisdom of Confucius himself, was that it went beyond expositions on self-cultivation and virtuous conduct and into fundamental metaphysical and spiritual discussions. It was thus regarded by Korea’s scholarly elite as encompassing all the wisdom that a human being required, rendering Buddhism obsolete. Beginning early in the dynasty, extraordinary attacks were launched against this competing ideology, pointing out its defects to highlight Neo-Confucianism’s strengths. “Those Buddhists,” ran one memorial to King Sejong in 1424,

what kind of people are they? As eldest sons they turn against their fathers; as husbands they oppose the Son of Heaven. They break off the relationship between father and son and destroy the obligation between ruler and subject. They regard the living together of man and woman as immoral and a man’s plowing and a woman’s weaving as useless. They abrogate the basis of reproduction and stop the sources of dress and food.

In the same memorial another writer observed that “beasts and birds that damage grain are certainly chased away because they harm the people. Yet even though beasts and birds eat the people’s food, they are nevertheless useful to the people. The Buddhists, however, sit around and eat, and there has not yet been a visible profit.”
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The kings of Choson got the message. Over the coming decades they instituted increasingly harsh measures to “chase the Buddhists away,” measures that went far beyond anything attempted in Ming China. Buddhist temples were ordered closed. The number of sects was severely limited. Religious buildings and images were destroyed. Property was appro
priated. Monks were forced to grow their hair and lead “productive” lives. It was mainly thanks to the efforts of a handful of devotees hidden away in remote mountain monasteries that Buddhism was able to survive at all in Korea into the modern age.

As Choson
Korea’s suppression of Buddhism went beyond anything seen in China, so too did its emphasis on moralistic righteousness. To enter and rise in government service, ambitious Korean males, like their Ming counterparts, had to acquire a Neo-Confucian education with a solid grounding in the classics, pass the government’s triennial examination, and remain highly virtuous and moral. Of these three steps the third was the trickiest. A single charge of impropriety could ruin a man’s career or derail it at the very start. Particular care had to be taken not to run afoul of the censorate, an overseeing body charged with criticizing public policy and scrutinizing the conduct of government officials, the yangban upper class, and even the king himself. One negative word from it and an official might find himself tossed out of office or up on charges for which the penalty could be death.

In the latter part of the fifteenth century this censorate came to be manned by a large number of young scholars of an extremely moral
istic, intolerant, and uncompromising bent. They were virulent in their criticisms of what they perceived as the shortcomings of others, particularly of the senior officials then dominating the reins of power. In 1498 these embattled officials struck back. Using as their weapon an obscure countercharge of slander against a long-dead king, they succeeded in having five of the censorate’s most prominent members put to death and two dozen others exiled or dismissed. This bloody backlash, however, did not have the intended effect. It lent the survivors within the censorate even greater moral authority, which they subsequently used to mount a counterattack. Other purges followed in 1504, 1519, and 1545, but they were of no real use. The censorate, originally intended as an instrument of moral oversight, emerged as a branch of government wielding a power all its own, while talk of morality and virtue became the language of politics, a sword of words used by ambitious men to strike out at their opponents.
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By the middle of the sixteenth century these developments, coupled with the increasing competition for a fixed number of government posts, had made the political arena a dangerous place. Even genuinely virtuous men had to watch their backs and count their friends. New
comers to government office consequently sought to align themselves with influential senior men for protection, usually someone from their own county or clan. Senior officials maintained followings of faithful juniors to back them in times of trouble and to lend a hand in attacks. The result, of course, was factions. The year of their appearance is usually given as 1575, when two clearly defined camps arose known as the “Easterners” and the “Westerners,” after the locations of the homes of their respective leaders, one in Seoul’s east end and the other in the west. Neither side promoted any particular ideology or point of view. Their struggle was of a more personal nature, each side striving to advance its own members in government service by discrediting its opponents or driving them out, typically in a war of words centered on some obscure point of ritual observance or moral nicety.

Figure 3: Korea, 1592

The career of Chong Chol, author of the poem “Song of Star Mountain” quoted at the beginning of Part One in this book, is a good example of what life was like for a government official in these politically tumultuous times. Born into the higher reaches of the upper class, Chong saw his elder brother killed and his father exiled in the purges of 1545—all before he was ten years old. He went on to achieve the top place in the civil service exam in 1561 and rose to high government office over the course of the next fifteen years. Then, in 1575, his career entered a permanently rocky stretch. As one of the more outspoken and intransigent leaders of the emerging Western faction, Chong became the target for many of the attacks launched by the competing Easterners and found it necessary to resign and retire to the countryside in 1578. He returned to office in 1580, but after just one year was impeached again for being too uncompromising. He came back for a three-year stretch in 1581, then was run out of office again, this time on charges of being too fond of wine. He managed to get reinstated yet again in 1589 during a period of supremacy of the Western faction and rose all the way to Minister of the Left in the State Council before being once again unseated in 1591. The bone of contention this time was which of the king’s sons should be named crown prince and heir. In a sly bit of backroom intrigue, Eastern faction head Yi San-hae encouraged Chong to recommend a son that they considered more worthy, but who was not the king’s first choice. Yi then dropped his support at the last minute and took a conciliatory stand, leaving Chong all alone in opposing the king. He was sent into exile again for that, this time into the desolate far north, leaving the Easterners behind in Seoul to reestablish themselves in power.
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It was during his various stints in the political wilderness that Chong Chol found the time to write the many poems for which he is now most famous. One theme he frequently returned to was the anguish and disillusionment he felt from his experience in government service:

Pine-tree rising beside the road,

what is it makes you stand there?

Relax for a little while

and stand down into the ditch:

Every rope-gird peasant that carries an axe

will want to cut you down.
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The year was now 1589. In Europe the Elizabethan navy under Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake had just defeated the armada of
Spain, signaling the decline of Spanish power and the beginning of the rise of England. Cervantes was in the prime of life. Peter Paul Rubens was learning to paint. John Donne was a teenager. Shakespeare and Galileo were twenty-five years old. John Calvin and Michelangelo were twenty-five years dead. The potato, introduced from South America, was becoming a staple. The smoking of tobacco was catching on. The spring-driven clock had just been invented, allowing for more accurate navigation at sea. The life insurance policy was five. Shorthand was four. The microscope was still being developed for its debut in the following year. And a fellow by the name of Bernard Palissy was condemned to the Bastille for suggesting that fossils were the remains of living things. He would die there.

On the other side of the world it was the year Wanli 11 in
China—the eleventh year of the reign of the Wanli emperor. Senior Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng had been dead for seven years and most of his reforms undone, returning the Celestial Empire to its former inefficient ways. Qi Jiguang, the Ming dynasty’s most successful general, the man who had quelled the wokou pirates on China’s eastern seaboard and kept the Mongols in check along her northern frontier, had died the year before, penniless and forgotten. The twenty-six-year-old Wanli emperor was into his recalcitrant stage, ignoring criticisms, shirking his duties, and amassing a personal fortune while his ministers fretted and fumed.

Japan
was just emerging from the throes of sengoku civil war under Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The “Bald Rat” had issued his “sword hunt” edict the year before, removing all weapons from the hands of farmers in preparation for the coming peace. His impressive castle at Osaka was newly completed after five years of labor involving thirty thousand men. Plans were being drawn up for a second castle far to the south at a place called Nagoya (modern-day Karatsu) on the island of Kyushu. Hideyoshi soon would be spending a great deal of time there.

And in
Korea a fox sat on the throne in Seoul’s Kyongbok Palace. The furry little creature had somehow found its way into the place and was discovered by horrified retainers actually sprawled on the royal seat. This was a very bad omen, for in Korea the fox was considered a sinister apparition, worse than a black cat in the West. Nor was this portent the only worrisome sign. Reports of strange occurrences throughout the kingdom had been accumulating for years, each laden with hidden meaning that seemed to point to some lurking evil or looming disaster. The Chongchon River had suddenly dried up and ceased to flow for many months. The planet Mars glowed blood-red in the night sky. Meteor showers blanketed Onsong in the far northeast. A flock of sparrows on Chiri Mountain in the south reportedly divided into two groups that fought each other until every bird was dead.
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What evil thing did these signs foretell? Some thought they warned of the rise of factions in Korean politics. King Sonjo’s dying prime minister had in fact warned him at the beginning of his reign in 1569 that “opposing factions will arise and that in their train great evils will follow.” In 1579, four years after the appearance of the Eastern and Western camps, Sonjo was again warned that “All the people have taken sides in this senseless war and even a man be a criminal there are plenty who will defend him. This means the ultimate destruction of the kingdom, and the King should act as a peacemaker between the factions.”
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King Sonjo agreed. He understood, apparently better than most of his ministers, that when men allowed factional interests to guide their actions, the kingdom as a whole was poorly served. Unfortunately, there was not a great deal he could do. Unlike the emperors of Ming China and Japan, he did not claim any sort of divine authority. This had been the case with the kings of Korea for centuries past, resulting in a particularly turbulent history in which the throne was fought over, manipulated, attacked, and usurped. Korean kings, in short, sat on a tenuous perch, and Sonjo was no exception. He did not wield enough real power or instill enough fear to command an end to factional strife; such an order might well have led to his being usurped and exiled to some remote place. No, the best he could do was to suggest and cajole, and to lead by good example.