Authors: Samuel Hawley
The first steps were taken to prepare for the coming war with
Japan in the months following the return to Seoul of the goodwill mission to Kyoto in 1591. Minister of the Left Yu Song-nyong would take a leading part in pushing for these defensive measures, breaking with the “there-will-be-no-war” line that was still being stubbornly adhered to by many of his fellow members of the Eastern faction when he realized the extent of the Japanese threat. At about this same time the Eastern faction itself split into two separate camps, the Northerners and the Southerners, over a difference of opinion regarding which of King Sonjo’s sons by his various concubines—he had none by his queen—should become his heir. As the leader of the Southerners, Yu Song-nyong won the trust of the king with his conciliatory approach to the matter of succession, and with his willingness to step beyond factional lines for the sake of the defense of the nation.
Among the measures taken to beef up
Korea’s defenses was the appointment of new governors to the southern provinces of Kyongsang-do, Cholla-do, and Chungchong-do, with orders to prepare their commands for war. This entailed in part restocking local arsenals and tightening up conscription. In Kyongsang, for example, the province where any Japanese attack was likely to occur, a drive was launched to put local farmers through six months of military training. Most able-bodied men found ways to avoid this service, however, likely by paying an exemption fee to corrupt military officials, leaving only teenagers, old men, and vagabonds in search of a meal to take the “required” training.
A building program was also launched to construct or extend fortifi
cations at ten key southern towns, again in Kyongsang Province: Yongchon, Chongdo, Samga, Taegu, Songju, Pusan, Tongnae, Chinju, Andong, and Sangju. The program was misguided, for it was based on the entirely wrong assumption that the Japanese were skilled in naval warfare but weak on land. It also focused on building large enclosures to accommodate as many people as possible, rather than the small, easily defendable mountain fortresses that had proven effective in the past. At Chinju on the southern coast, for example, the town’s small hilltop citadel was abandoned in favor of a sprawling fort on the river, encircled by walls so long that they would require a multitude of soldiers to defend them. While Kyongsang-do had become highly fortified by the start of 1592, therefore, and appeared ready for war, the question remained: could all those kilometers of walls be held?
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All these defensive preparations were met with stiff resistance from local populations and government officials. The additional burden of having to make weapons, build forts, and take military training—or more often pay a “fee” to get out of doing so—seemed to many like just another form of taxation, and an unjustifiable one too considering that the nation was currently at peace and that harvests had been poor throughout the previous several years. A good deal of the work that was planned was therefore never completed, and what was done was some
times shoddy. One fort that was built is said to have been only ten feet long, with a defensive trench around it so shallow that even a child could scramble across.
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The Koreans at this point were acquainted with the fo-lang-chi, the heavy, long-outdated muskets that had been used in
China for more than a hundred years. These were cumbersome and unreliable weapons, however, and consequently few were ever produced in Korea and they never saw much use. The altogether more serviceable arquebus, meanwhile, the lightweight musket then in common use in Japan, remained largely unknown. The only specimens in the country, those presented to the court by Tsushima daimyo So Yoshitoshi in 1590, were now packed away in a government warehouse in Seoul. Efforts to copy them would not be made until after the Japanese invasion began. In 1592 Korean soldiers were thus armed with essentially the same personal weapons that had been used by their ancestors for more than a thousand years: the double-edged sword, the bow, the spear, plus a handful of more exotic instruments such as maces, flails, tridents, and the distinctive half-moon spear, an enormous knife blade affixed to a long shaft. Of these the bow stands out as the quintessential Korean weapon. At less than one and a half meters long it was much shorter than a Japanese bow, but is said to have been capable of firing an arrow even farther, reportedly as much as 450 meters as opposed to 320. (The effective range in battle was of course much less.) This impressive range may have been due partly to its sturdy composite construction, but more likely to the use of the firing tube, a Korean innovation that allowed for the firing of a much shorter and hence lighter arrow that could travel greater distances. The Korean bow was difficult to string and fire, however, and like all bows required long years of training to master in addition to a good deal of muscular strength to use. Unlike the Japanese arquebus, therefore, it was of little use in the hands of untrained peasants, the sort of men then being conscripted into the Korean army in preparation for the coming war.
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While the Koreans may not have known much about the arquebus, they knew a great deal about cannons—more, in fact, than the Japanese did. They had learned how to make gunpowder from the Chinese in the fourteenth century,
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and subsequently combined this knowledge with their skill at casting temple bells to manufacture cannons that fired stone and iron balls and enormous arrows weighing up to thirty kilograms and as thick as a man’s arm. These weapons did not much resemble the smooth-barreled cannons on wheeled mounts later developed in
Europe, the handsome weapons that in modern times are typically seen on display outside museums and in public parks. Korean cannons in the late sixteenth century were ugly, crude cylinders of metal, reinforced all along the exterior by a series of thick iron bands, with one or two handles or rings welded to the top to facilitate transportation. Few came affixed to any sort of permanent mount. The barrel itself was generally manhandled into position where needed and set atop some sort of firing platform or wheeled carriage. Four major types of barrels were manufactured: the
chonja
(heaven), the
chija
(earth), the
hyonja
(black), and the
hwangja
(yellow). They were named after the first four characters in the traditional student’s primer for learning Chinese characters, much as a series of items in the West might be identified as A, B, C, and D. The chonja was the largest cannon in the series. It was made of copper, weighed from 300 to 420 kilograms, had a caliber of twelve to seventeen centimeters, and a barrel approaching two meters in length. The bronze hwangja, the smallest gun in the series, weighed between sixty and eighty kilograms, had a caliber of six to seven centimeters, and was slightly over one meter long. The bronze chija and the iron hyonja fell somewhere in between. All four of these guns could lob stone or iron balls and giant arrows over a distance of 600 to 1,000 meters, although the useful aimed range was undoubtedly much less. They could also be packed with small stones or lead slugs and fired into enemy ranks as a crude form of grapeshot.
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Also in the Korean arsenal was a bell-shaped mortar called the
daewangu
(big mortar), a 300-kilogram bronze bowl from which a heavy stone ball could be blasted with considerable inaccuracy over a distance of 300 to 400 meters, or more usefully at point blank range to knock down walls. There was a smaller version as well known as the
chungwangu
(medium mortar). The
hwacha
, or fire wagon, resembled a rectangular rack of pigeon holes mounted on a two-wheeled cart. Each hole held one gunpowder-propelled arrow, up to one hundred in all. When the contraption was ignited, it sent its entire load of arrows hurtling toward the enemy on one deadly fusillade. Finally, there was the recently developed
pigyok chinchollae
(flying-striking-earthquake-heaven-thunder), sometimes rendered as “the flying thunderbolt,” a hollow iron ball packed with gunpowder and equipped with a fuse. This ingenious device was fired from a cannon over the walls of enemy fortifications and into the midst of the defenders clustered within, where, if all went well, it exploded.
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On the eve of the Japanese invasion the Koreans therefore knew little about muskets, but possessed a great deal of knowledge about other types of weapons employing gunpowder, particularly cannons. These weapons would do them little good on land in the coming conflict. At sea, however, it would be a different story.
One aspect of Korea’s defenses that seems to have been given no attention on the eve of the Imjin War was its beacon-fire system, first built during the Koryo dynasty to provide a fast means of communication between the frontier and the capital. It consisted of 696 hilltop fire beacons laid out in lines stretching from Seoul to the northeastern and northwestern frontier with Manchuria, and down to the southeastern and southwestern coast. Each was manned around the clock, ready to relay any signal from hilltop to hilltop, using smoke by day and fire by night. Exposing the light of the fire once in the direction of the next beacon in the chain conveyed the message that all was quiet, two flashes meant that enemy forces had been sighted, three that they were approaching, four that they had crossed into the country, and five that fighting had commenced. Removing the cover entirely from the beacon to send a continuous light meant that reinforcements should be sent at once. It is said that a signal could be relayed in this manner from the most distant region in Hamgyong Province in the far northeast all the way to Nam Mountain in Seoul, a distant of more than 600 kilometers over rugged mountain terrain, in less than four hours. While this phenomenal time was admittedly achieved in a prearranged test, it was certainly true that, by using beacon fires, an early warning could be flashed from the northern frontier or southern provinces to Seoul in something under a day.
This was assuming, of course, that every beacon was manned all along the route. In fact they rarely were. An inspection of the north
western fire line in the fifteenth century revealed numerous interruptions, with many beacons neglected and others totally unmanned. The reason was that no one wanted to do the work; tending the beacons atop lonely, windswept mountains was understandably a despised duty, which locals did their utmost to avoid. So difficult was it to coax locals into service that the task frequently was assigned to political exiles, whose desire to serve the government that had exiled them must have been less than ardent. Little seems to have changed by the start of the 1590s. With Korea’s ingenious early warning system effectively useless for want of manpower, the fastest means of communication between the provinces and Seoul remained the horse and rider.
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Recognizing the need for strong leadership in the field, particularly in the vulnerable southern provinces of Kyongsang and Cholla, the Korean government appointed a number of new commanders beginning in 1591. The initiative began with King Sonjo soliciting recommenda
tions of promising officers worthy of promotion to the rank of commander. A few of the resulting appointments were fortuitous and served to strengthen the nation’s defenses. Many others did not.
A good example of an ill-conceived appointment is what occurred with regard to the Kyongsang Right Army. The army’s present commander, Cho Tae-gon, was regarded in
Seoul as too old and sick to be of any use in the event of war. Yu Song-nyong suggested that one of the nation’s top generals, Yi Il, be sent south immediately to replace this man, so that he would have time to acquaint himself with his new command and prepare for the coming conflict. The Minister of War responded with the usual line that Yi Il, being a general, had to remain in Seoul. He would be sent south only if and when a war broke out. “If this were an incident of one morning,” argued the exasperated Yu, “in the final analysis it would be unsuitable to send Il. Others would be sent. But when morning becomes a whole day, it perhaps would be advantageous to make proper preparations in anticipation of the event. But on the contrary, visiting generals gallop down to the provinces on the spur of the moment. They are acquainted neither with conditions in the provinces where they are sent nor the valor or timidity of the soldiers there. They shun the arts of war. We will certainly regret this later.”
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The Minister of War would not relent. The post of Kyongsang Right Army commander instead went to none other than Kim Song-il, the former vice-ambassador of the Korean mission to
Kyoto, the man who had said there would be no war and that there was nothing at all to worry about. During the previous months he had continued to insist that fortress construction in Kyongsang-do be halted and had written a series of reports outlining how the province could be better administered to ease local dissatisfaction. In the end King Sonjo personally ordered the outspoken official south to that province, perhaps as something of a rebuke. The Border Defense Council expressed misgivings about the appointment, but it went ahead regardless. Kim, a civil official with no military experience, thus took command of one of the nation’s key military posts just one month before the start of the war that he said would never come. As the subsequent course of events would show, he had the necessary courage to die for his country. But he lacked the skills to defend it.
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On a more positive note, a forty-six-year-old career soldier was promoted on Yu Song-nyong’s recommendation from relative obscurity to the command of the Left Navy of Cholla Province. His name was Yi Sun-sin. His unexpected advancement to high command would prove to be one of the more fortuitous appointments made in the months leading up to the Imjin War.