The Imjin War (40 page)

The commitment of large numbers of Ming troops to the war effort in early 1593 would add tremendously to the impetus that would ulti
mately drive Hideyoshi’s forces back toward Pusan. It must be stressed, however, that China’s coming contribution to the effort would not make the difference between victory and defeat, but would rather hasten what was already an inevitable outcome. By the end of 1592 the Koreans had overcome their initial shock at being invaded, and had pieced together a haphazard campaign of grassroots resistance that would ultimately make their country ungovernable for the Japanese. Hideyoshi’s armies were by no means beaten by December of 1592. But attrition was starting to eat away at their strength. Of the initial force of 158,800 that had landed on Korean soil in the late spring and early summer of 1592, fully one-third would soon be gone, casualties of battle, victims of hunger and exhaustion and disease. Korean losses would be many times higher. But they were willing to bear the sacrifice. The Japanese were not. It would probably have taken several years of guerrilla warfare before the Koreans wore the Japanese down to the point where they were forced to leave the peninsula altogether. But this they would have done—with or without the help of the Ming Chinese.

In August of 1592 a unit of Japanese soldiers began advancing on the walled town of Chonju, the administrative center of the southwestern province of Cholla, with the intention of occupying the place and laying claim to the region. The provincial governor, Yi Kwang, was desperate to save the town, and joined with Yi Chong-nan, an elderly official formerly in charge of the city’s repository of historical records, in mounting a defense. A force of civilian volunteers was first sent ahead to stop the Japanese at a mountain pass leading to the town. The defenders erected a wooden barrier across the pass and fought bravely to hold it, but the Japanese were too strong for them and they were pushed aside. In front of Chonju, meanwhile, Yi Kwang and Yi Chong-nan had organized the local citizenry in erecting banners by day and torches by night, so that when the Japanese approached they would be tricked into thinking that a formidable force was encamped there and determined to defend the town. The ruse worked. When the Japanese drew near Chonju and spied the torches and banners in the distance, they assumed that a large Korean army was waiting to meet them, and prudently decided to withdraw and leave Chonju for another day.
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The defense of
Chonju was in itself a relatively insignificant affair involving few defenders and little loss of life, a minor episode lost amid the greater conflicts and conflagrations of the opening months of the Imjin War. For the Koreans, however, what happened outside the walls of that town in the summer of 1592 had a deep and enduring significance. For in turning back the Japanese, Yi Kwang, Yi Chong-nan, and the citizens of Chonju had not just saved their town, they had saved the very history of Korea.

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There was not a people anywhere in the pre-modern world with a greater regard for history than the Koreans. From as early as the Silla dynasty virtually every event occurring during the reign of each king, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, was painstakingly recorded and preserved so that future generations could benefit from the lessons learned. The Koreans were of course greatly influenced in this by the Chinese, who were themselves great historians. By the second century of the Choson dynasty, however,
Korea’s record keepers had come to surpass their Middle Kingdom counterparts. In terms of completeness, accuracy, and objectivity, the multi-volume
sillok
(“true record” or “annals”) that was compiled for the reign of each Choson king marked a pinnacle in the recording of history in the world up to that time.

The sources used in the compilation of the true record of the Choson dynasty were many and varied. First and most important were the records kept by the court historians. These included the transcripts for every royal audience as written down by the two officials who sat to the left and right of the king, one charged with recording his words, the other his actions. The court historians also kept dia
ries of all the happenings in the capital and elsewhere that they deemed important. Other valuable sources included the records kept by the various ministries of government, the diaries and journals of key ministers, and the tens of thousands of dispatches that arrived in Seoul from officials posted throughout the land.

In keeping a record of the affairs of state, great emphasis was placed on objectivity. In this respect the Koreans seem to have been superior to the Ming Chinese. The court historians in particular were expected to write with impeccable honesty. Even the king was not to be exempt from their critical gaze. In 1456, for example, King Sejo himself enjoined his court historians to write about his reign warts and all. “What I do right and wrong,” he said, “all people see. It is not right that anything should be hid. The historical officers should record in detail what actually happens.” In 1508 King Chungjong similarly instructed the historians to record “exactly what the King did, whether it be right or wrong, without hesitation.”
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Indeed, the fact that Korean accounts of the Imjin War are so replete with tales of cowardly commanders and self-serving officials is not due to some sort of national weakness of character on the part of the Koreans. It is because the Koreans of the Choson dynasty kept such a candid record of their times, recording for posterity their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

It was only after the death of a monarch that all the historically significant documents produced during his reign were collected and compiled into the multi-volume set of books that have survived to the present day. After the requisite six months of mourning had elapsed, a board of editors was appointed, a group of some thirty men assisted by a small army of clerks, and the daunting work begun of plowing through stacks of court histories, private diaries, ministry journals, and government dispatches. It was a task that commonly took several years. When the true record was finally complete, no one was allowed to read it, for the unvarnished truth the document was supposed to contain would undoubtedly have angered some, which in turn would have intimidated the historians and editors involved and compromised their integrity. Once again even the king was not exempt from this injunction. In 1431 King Sejong asked to see the completed annals for his father’s reign, but his request was denied. As the Minister of the Right explained, the purpose of the annals was to provide an unbiased account of the affairs of state for future generations. “Even though Your Majesty should read them,” the minister cautioned, “you probably should not wish to alter them. And if you see them, other kings after you will wish to do likewise. The historical officers will thus be afraid to write accurately, thinking they might be dishonestly accused.”
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After the collected annals were complete, the document was sent to the printer and four copies made. During the early years of the dynasty these were written by hand. Beginning in the late fifteen century the four copies were printed by means of recently invented movable type, still a laborious process involving the use of thousands of individual Chinese characters. The four copies were then placed in storage and the original manuscript destroyed by immersing it in water to wash away the ink.

With the four sets of the true record complete, the challenge was to ensure their safekeeping throughout the centuries to come. During the Choson dynasty the Koreans adopted the expedient of storing the four sets of books in four separate repositories scattered across the kingdom: one set was kept at the royal palace in Seoul; the other three were sent with great pomp and ceremony to storage facilities in the south-central cities of Chungju, Songju, and Chonju. In this way the survival of Korea’s historical record was assured, for any given calamity could claim only one set of books. In 1538, for example, the caretakers of the repository at Songju burnt the wooden building to the ground, and with it all the books in their charge, while trying to smoke out pigeons that had nested under the eaves. The conflagration caused considerable inconvenience and expense, but no irreparable harm was done, for three other sets of the true record remained, the ones in Chungju, Chonju, and Seoul. Within five years the destroyed building had been rebuilt, a replacement set of the record printed, and the Songju repository restored.

This system of separate repositories worked very well over the cen
turies in safeguarding Korea’s historical record. If a fire claimed one of the repositories, the other three would remain, and thus a new copy could be made to replace the one that had been lost. Only the most bizarre coincidence or act of God could claim two repositories, but even then two others would remain. As for losing three repositories, that was frankly inconceivable. How could disaster strike simultaneously in three separate parts of the country?

During the Japanese invasion it did. In June of 1592 Konishi Yuki
naga’s first contingent crushed the army of Sin Ip at Chungju and occupied the city. In the reprisals that followed, the first repository went up in smoke. Four days later, in the looting and arson that followed King Sonjo’s evacuation of Seoul, Kyongbok Palace was burned to the ground by the local citizenry, and with it the attached second repository and its precious store of books. In their march north from Pusan to Seoul, Kuroda Nagamasa and the men of his third contingent captured and burned the city of Songju. And so the third repository was lost.

By July of 1592 the inconceivable had thus happened: three of the four sets of
Korea’s historical record had been destroyed. The Japanese move against Chonju in the southwestern province of Cholla, home of the fourth and final repository, consequently was regarded as a profound threat not just to the town itself, but to the nation as a whole. If Chonju fell and the books stored there were stolen or destroyed, the loss would be irreplaceable. The city therefore could not be allowed to fall. And in the end it did not, thanks to the successful defense organized by Cholla governor Yi Kwang and former guardian of the books Yi Chong-nan.

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Following the withdrawal of the Japanese from the vicinity of
Chonju, Yi Chong-nan and the officials responsible for the town’s repository realized that the hundreds of volumes in their charge would have to be moved to a safer place, far from the possibility of enemy attack. A caravan of horses thus set out from the city, bearing 577 precious books. The first leg of the journey took them south to a remote hermitage in the nearby Naejang (Inner Sanctum) Mountains. The repository, together with its sacred portrait of King Taejo, the Choson dynasty’s founder, remained here for the next ten months, carefully guarded, periodically aired and dried in the sun, and attended to with ceremony and reverence. Then in 1593 it was decided that even this remote mountain retreat was situated too far south for safety. And so the books and the sacred portrait were moved again, first overland to Asan on the Yellow Sea coast, then farther north by ship to Haeju, then to fortified Kanghwa Island at the mouth of the Han River. Finally, toward the end of the war, they were transferred yet again, this time to a temple on Mt. Myohyang, in a cliff-top aerie accessible only by ladder. Here, at last, the true record of the kings of Korea was deemed to be safe.
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Being victorious in battle is easy,

but preserving the results of victory is difficult.
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Wu Tzu Ping Fa
(Master Wu’s Art of War)

4th century
B.C.

By the beginning of 1593 the Japanese army in Korea was beginning to falter. In the southeastern province of Kyongsang, the city of Kyongju had been retaken by the Koreans, a full-scale assault on Chinju had been repelled with heavy losses, and attacks by guerrilla bands had rendered large parts of the region unsafe for Japanese troops. To the west, Kobayakawa Takakage’s attempts to subdue Cholla had failed, and that province remained almost entirely in Korean hands. In the central-eastern province of Kangwon, Japanese troops had abandoned most of that region in order to protect the central road leading from Pusan to Seoul, which was coming under increasing attack. Kuroda Nagamasa’s men in the central-northern province of Hwanghae were doing likewise, leaving most of the province to the guerrillas in order to safeguard the vital road leading north from Seoul, the only means of supply for the forward units occupying Pyongyang. Even in Hamgyong Province, which Kato Kiyomasa had by his own reckoning subdued so completely the previous fall, civilian resistance was becoming a serious threat. The Japanese headquarters at Kilchu came under attack, co-opted Korean administrators were assassinated or driven into the hills by guerrillas, and the province’s nascent government of occupation was reduced to a shambles.

In addition to having to deal with growing local resistance, the Japanese invasion army was also having difficulty obtaining enough to eat. For the past seven months they had relied for their subsistence mainly on supplies purchased or seized from the Koreans, the previous year’s harvest. By the beginning of 1593 these stores were nearly all used up and not much had been grown in the meantime, for throughout the country farmers had fled their homes and abandoned their fields. What little remained in the countryside that was edible was also becoming more difficult to get, for foraging parties were now prime targets for guerrilla attacks. Nor was much being sent across from
Japan, due in large measure to the reticence of the Japanese navy to risk an encounter with the Korean battleships under Commander Yi Sun-sin. Of those meager supplies that did arrive from home, moreover, almost nothing could be transported north to the units needing them most. By the beginning of 1593 this lack of supplies had become so critical for the Japanese that some units were facing the prospect of starvation.

The Japanese now were caught in a dilemma. They did not have enough fighting men in
Korea to beat down local resistance and secure their grasp on the peninsula. But they could not ship additional units over from Kyushu because they did not have enough food to support them. Indeed, they did not have enough to feed the men already there.

Of all the occupation forces scattered throughout
Korea, none was in worse shape than Konishi Yukinaga and the men of the first contingent encamped at Pyongyang. They had been stalled in the city for the past five months and had given up any thought of advancing farther north. They had also given up hope of ever receiving reinforcements and supplies by ship up the Taedong River from the sea, for as long as the Korean navy blocked access to the Yellow Sea a seaborne supply route would remain nothing but a dream. Indeed, the arrival of reinforcements now would have been a mixed blessing, for it would have meant more mouths to feed. Konishi and his men had secured a large amount of grain when they captured the city in July of 1592, but with fifteen thousand men to support this was eventually exhausted, and the army of occupation in Pyongyang was forced to rely on what meager supplies could be foraged from the vicinity—an increasingly dangerous undertaking—or carried north from Seoul on the backs of horses and men. With the harsh Korean winter now upon them, the men of the first contingent hunkered down in their frozen billets, grimly watching their numbers being whittled away by hunger, cold, exhaustion and disease, pining for the warm and hospitable shores of Kyushu which many now feared they would never see again.
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By the beginning of 1593, therefore, the Japanese army was being constricted from one end of the country to the other by Korean resis
tance and lack of food, forced out of outlying areas and back onto the central line of march that they had followed during their initial advance up the peninsula the previous year. Their point of farthest northern advance remained unchanged. To the south of this, however, all they really held was a narrow corridor of territory running from Pusan to Pyongyang, and even this was becoming difficult to protect. The Japanese had not yet lost a major land battle and had in almost every engagement inflicted far greater losses than anything they themselves had sustained. Their initially large numbers were limited, however, and in the vastness of Korea were being steadily whittled away. In a head count conducted later in the spring, it was discovered that Konishi Yukinaga’s spearhead first contingent, which had totaled 18,700 men at the start of the invasion, had only 6,626 able-bodied men left, a decline of sixty-five percent. Kato Kiyomasa’s 22,800-man second contingent was down to 13,980 men, a loss of thirty-nine percent. After half a year of attrition, the Japanese in Korea had scarcely 100,000 men all told.
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With the campaign to conquer Korea on the verge of collapse, the Japanese commanders in Seoul charged with overseeing operations on the peninsula dispatched a message to Kato Kiyomasa recalling him from the northeastern province of Hamgyong, saying that his men were urgently needed in the south. It is important to note that this message was sent to Kato before the Chinese entered the war in force (the only experience of Ming troops so far had been at the First Battle of Pyongyang, a resounding victory for the Japanese), an indication that Korean resistance was playing a major role in turning the tide of the invasion.
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This order undoubtedly caused Kato some anguish; of all the daimyo commanders serving in
Korea, he would be most consistent in opposing retreat. By the time he received it, however, the situation in the north had taken a drastic turn for the worse.

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On the far side of the Yellow Sea,
China was ready for war. Seaports were now closed all along the east coast to guard against Japanese attack. Foreigners everywhere were eyed with suspicion. And troops, thousands of them, were now amassed in Liaodong, the province nearest to Korea, awaiting orders to cross the Yalu River and attack the Japanese.

As was the custom with the Chinese, this expeditionary force gathered in Liaodong was under the supreme command of a civil administrator, Vice-Minister of War Song Yingchang. Song would not immediately cross into
Korea, however, or take part in any of the battles to come. This would be the job of Commander in Chief Li Rusong, an experienced general of distant Korean extraction who had served with distinction in the recently concluded Ordos Campaign on the empire’s northwest frontier, the army-mutiny-cum-Mongol-uprising that had been Beijing’s foremost concern throughout most of 1592.

Li’s army consisted of 35,000 fighting men divided into left, center, and right divisions. One of these divisions was under the command of Li’s younger brother, Li Rubo (a second of Li’s brothers and a cousin served on his staff); the other two divisions were led by Zhang Shijue and Yang Yuan. The bulk of this force was composed of men from
Liaodong Province, augmented by a contingent of three thousand from the east-coast province of Zhejiang. They were divided into cavalry and artillery units, and foot soldiers armed with spears and bows and arrows. Some wore coats of chain mail that were said to offer effective protection; many carried short, blunt swords that would be no match for the razor-sharp katana of the Japanese. They had few if any muskets, but did possess a large number of smallish cannon in the hands of the three thousand-man contingent from Zhejiang.
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Most of these weapons were probably of the fo-lang-chi variety, a small-caliber gun copied from Portuguese samples captured by the Chinese some decades before (hence the name, derived from
farangi
, the Chinese term for Europeans). An average-sized fo-lang-chi was between one and two meters long and fired a lead ball of no more than five centimeters in diameter, the ball being shoved down the barrel and a gunpowder cartridge being slotted into an opening at the rear. The Chinese expeditionary force may also have had larger cannons, but if so only a very few. The “generalissimo,” for example, which was commonly used to blast a mass of pebbles and iron scrap into the face of an attacking enemy, weighed up to six hundred kilograms and thus would have been a tremendous burden over the snowbound mountain passes between Liaodong and Korea.
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Like most Ming soldiers, Li Rusong’s expeditionary army was made up mainly of paid mercenaries, recruited from the ranks of outcasts, bandits, and peasants who had fallen on hard times. They cared little for patriotism; they fought for food, money, and the chance to loot. The only discipline they responded to was the threat of death at the hands of their commanders. Otherwise they tended to be riotous, totally without scruples, and at times more dangerous to friend than foe. This fact was nowhere better illustrated than in the Ming practice of taking heads. Throughout the sixteenth century the Chinese determined the success of a fighting man, from the lowest soldier to the highest commander, by the number of enemy heads he took: the more heads one could produce at the end of a battle, the greater the honors and rewards one stood to gain. Not surprisingly, this incentive as applied to the generally undis
ciplined, amoral ranks of the Chinese army led to abuses, with civilians, sometimes even women, being killed by the very soldiers sent to protect them so that their heads could be submitted for reward. If a head was too obviously that of a civilian, a bit of steaming or beating with a wet sandal usually disguised it enough. Even unit commanders at times participated in this fraud to increase their “head count” to the one hundred and twenty needed to win first-class battle merit.
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This, then, for good or ill, was the Ming force that was gathered in
Liaodong Province at the end of 1592, poised to march to Korea. It was ostensibly being sent in response to the Korean government’s repeated entreaties for help in beating back the Japanese. China’s main concern, however, did not lay with the survival of Korea, as much as it respected its loyal vassal to the east. Its number one objective was to safeguard its own borders. The two kingdoms would thus be at odds from the very start of their alliance against the Japanese, for the Chinese were not committed like the Koreans to annihilating the “robbers”; all Beijing really wanted was to push the invaders back toward the south. In the coming weeks and months, therefore, the Koreans were assured of receiving from China less than they bargained for in terms of military aid, and more in terms of trouble.

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The Japanese forces occupying
Pyongyang knew nothing of the large Ming army that was moving their way. By the beginning of 1593 Korean guerrilla activity had left them isolated within the walls of the city and had deprived them of the native spies who had previously provided so much useful information. As far as they knew, negotiations were still under way with the Chinese through Ming envoy Shen Weijing.

Shen, it will be remembered, had been dispatched by
Beijing in September of 1592 to parley with the Japanese. The talks were intended to buy the Chinese time enough to bring the Ordos Campaign to a conclusion and shift troops eastward into Liaodong. Shen himself was not apprised of this; he set out for Pyongyang in the belief that Beijing really did want him to return with the makings for a lasting peace. The ensuing talks were a mutually satisfactory parade of lies, with the Japanese asserting that all they wanted was friendly relations with China, and the cagey Shen reciprocating with assurances that Beijing would welcome them with open arms.

After arranging a fifty-day armistice, Shen returned to
China to find that no one was interested in a settlement. On the contrary, a large army had been amassed in Liaodong during his absence, and everyone seemed intent on war, not peace. After delivering his report, Shen was ordered to return south and tell the Japanese that there would be no more talking until they had withdrawn their forces all the way back to Pusan. Shen thus returned to Pyongyang with nothing whatsoever to offer the Japanese. He entered the city on December 29, 1592, more than a month past the expiration of the fifty-day armistice, and once again the two sides sat down to talk. Konishi began by questioning Shen about a rumor that he had returned to Korea with a great army in tow. Shen assured him that this was not true. There is no army, he said; I have come with an entourage of only fifteen men. With this matter out of the way, the two sides proceeded to see if they could find some common ground. And of course they could, for Konishi was eager for peace in almost any form, while Shen wanted to win the riches and royal title that Beijing had promised to whoever was able to restore peace in Korea. The settlement they reached was this: the Japanese would withdraw their forces from Pyongyang, but Beijing would first have to guarantee Japanese ships access to ports along China’s eastern coast.
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The Koreans found Shen Weijing far more secretive during his second visit to their country. He did not let them know much of the nature of his mission, and he kept his distance from government inter
preters, the only Koreans who understood the Chinese language he spoke. Board of Rites minister Yun Gun-su was one of the few officials who managed to extract any information from him of the talks that had taken place in Pyongyang. Yun was not happy with what he heard. When they had met previously, Yun reminded Shen, “I told you that if the Japanese returned the two princes and all other prisoners, together with all the land they have seized, then and only then can peace negotiations go ahead. If even one of these conditions is not met, however, there can be no peace.” Shen replied that it had not been possible to negotiate with Konishi for the return of the captive princes, Imhae and Sunhwa, as they were not under his jurisdiction, but rather were being held by Kato Kiyomasa. Konishi was responsible only for Pyongyang, and so a Japanese withdrawal from Pyongyang was all he could arrange. Yun Gun-su was not satisfied with this, and began pressing Shen to have the Ming army sent south to drive the Japanese out of Pyongyang. Shen explained that dispatching troops was entirely up to the supreme civil administrator, Song Yingchang. He himself had no say in the matter. “But Song will listen to you,” Yun continued to press. “Please urge him to send the army.”