Authors: Samuel Hawley
That was the end of the Battle of Pyongyang. Li Rusong sounded the gong signaling a withdrawal and returned with his men to their camp north of the city to pass the night, leaving a guard of mainly Korean troops behind to watch over the Japanese holed up in their fort. Li had breached the walls as planned, but had sustained heavy losses in doing so, and still had not defeated the enemy within. On the contrary, with the Japanese now cornered and their firepower concentrated, it would take the sacrifice of hundreds if not thousands more Chinese and Korean attackers to complete the job and snuff them out. Anxious to avoid such a costly second round, Li sent a message to his opponent Konishi Yukinaga, offering him the chance to evacuate the city without a fight. “My army is quite sufficient to annihilate you to the last man,” he wrote. “But I do not wish to kill so many. I will therefore leave a way open for you to withdraw. Take it, and leave at once.”
It was an offer the pragmatic Konishi could not refuse. The first day’s fighting had cost him as many as twenty-three hundred casualties, a loss his already depleted numbers could not bear. A large portion of his supplies had also been captured. When the Chinese and the Koreans attacked again, he and his men might be able to hold out for a morning, a day, perhaps two or three. But no amount of courage could resist the onslaught of fifty thousand men. Ultimately the Japanese defenses would fall and, as Li had said, everyone would be killed. Konishi thus wrote back to the Ming commander, “We will withdraw. See that our way is not blocked.” Li agreed, and issued orders to the Koreans to let the Japanese army leave the city unmolested. The evacuation took place later that night, Konishi’s men silently filing out of Pyongyang through its southern gate, crossing the frozen Taedong River and marching south on the road to Seoul.
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“Wounded men were abandoned,” samurai chroni
cler Yoshino Jingozaemon writes, “while those who were not wounded but simply exhausted crawled almost prostrate along the road.”
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The retaking of
Pyongyang was bittersweet for the Koreans. They had reclaimed their city as intended, but the victory had not really been their own: with the arrival of Ming commander Li Rusong and his army, native troops under Yi Il and Kim Ung-so had been reduced to mere helpers. Li also was clearly not committed to destroying the Japanese invaders, but was intent only on driving them away from China and back toward the south. His decision to allow Konishi and his men to leave Pyongyang without a fight must have frustrated the Koreans immensely, for they were thirsting for revenge for what the Japanese had done. There was even talk that Li had accepted a bribe from Konishi in exchange for allowing him and his men to retreat.
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The inevitably bad conduct of the Ming troops was also becoming an aggravation. In the Battle of Pyongyang the Chinese made little dis
tinction between Japanese soldiers and Korean civilians when it came to killing “enemies” and claiming their heads—just as Li Rusong had warned King Sonjo would be the case. News of these abuses found its way to Beijing and resulted in the sending of an official to Korea to investigate. Nothing came of it, however, for in the end the outraged Koreans declined to press the matter for fear of offending Commander in Chief Li.
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This Ming official sent to
Korea was also charged with looking into the suspiciously high enemy casualty figures that Li and his civilian superior, Song Yingchang, had reported to Beijing. According to Song’s report, the Japanese lost 16,047 men in the fighting, plus 10,000 others who burned to death in the fires that scorched the city, plus numerous others who were taken captive. Enemy losses were so extreme, Song bragged, that scarcely a tenth of the troops defending the city were able to escape.
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As with the accusations of civilian killings, nothing came of the charges of exaggeration leveled against Li, although had the Ming official bothered to check with the Koreans he would have found that there had been no more than 15,000 Japanese stationed at Pyongyang, and that their losses may have been as low as 1,285.
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This episode is but one of many examples of how the Korean historical record of the Imjin War is decidedly more accurate and more reliable than the records kept by the Ming Chinese. The Chinese were prone to exaggeration in ways that the Koreans were not, primarily because they had so much to prove. Their country, after all, was the Middle Kingdom, the most important nation in the world as they saw it, and as such could not afford to be seen as weak in any way. So we read of the emperor threatening to send a million-man army against the Japanese, when in fact the empire had only forty thousand-odd troops to spare. And so we find Ming commanders inflating victories at times to staggering proportions, for it was an easy step from exaggeration for the good of the nation to exaggeration for personal honors and rewards.
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It took Konishi Yukinaga and his first contingent nine terrible days to retreat from
Pyongyang to Seoul. After an exhausting day’s march they arrived at the first fort on the road to the south only to find it abandoned; the garrison commander had assumed they had been destroyed and had already withdrawn his force. And so Konishi’s men were forced to keep moving, without food or rest or a fire for warmth. The Koreans urged Li Rusong to lead his army in an immediate pursuit to cut them down before they reached the safety of the capital. The Ming general demurred. If the Koreans were so eager to attack, he said, echoing Shen Weijing’s earlier comment made to Yun Gun-su, they were welcome to do so on their own. In the end neither of the allies made a move to pursue and Konishi and his men were allowed to straggle back to Seoul unmolested, evacuating all remaining garrisons en route. They arrived on February 17, exhausted, starving, and suffering horribly from frostbite. According to Yoshino Jingozaemon, “The only clothes they had were the garments worn under their armour, and even men who were normally gallant resembled scarecrows on the mountains and fields because of their fatigue, and were indistinguishable from the dead.”
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While it would seem that Li Rusong was not overly eager to do battle with the Japanese, this was not the only reason why he was slow to pursue them after their withdrawal from
Pyongyang. A more important consideration was the matter of supplies: food for his tens of thousands of horses and more than forty thousand men. The supplies that the Chinese had brought with them, coupled with the stocks that the Koreans had provided them in the far north, had got the Ming army as far as Pyongyang. But these were now nearly exhausted; more would have to be arranged before any further advance could be made. Li Rusong thus held his army in place for five days after the Battle of Pyongyang, giving National High Commissioner Yu Song-nyong, the Korean official charged with overseeing military affairs, time to race ahead to arrange the necessary food stores and horse fodder along the main road to Seoul. During these frantic days Yu was at times just a few hours behind the retreating Japanese, slogging through muddy roads churned up by the passage of their horses and men. Once again the official secured all that was needed and the great Ming army was able to resume its advance.
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As Li Rusong led his army south from
Pyongyang he was pleased to find that the Japanese had evacuated all their garrisons along the road to Seoul. When he reached Kaesong, the main city and strongest fortification on the way to the capital, and found it too abandoned, the Ming commander began to feel very confident indeed, for it seemed he now had the Japanese well and truly on the run. His army marched into the city on February 19, the division under his younger brother, Li Rubo, leading the way through the gates. A halt was made here for a few days to rest the men, with the Koreans once again raising a chorus of protests for them to press on. Then the march was resumed to the Imjin River. After crossing this obstacle, the Ming and Korean allies established their camp at Paju, forty-five kilometers north of Seoul.
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*
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By this time the order to fall back to
Seoul had reached second contingent leader Kato Kiyomasa at Anbyon on the border of the remote northeastern province of Hamgyong. Kato, in his own mind the most daring and successful of all the daimyo commanders in Korea, was not eager to comply, for it meant abandoning all he thought he had achieved in Hamgyong to support his less able comrades in the south. The local situation, however, was not as rosy as Kato claimed. By the beginning of 1593 the citizens of Hamgyong, who had been so compliant the previous year, had become unruly and ungovernable, with guerrilla attacks increasingly common. There was also the Chinese army to consider. The farther south it advanced, first to Pyongyang, then to Kaesong, and then across the Imjin River toward Seoul, the greater the danger became that Kato and his men would be cut off in the north.
News of this looming peril was brought to Kato by an envoy sent from Pyongyang by Ming commander Li Rusong, together with an order that he surrender with all his troops. But Kato was not the surren
dering type. By way of an answer he had one of his Korean captives, a young woman reputed to be the most beautiful in the kingdom, tied to a tree, and then with the Ming envoy looking on he impaled her with a spear. With this demonstration of Kato’s determination in hand, the Ming envoy turned about and headed west to make his report. Kato and Nabeshima Naoshige, meanwhile, began the long march to Seoul. They left Anbyon in a rainstorm on February 22, the Korean princes Sunhwa and Imhae in tow.
The journey must have been hard. The second contingent had more than two hundred kilometers of rugged mountain wilderness to cross in the freezing cold, and were harried along the way by bands of guerrillas. No major engagements took place, but the constant strain must have deprived Kato’s men of sleep at night, and left them constantly fearful throughout the day of falling behind or being separated from the group. There were freezing streams to ford, and raging torrents that could only be traversed by cutting down trees and floating across, immersed in the ice-cold water. Despite these difficulties, Kato and Nabeshima managed to get their contingent south in good order, arriving at
Seoul on the first of March to bring the total forces congregated there to fifty-three thousand.
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While this consolidation in Seoul of Japanese forces was taking place, one unit stubbornly remained encamped fifteen kilometers north of the capital, its leader refusing to fall back within the safety of the city walls. He was Kobayakawa Takakage, the feisty old commander of the sixth contingent. Kobayakawa, it will be recalled, had spearheaded the failed attempt the previous year to subdue the southwestern
province of Cholla. After this, in October, he had been redeployed north to garrison the city of Kaesong, the main town on the road between Pyongyang and Seoul. With the tide of the invasion having turned by the beginning of 1593, Kobayakawa was ordered to evacuate Kaesong and pull his forces back to Seoul. He refused. He disagreed with the decision to retreat, viewing it as an indication of both lack of resolve and lack of experience among the leadership of the Korean campaign. During Konishi’s retreat from Pyongyang, the remaining garrisons along the main road to the capital were evacuated. But still Kobayakawa would not move. It finally took a personal visit from Otani Yoshitsugu, one of the three commissioners assigned to oversee operations in Korea, to persuade the commander to withdraw his forces, and then only after Otani agreed to grant Kobayakawa the lead in what was regarded as the coming decisive battle with the Chinese.
By this point the Chinese and Korean allied army was on the verge of entering
Kaesong. Kobayakawa managed to get his troops clear of the city only hours ahead of the advancing enemy and back across the Imjin River to the vicinity of Seoul. But even then he refused to enter the capital itself, choosing instead to camp alongside the main road fifteen kilometers to the north. As he explained to his annoyed colleagues who rode up to urge him to move his troops back, “You have always been under the great Taiko (Hideyoshi), who has been ever victorious. You know nothing of defeat, and consequently nothing of how to turn defeat into victory. But that’s an old experience with me; so leave this matter in my hands. There is a vast difference between our numbers and the enemy’s. Suppose we do win one or two battles; they will yet keep pestering us like so many swarms of flies. Unless it is a life-and-death fight, these fellows won’t be cowed. We’ve gone back far enough; now is the time to seek life in the midst of death.”
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And so Kobayakawa sat down to await the arrival of the Chinese, and with them what he believed would be the decisive battle, the
tennozan
, that would turn the course of the war back in their favor. The place he had chosen to camp was near the first rest station along the main road north from Seoul. It was called Pyokje.
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It was now February 27. At his camp at Paju just south of the
Imjin River, Commander in Chief Li Rusong’s confidence was running high. He had forced the Japanese out of Pyongyang, driven them back along the main road south, taken Kaesong without a fight—and now, he hoped, was on the verge of capturing Seoul. To begin the final phase of the advance on the capital, he sent a party of three thousand men on ahead under Ming commander Zha Dashou and Korean general Ko On-baek as the rest of his forces slowly geared up to follow. In the vicinity of the rest station at Pyokje, fifteen kilometers north of Seoul, Zha and Ko came upon a lightly armed unit of Japanese and gave them a severe mauling. Initial reports put the number of enemy heads taken at six hundred;
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the actual figure was probably much lower. Upon receiving word of this, Commander Li raced ahead of his main army with just one thousand cavalrymen, evidently expecting to win an easy victory against what he assumed was a weak and demoralized foe.