Authors: Samuel Hawley
The omens were against Li Rusong from the start. As he drew near Pyokje, where Zha and Ko had scored their victory, he was thrown from his horse and sustained a cut on his face. Things seemed to brighten shortly thereafter when his men spotted a small and apparently isolated party of Japanese soldiers watching them from the slopes of a nearby hill. Li divided his cavalry into two groups and charged to the attack, chasing the fleeing Japanese up the hill and down into a long, narrow valley beyond—and straight into the bulk of the Japanese army.
Kobayakawa Takakage himself stood at the fore. He commanded 20,000 men, drawn mostly from his sixth contingent, divided into four groups. They had recently been joined by four units of reinforcements sent north from
Seoul under the overall direction of young Ukita Hideie, bringing the total Japanese presence at Pyokje to 41,000 men.
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Li Rusong and his cavalry were at first hopelessly outnumbered and in desperate peril. Li himself was very nearly killed when one of Koba
yakawa’s officers closed with him, but was spared at the last moment when one of his commanders sacrificed his life to save him.
Before Commander Li’s force could be totally annihilated, General Yang Yuan hurried to the rescue with the main body of the Ming army, bringing the Chinese forces to 20,000 men. The fighting now took on epic proportions, a total of 61,000 combatants crowding the narrow valley, the Japanese unable to put their muskets to good use in the great push and shove, the Ming cavalry for their part bogged down by mud and deprived of space, forced to dismount and fight on foot. The out
come of the battle was thus determined mainly by swords in hand-to-hand combat, the short, straight, double-edged stabbing weapons of the Chinese against the gently curving, single-edged Japanese katana, sharp enough to cut through bone. The battle raged from ten o’clock in the morning till noon, until the superior numbers and weapons of the Japanese forced Li Rusong and his army to begin to fall back. The fighting continued up the pass on the road north to Paju, the Japanese making better use of their musket squads now, the Chinese leaving a trail of dead bodies behind. Finally, with the onset of darkness, Kobayakawa ceased his pursuit and led his men back to Seoul, reportedly returning with 6,000 Ming heads.
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Li Rusong downplayed the disaster at Pyokje in his subsequent report to the Koreans, leaving them with the impression that only a few hundred men had been lost. The true figure was much higher, although perhaps not as high as the Japanese claimed. In any case the debacle took all the fight out of Li and his generals. They had now had a good taste of combat against the Japanese, fighting them behind walls at
Pyongyang and on open ground at Pyokje, and wanted nothing more to do with them. The Koreans, led by High Commissioner Yu Song-nyong, urged Li to press on with his southern advance and try again to retake Seoul. Li refused. It was not that he was discouraged by recent setbacks, he explained. The problem was the weather. With the rains having left the ground too muddy for battle, it would be better to fall back and rest his men and wait for conditions to improve before attempting any further advance. He accordingly withdrew with his army first to the Imjin, then back across the river to Kaesong.
In his report to Beijing Li made it clear that he had no intention of attacking the Japanese in Seoul, no matter how dry the ground or how rested his men. There were more than 200,000 enemy troops in the capital, he claimed, far too many for his meager forces to defeat. (The actual figure was between fifty and sixty thousand.) The terrain in
Korea would remain too wet for fighting throughout the summer season. An epidemic was sweeping through his ranks. There was dissension among his officers. And Li himself was sick and no longer fit to command, due perhaps to the fall he had taken from his horse. It would be best, he concluded, if someone were appointed to replace him.
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In the days that followed, additional reasons presented themselves to Li Rusong that served only to firm his resolve not to stay and fight. First, the Japanese had burned the grass off most of the fields in the vicinity of
Seoul, leaving the Ming cavalry when they arrived with no fodder for their horses. The situation was so critical that ten thousand horses died within just a few days, worn out from the journey south and the fighting, and now with no pastures in which to graze and recover their strength. Then word arrived that Kato Kiyomasa was marching toward Pyongyang from his area of operations in the northeast. This was not true. Kato was making straight for Seoul. The false report nevertheless provided Li, whether he believed it or not, with an excuse to retreat all the way back to Pyongyang, ostensibly to protect the city from Japanese counterattack, and so prevent his army from being caught between Japanese forces to the north and the south.
The Koreans, having placed so much hope in
China’s “celestial army,” must have been beside themselves with frustration as they watched Li and his men turn away from Seoul and fall back to the north.
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Seoul
by this point was a smoldering ghost town, with scores of corpses lying unattended in the streets. In the early hours of February 24 local citizens had started a number of fires in an attempt to assist with what they hoped was their imminent liberation. The Japanese garrisoning the city had responded with terrible ferocity. Prior to marching north to join Kobayakawa, they massacred every Korean man they could lay their hands on to preempt further uprisings occurring while they were away. The only men reported to have escaped the slaughter were those who disguised themselves in women’s clothing. Large areas of the city were also burned, in part in retaliation, in part to deprive Chinese and Korean troops of cover when they eventually arrived and laid siege to the place. The city was therefore further depopulated as women and children, their homes destroyed, fled into the countryside in search of shelter.
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This was the city that the victors at Pyokje returned to, a once great capital of culture and refinement, now reduced to little more than a blackened walled enclosure. In such grim surroundings elation over the mauling they had given the Chinese could not have lasted long. The battle, after all, had cost them considerable casualties. It also promised to be only the first round in a long, drawn-out fight, for the Chinese would certainly be back. The question thus arose among the Japanese commanders: should they remain in the capital and await a second Chinese attack? Or should they retreat to the south? Kato Kiyomasa, just back from
Hamgyong Province, joined Kobayakawa Takakage in opposing the idea of retreat on principle alone; now was the time to stand and fight, they argued, and show the Ming what Japanese warriors were really made of. The pragmatic Konishi Yukinaga and others were less eager to risk their lives to prove such a point. The option of retreat, however, was by no means without risk, for it meant abandoning the relative safety of the walls of the capital and taking to the open road, where they would be vulnerable to attack.
Indeed, although the Ming army had retired to
Pyongyang, the Japanese in Seoul were now surrounded on all sides by native Korean troops, guerrillas, and monk-soldiers, and were thus unable to venture into the surrounding countryside in anything but large, well-armed groups. Several companies of Korean government soldiers still remained to the north, forces under Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won at the Imjin River, General Yi Bin at Paju, and Generals Ko On-baek and Yi Si-on at Haeyu Pass.
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Twenty kilometers to the west at Chasong, a force of one thousand monk-soldiers attacked a Japanese unit and, at a cost of nearly half their number, succeeded in driving them back within the city walls. Two thousand monks under Yujong achieved similar results ten kilometers to the northeast at Surak-san, driving the Japanese garri
son there back into Seoul and claiming the mountain for themselves. A third contingent of six hundred monks made an attack at Ichon in the southeast, again suffering heavy losses, but again driving the Japanese back into the capital.
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And at Haengju to the west lay the biggest thorn of all: twenty-three hundred Koreans under Cholla Province Army Commander Kwon Yul, holed up in a wooden stockade on a bluff overlooking the
Han River.
Kwon Yul was a fifty-five-year-old civil servant of middling rank from a family of note in
Kyongsang Province. Before the war he had served, on Yu Song-nyong’s recommendation, as magistrate of Uiju on Korea’s border with China, and later as magistrate of Kwangju in the southwestern province of Cholla. Immediately following Hideyoshi’s invasion he raised troops in the Kwangju region and led them north in a failed attempt to halt the Japanese advance before it reached Seoul. He then returned south and participated in the defense of Cholla Province, which the sixth contingent of the Japanese army under Kobayakawa Takakage was threatening to overrun. Kwon distinguished himself by defeating Japanese units in two engagements, the Battles of Ungchi and Ichi, in the second week of August. Recognizing his ability, the government appointed him army commander of Cholla Province in the following month.
By this time Kwon had come to the conclusion that the Japanese were too skilled in warfare to be defeated on open ground, and that the Koreans should therefore fall back on their traditional strength of fighting from behind walls.
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He would make his first attempt at this in October of 1592 from a base at Toksan, a mountain redoubt two days’ march south of the capital, overlooking the main road from Pusan to Seoul. From an ancient Paekche dynasty fortress that they strengthened and enlarged, Kwon and his men attacked enemy foraging parties and small units passing along the road and generally proved troublesome enough that the Japanese high command in
Seoul sent a company south to besiege the fortress. The effort, we are told, was soon abandoned. According to one report, Kwon fooled the Japanese into giving up and returning to Seoul by having a horse rubbed down with rice grains until its coat sparkled in the sun. To the Japanese watching in the distance it appeared that the animal had just been washed, a sign that the Koreans within had ample stores of water to withstand a lengthy siege.
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Early in 1593 Kwon Yul led his men farther north in preparation for the anticipated allied attack on
Seoul. Incorporating a unit of monk-soldiers under the priest Choyong into his ranks, he set to work strengthening a dilapidated fortress on a hill outside the village of Haengju on the north bank of the Han River ten kilometers west of the capital. It was a highly defensible position, protected at its rear by a steep drop-off down to the Han. If an attack came, it would have to be made uphill and from the north, straight into the Koreans’ concentrated fire.
With the retreat of the Ming army, Kwon Yul’s fortress at Haengju emerged as the greatest immediate threat to the Japanese in
Seoul. On March 14 they decided to do something about it. Some hours before dawn, the west gate of the city was opened and a long line of troops filed out and turned toward Haengju, marching along the north bank of the Han to the accompaniment of drums and horns and gongs. The daimyo on horseback in the lead constituted an all-star cast from the Korean campaign. There was Konishi Yukinaga, leader of the first contingent that had spearheaded the invasion, recently back in Seoul after the retreat from Pyongyang. There were third contingent leader Kuroda Nagamasa, and Kobayakawa Takakage, hero of the Battle of Pyokje. There were Hideyoshi’s adopted son Ukita Hideie, the young supreme commander of all Japanese forces in Korea, and the veteran Ishida Mitsunari, one of the overseers sent from Nagoya to help him. Accompanying them were more than half the troops garrisoning Seoul, a total of thirty thousand men.
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The twenty-three hundred Korean troops and monk-soldiers within Haengju fortress, crowded together with thousands of civilians who had fled their villages to seek shelter within the walls, watched the noisy approach of this enemy multitude with growing trepidation. When the Japanese arrived at the base of their hill in the soft light of dawn, the Koreans observed that each soldier had a red-and-white banner affixed to his back, and that many wore masks carved with fierce depictions of animals and monsters and ghosts. Panic was now hovering just beneath the surface, held in check by the calm authority of Commander Kwon Yul. As the Japanese busied themselves below with their pre-battle preparations, he ordered his men to have a meal. There would be no telling when they would have a chance to eat again.
The battle began shortly after dawn. The Japanese, so numerous that they could not all rush at the ramparts at once, divided into groups and prepared to take turns in the assault. Their strength must have seemed overwhelming to the Koreans. For once, however, the muskets of the Japanese were of only limited use, for in having to fire uphill they were unable to effectively target the defenders holed up within. Their lead balls simply flew in an arc over the fort and into the Han River beyond. The advantage was with the Koreans, firing down upon the attacking Japanese with arrows and stones and anything else that came to hand. They had a number of gunpowder weapons as well, including several large chongtong cannons and a rank of
hwacha
(fire carts), box-shaped devices built onto wagons that fired up to one hundred gunpowder-propelled arrows in a single devastating barrage. Alongside these more traditional weapons was an oddity that employed a spinning wheel mechanism to hurl a fusillade of stones. It was called the
sucha sokpo
, the “water wheel rock cannon.”