Authors: Samuel Hawley
The Koreans therefore were not idle during the long break in the war. Their defensive preparations, however, came nowhere near what would be required to repel Hideyoshi’s second campaign. There was a good reason for this: the first invasion had devastated the southern half of the kingdom and effectively ruined the economy. With the popula
tion facing famine and starvation, the government in Seoul had had no choice but to focus its efforts on getting farmers back into the fields growing grain to feed the nation. Keeping the people fed and the kingdom alive was such an all-consuming task that there was little manpower or resources left over for making any sort of substantial military preparations. It was for this reason that the government had given up the idea of maintaining a large standing army. Apart from a few thousand professional soldiers stationed in and around the capital, Korea’s army was now composed of local militias, farmer soldiers who would be summoned from their fields only when it came time to fight. The navy, meanwhile, had of necessity gravitated toward a similar form of self-sufficiency. Soon after the cessation of hostilities in 1594, Supreme Naval Commander Yi Sun-sin had sent his sailors back to their homes on an alternating basis to work their fields and thus keep their families fed. The Korean fleet therefore contracted by half during the interwar years. That any sort of fleet existed at all in the south in early 1597 was a testament to the resourcefulness and determination of Yi Sun-sin himself. From 1593 until the end of 1596 Yi operated farms to grow food for his men and raised money through the production of salt to pay for the maintenance of his fleet, all with only the most meager government support.
Indeed, the government was able to undertake some of its most significant defensive work, the construction and strengthening of fortresses in the south, only because it cost the nation so little. A good deal of this work was completed by monks, criticized from the earliest days of the Choson dynasty as being leeches on society, and persecuted so vigorously that they were no longer even officially recognized as monks. The government was able to put several thousand members of this underclass to work on projects throughout the kingdom by dangling the prospect of rewards and honors for their leaders, official recognition of its two main sects, and certification of monkhood to any monk vol
unteering for one year of service in the construction brigades. These concessions cost Seoul almost nothing. The government was for the most part offering to return to the Buddhists some of the things it had taken away from them over the previous two hundred years. As it turned out, moreover, the monks received even less than that. When settling its accounts in the wake of the war, the government was stingy in the rewards and honors it bestowed, and imposed so many restrictions on certification of monkhood that few could make the grade.
[628]
The devastation
Korea had suffered during Hideyoshi’s first invasion was undoubtedly the most significant reason why it was unable to do more to strengthen its defenses. But it was not the only reason. When the Korean government asked for and received military aid from China at the beginning of the war, it gave up some of its independence and in turn some of its ability to defend itself, if only in its own mind. Now, on the eve of Hideyoshi’s second campaign, the option of calling for Ming intervention had come to replace national preparedness as the main plank in Korea’s defense policy. Seoul now regarded the Chinese army as its ultimate weapon of deterrence. For King Sonjo and his ministers, the guarded confidence they felt in being able once again to summon this force overshadowed any defense preparations they may have been able to make on their own. While they certainly did make an effort to build walls, organize militias, and strengthen mountain fortresses, therefore, had they not possessed this China option they probably could have done more. Indeed, when it became clear toward the end of 1596 that the Japanese intended to resume their offensive, one of the first things the Korean government did was to send a succession of representatives to Beijing with memorials requesting military aid.
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* *
It took a week for reports of the return to
Korea of large numbers of Japanese troops to reach Seoul. Among the communications was the letter from Hideyoshi that Kato Kiyomasa had dispatched to the capital from the peninsula’s south shore. The Border Defense Council (
bibyonsa
) refused to receive it; they did not wish to appear to be negotiating with the enemy without prior approval from Beijing.
[629]
Fearing that the enemy would again make a lightning advance toward the capital as they had in 1592, Kwon Yul, hero of the Battle of Haengju and now commander in chief of
Korea’s armed forces, proceeded to Choryong (Bird Pass) in the Sobaek mountains, the most defensible point on the central road to Seoul. In 1592 this gap had been left unguarded. The Koreans did not wish to see this mistake made again. Kwon had the fortifications along the pass strengthened and stationed a sizable body of men there to guard them. It was a wise move, but unfortunately futile: Choryong Pass, so important in 1592, would play no significant part in the battles to come.
In
Seoul, meanwhile, another memorial requesting military aid was hastily drawn up and dispatched to Beijing, together with reports on the latest developments in the south. The Ming government received it in a much different mood than it had King Sonjo’s first pleas for help back in 1592. To begin with, it was already angry at Hideyoshi for his unprecedented rejection of their offer of vassalage and his rude treatment of their envoys. The sentiment in Beijing was therefore overwhelmingly hawkish. The government had anticipated a renewal of Japanese aggression in Korea, moreover, and so preparations were already under way to dispatch a second expeditionary army eastward when King Sonjo’s latest memorial arrived. Xing Jie had been appointed to the position of general oversight of military affairs in the eastern regions, under which Korea was included. A strictly civilian official as was the custom, he would make his headquarters, “Army Gate,” initially in Liaodong Province. Yang Hao, a man with both military and civil experience, was appointed to serve beneath Xing as
Jingli Chaoxian junwu
, overall regulator of military affairs in Korea. In the coming campaign he would be the de facto supreme commander of all Ming forces sent to stop the Japanese. Beneath Yang Hao would come Ma Gui, the actual commander in chief of the Chinese expeditionary force, the same position held previously by Li Rusong. Finally, beneath Ma were the generals in charge of each of the army’s main divisions: Yang Yuan, Dong Yiyuan, and Liu Ting—the same “Big Sword” Liu who had seen action in Korea back in 1593.
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Appointing generals for service in
Korea was easy for Beijing. Finding soldiers for them to command was not. The first Korean campaign had put a severe strain on the treasury, leaving the empire with little cash to fund a large army, in particular the salaries that had to be paid to the mercenaries that it had come to rely so heavily on. The financial situation was so acute that the Wanli emperor momentarily had to suspend his usual hibernation from administrative duties to approve a request for a number of silver mines to be opened to replenish state coffers. When this endeavor failed to yield enough wealth, he gave his stamp to a series of increasingly onerous special taxes that soon had the provinces in an uproar.
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Nor was Korea Beijing’s only concern. It had other problems to deal with that necessi
tated a military presence elsewhere. Most important of these was the growing threat on the northeastern frontier, where a charismatic chief named Nurhaci had over the previous twenty years united all the Jurchen tribes of the region and amassed a highly disciplined army of between thirty and forty thousand cavalrymen and forty and fifty thousand infantry.
[632]
No fighting was currently taking place on this front. That would come later. The necessity of guarding
Liaodong Province’s eastern border from Nurhaci’s looming menace, however, made it impossible to do the most convenient thing and simply transfer the bulk of the Liaodong Army to Korea, it being the nearest army to that theater. The best that China could do was to dispatch immediately a token force from Liaodong and then mobilize additional troops from elsewhere in the empire, including regions as distant as Guangdong and Fujian Provinces on the south coast and Sichuan in the far west. It would therefore take several months for the Chinese to return in force to Korea. Yang Yuan, commanding the initial brigade from nearby Liaodong, would be the first to arrive in July of 1597; “Big Sword” Liu, stationed two thousand kilometers away in Sichuan, would be the last. (The Ming navy would also be ordered to Korea for the first time in the war, but it would not arrive until later in the year.)
Despite the difficulties it faced in raising troops to send to
Korea, the Ming government managed to scrape together a significantly larger force than it had in 1593. It did not approach the 100,000-man army Ming official Xing Jie had envisioned prior to the start of the campaign. But it came close. Accordingly to the Chinese historical record, initial mobilizations of army units yielded 38,000 troops. They would be joined over the coming months by approximately 16,000 additional troops from outlying regions of the empire. The naval units that eventually found their way to Korea added another 21,000 men. At the height of the second Korean campaign, therefore, Ming army and navy forces totaled approximately 75,000 men.
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General Yang Yuan, the first Ming commander to respond to
Korea’s call for help, crossed the Yalu River in late June at the head of three thousand Liaodong soldiers and immediately proceeded to Seoul. This was Yang’s second tour of duty in Korea; he had served as Left Division commander under Li Rusong in 1593. After a few days’ rest in the capital he was then seen off by the Koreans on his continuing journey to the south. King Sonjo himself presided over the pomp and ceremony, urging wine upon the general and presenting him with a gift as a sign of his kingdom’s gratitude. As they parted outside Seoul’s Great South Gate, Yang assured Sonjo that he was not afraid of the enemy. “If they come,” he said, “I will fight.”
[634]
With advance Ming forces now on their way to the front and others soon to arrive, the Korean government began to feel surer of itself in the face of the Japanese threat. This confidence is evident in a scolding letter that
Seoul now dispatched to Hideyoshi, just four days after General Yang left the capital. The Emperor of China, Hideyoshi was informed, was angry at his incomprehensible desire to engage in renewed aggression. Army and navy forces were thus being raised to strike him down. Japan could not hope to resist this force, for “compared to China your tiny country is like one small island among sixty-six. You have already been made a vassal king of China, so what you are now doing is unacceptable, and will be duly punished by the order of heaven. The earthquake that devastated your country last year was a sign of this celestial disapproval. Yet even though you were given such a clear sign, you still refuse to cease your aggression and lead a peaceful life. You are already sixty years old. How many more years do you think you have left?”
[635]
As this letter was being carried by messenger to
Pusan, General Yang Yuan proceeded with his three thousand men to the town of Namwon in southern Cholla Province, sixty kilometers from the coast. Namwon, overlooking the string of forts that the Japanese had maintained on Korea’s southeastern tip after retreating south in 1593, had served as a forward base for Chinese troops until their withdrawal in 1595. Now, with the Japanese reestablishing themselves in the south, it was to Namwon that Ming troops returned. If the Japanese attempted to advance toward the north, it would be here that the Chinese would block them.
General Yang reached Namwon toward the end of July and set up camp inside the town’s fortifications. Its walls and towers were strongly built and in good repair, and so he determined it to be a suitable base from which to take on the Japanese. This caused local officials and commanders some concern. In line with the new Korean commitment to defending mountain strongholds rather than trying to hold cities and towns, they urged Yang to move his forces to the unassailable fortress on nearby
Mt. Kyoryong. Yang brushed this advice aside. Instead he set his men to work strengthening the defenses of Namwon itself. He had the walls of the fortress heightened and a deep trench excavated all around the outside, at the bottom of which were laid felled trees with sharpened branches intact to make it more difficult to cross.
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Shortly after Yang Yuan reached Namwon, “Attacking General” Chen Yuzhong led an additional two thousand Ming troops south from
Seoul to the city of Chonju, fifty kilometers to the north of Yang’s advance base. Should the Japanese take or bypass Namwon, it would be Chen’s job to present them with a second line of resistance. He was to be aided in this by a Korean force camped nearby at Unbong under Kyongsang Army Commander Kim Ung-so.
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* *
While General Yang dug himself in at Namwon and General Chen at
Chonju, the Japanese were making preparations of their own. One of their foremost concerns was the Korean navy. This force had been instrumental in scuttling their first invasion by blocking the sea route north via the Yellow Sea, preventing the ferrying of men and supplies to the increasingly distant front. Hideyoshi’s commanders did not intend to let this happen again. For their land offensive to be successful, the Korean navy first would have to be destroyed.