Authors: Samuel Hawley
By the time the smoke had cleared toward the end of the day, the Japanese fleet was gone. It had been a clear victory for the allies. According to the report on the battle that government minister Yi Dok-hyong sent to Seoul, about two hundred of Shimazu’s ships had been destroyed and an “uncountable number” of his men either killed or drowned.
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Chen Lin would put the numbers at two hundred Japanese ships destroyed, one hundred ships captured, and five hundred heads taken, adding that “we don’t know how many of their men drowned as their bodies have not yet risen to the surface.”
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While the Battle of Noryang was being waged at the eastern end of
Kwangyang Bay, Konishi Yukinaga’s forces were evacuating their fortress at Waegyo to the west and boarding their ships to return to Japan. No allied vessels were in the vicinity to stop them. When he received intelligence of this, General Liu Ting advanced from his headquarters at Sunchon and took possession of Waegyo without a fight. General Dong Yiyuan did the same at the abandoned Japanese stronghold at Sachon. Konishi’s fleet in the meantime made its way east to Pusan, the hundred surviving ships of Shimazu Yoshihiro following behind. They reached Pusan on December 21 and immediately began organizing the final evacuation.
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At the opposite end of the Japanese fortress chain, Kato Kiyomasa was calmly evacuating his Tosan fortress, free from any pressure from nearby armies or enemy fleets. He set fire to his camps and the last of his stores on December 15, on the eve of the Battle of Noryang, then boarded his ships and put out to sea. When General Ma Gui received word of this, he raced down from his headquarters near Kyongju to pick off any stragglers and take possession of the fort. All he found was a message left behind by Kato. The Koreans and Chinese, it said, should not think that he had evacuated his fortress out of weakness; if Kato had chosen to do so he could have stayed and held Tosan for as long as he liked. Nor should they assume that
Japan had been weakened by the death of Hideyoshi. The government remained stable, and the nation remained strong. Japan could in fact return and attack Korea any time it wished. It would therefore be in Korea’s best interests to approach Japan to arrange a lasting peace.
Kato, consistently one of the most loyal and unrelenting of Hideyoshi’s daimyo commanders, thus left Korea conceding nothing to the allies. Japan remained an indomitable force, he in effect warned. Make an effort to appease us, or you might suffer more of the same.
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With the Japanese now gone from Waegyo, Sachon, and Tosan, there was talk among the Chinese of marching on the exposed heart of the enemy perimeter at
Pusan. By the time any serious movement was made in this direction, however, the Japanese there had evacuated as well. The last of their ships set sail for home on December 24, 1598,
bringing to an end the Imjin War.
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For the rest of December Chen Lin and Yi Si-on, former Chungchong Army commander and now Yi Sun-sin’s replacement as head of the Korean fleet, roamed the waters off the southeast coast of Korea, running down the odd Japanese ship that had been left behind, routing stragglers out of caves, and laying claim to abandoned stores. Chen would return to
China to receive the highest military honors to be bestowed on any Ming commander who served in the Korean campaign. He died in June of 1607.
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The body of Yi Sun-sin, meanwhile, was transported back to the Korean navy’s base on
Kogum Island, then carried in procession to the Yi family home at Asan to be buried on a hill near the tomb of the commander’s father, Yi Chong. As the coffin slowly proceeded along the icy roads on its journey north, weeping people gathered along the route to bow their heads and walk behind. The Korean government, which had remained suspicious of Yi until the very end, only now became generous with its recognition and rewards, bestowing on him the posthumous rank of Minister of the Right and ordering a shrine built at his former base at Yosu on the south coast, with sacrifices to be offered to the commander’s spirit in the spring and autumn of every year. Additional honors would follow as the years passed and Yi’s reputation grew, notably the bestowal in 1643 of the title
Chungmugong
, “Minister of Loyal Valor,” an honorific that is now commonly used by Koreans to refer to the revered commander. Numerous other shrines and monuments would also be erected at places like Hansan-do, Kogum-do, Koje-do, and Asan, mostly by local authorities and grateful citizens who felt that Yi Sun-sin had saved their land.
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Prime Minister Yu Song-nyong in the meantime was out of a job, the victim of the factional strife that came to be waged with renewed intensity as the war was winding down. The contending factions had been on the scene all along. The Japanese invasion had simply forced them to paper over their rifts and set aside their grudges while they dealt with the bigger issue of national survival. At the start of the war Yu’s Eastern faction held the preponderance of power. The opposing West
erners bided their time for the next six years, working with the Easterners for the good of the nation as they quietly secured for themselves the lofty posts of Minister of the Left (Yi Won-ik) and Minister of the Right (Yi Dok-hyong).
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Finally, in November of 1598, with the Japanese on the verge of withdrawing from
Korea, they made a move to unseat Yu Song-nyong. After a barrage of criticisms leveled at the elder statesman by anti-Eastern censors, an attack that King Sonjo tried to fend off, Yu was dismissed from office, and Yi Won-ik took his place.
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It was during his retirement that Yu Song-nyong penned his impor
tant work
Chingbirok
, “A Record of Reprimands and Admonitions,” an account of the war coupled with a warning to future generations of what had gone wrong. In the preface he used a quote from the
Shih-ching
, the Chinese “Book of Odes,” to explain his reason for writing the book: “I have been chastised, and I will guard against future calamities.”
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Yu lived in quiet retirement until his death in 1607 at the age of sixty-five.
* * *
Antiwar investigator Ding Yingtai, who had caused King Sonjo and his government such anguish with his charges of disloyalty to the Son of Heaven, remained in
Korea throughout the winter of 1598–99, roaming about in search of improprieties to support his sagging case. He was a spent force, with no supporters in either Seoul or Beijing now that the war was won. He was finally recalled to China on March 16, 1599 to face charges of fabricating lies to attack innocent people. According to one Korean account, evidently based more on wishful thinking than fact, he was subsequently executed by having his body cut in two at the waist.
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Chinese sources state merely that Ding was ordered to return to his hometown in central
China, where he spent the rest of his life in obscurity, working as a teacher.
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Two months after Ding’s departure, the long-awaited edict from the Wanli emperor arrived in
Seoul, exonerating King Sonjo of the despised official’s charges. The weight of false accusation that had so oppressed Sonjo for more than a year was thus finally removed, and his relationship with Beijing restored to its former cordial balance. Sonjo would remain on the throne until his death in 1608.
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Ming general “Big Sword” Liu Ting returned to
China in early 1599 to resume his command in Sichuan Province, keeping the tribes there under control and the western borders of the empire safe. In the bestowal of military honors later that year he received second honors after Admiral Chen Lin for his service in Korea. Liu continued to serve his country into his late sixties. He died in combat fighting the Manchus in 1619. The details of his death remain obscure. Chinese sources recorded that Liu was killed in action, the Manchus claimed that he was captured and put to death, while the Koreans asserted that he committed suicide by blowing himself up with a charge of gunpowder.
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Supreme Commander Yang Hao, who had been sacked for the contro
versial losses he had suffered at Tosan, remained in retirement for a decade before being restored to official favor and recognized for his service in Korea. His return to command lasted until 1619, when he led his army into an even greater defeat in the campaign to deal with the Manchu threat. The official estimate put Yang’s losses at a staggering 45,890 men. This time he was arrested and thrown in prison. Nine years later he was put to death.
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In 1599, the year following his death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was enshrined as a
kami
, a native deity, to be worshiped according to the rituals of Japan’s ancient Shinto religion. It was common practice in Japan for local communities to worship their own
ujigami
, or group deity, that watched over them. The great clans had personal ujigami as well. The formerly powerful Ashikaga and Genji houses, for example, worshiped the kami Hachiman. The house of Toyotomi, conversely, had none; it had only recently been established and thus lacked any sort of pedigree and the kami that came with it. Hideyoshi therefore decided to become a kami himself after his death, a deity with the power to protect his vulnerable son and family group and influence events in their favor. The instructions he left behind were followed to the letter, and he was accordingly enshrined as the deity Toyokuni daimyojin.
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He is still worshipped in
Kyoto to this day, at Toyokuni Shrine, next to the National Museum. During the festival that is held here every year on September 18, the anniversary of the taiko’s death, a tea ceremony is performed, and a cup is offered to his spirit.
The gate standing in front of Toyokuni Shrine, moved here in 1880 when the site was restored, is one of the few original structures from Hide
yoshi’s once magnificent Fushimi Castle that can still be seen today. (The buildings on the site where Fushimi once stood just outside Kyoto are reconstructions dating from 1964.) Another surviving remnant are the floorboards from the castle’s main hall. On September 8, 1600, as Fushimi was about to fall to rival forces during the struggle for power that followed Hideyoshi’s death, 380 samurai loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu committed mass suicide inside this building, covering the floor with their blood. When Tokugawa subsequently ordered Fushimi razed, these stained boards were carefully preserved, and were later distributed for use in seven Kyoto-area temples. The best place to see them today is at Genkoan Temple just north of the city center. If you look up you can see the stains on the boards of the ceiling, darkened with age but still clear after more than four hundred years. Here and there hand- and footprints can be discerned in the blood.
COMING HOME AFTER A WAR
I couldn’t bear the home-sickness,
So I sped my donkey a thousand leagues.
Spring is in its prime as of old,
But I find no man in the streets.
The storm has swept over the whole land,
Even the sun and moon are eclipsed.
All the prosperity that grew here is gone:
It is a chaos as at the world’s dawn
.
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Chang Hyon-gwang (1554–1637)
Hideyoshi’s armies returned to Japan at the end of 1598 with little to show for their nearly seven years of war. True, they had taken many Korean slaves who were subsequently put to work in the fields back home or sold for cash in the markets. They had captured Korean potters with advanced skills who would enrich Japan’s own ceramics industry. They had brought back a large supply of hand-crafted movable type, invented by the Koreans two centuries before, a prerequisite for the brief efflorescence in Japan’s own publishing industry that would follow.
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Thousands of valuable books were looted and hauled back to
Japan, and with them all the knowledge they contained; many would be incorporated into a library founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu. Paintings, scrolls, and religious artifacts were also taken, even stone pagodas and unusual trees. It was in reference to these captured items that the Japanese would subsequently come up with such names for Hideyoshi’s invasion of the mainland as the War of Abduction, the Pottery War, and the War of Celadon and Metal Type.
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All these cultural enrich
ments, however, were poor compensation for the tens of thousands of Japanese troops who lost their lives in the conflict (a reasonable estimate is seventy to eighty thousand men, some killed in the fighting, most the victims of hardship and disease), and the untold wealth and resources that had been sucked out of Japan’s economy to support the entire affair. Nothing less than the conquering of vast new lands could have justified such a tremendous expense, and that Hideyoshi’s armies had failed to do. So it was that the Japanese came up with yet another epitaph for Hideyoshi’s ambitious war to seize all of Asia: ryoto-jabi, the “Dragon-head Snake-tail Campaign,” the war that began with grand designs that petered out to nothing.
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For
Korea the Imjin War had been a great deal more. It remains to this day the worst calamity that has ever befallen the nation, to be rivaled only by the Korean War of 1950–53 for devastation and loss of life. The number of Koreans killed outright in Hideyoshi’s invasion of 1592–98, the soldiers who lost their lives in battle and the civilians who were slaughtered, easily ran into the hundreds of thousands. When one adds to this the people driven from their homes who subsequently died of starvation and disease, plus those taken as slaves to Japan never to return, the figure rises possibly as high as two million—approximately twenty percent of the kingdom’s population.
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The scorched-earth policy pursued by the Japanese in the latter part of the war, coupled with the flight of farmers from their fields, addi
tionally dealt a serious blow to Korea’s economy, a blow that fell most heavily on the breadbasket provinces of Kyongsang and Cholla in the south. In the survey of 1601, the first conducted in the wake of the war, it was found that only 300,000 kyol of cultivated, tax-paying land remained in the kingdom, down from the 1.5–1.7 million kyol assessed just prior to the war in 1592.
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This loss of four-fifth’s of Korea’s farm
land meant not only a tremendous drop in the amount of food being produced, but also a huge reduction in the amount of taxes the government could collect, taxes that were now desperately needed to fund the nation’s rebuilding. It was a blow from which Choson Korea would never fully recover. One hundred years after the war, the amount of land under cultivation still had not returned to prewar levels. Two hundred and fifty years after the war, Kyongbok Palace in Seoul, the residence of the king and thus the center of the kingdom, still remained a burned-out shell. The government lacked the funds to rebuild it.
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In addition to all this death and destruction, the Imjin War plunged
Korea into a period of profound social and political upheaval. To begin with, a significant portion of Korea’s slave population—according to census data a third of all Koreans were slaves at this time
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—was able to assume commoner status, for with numerous slave registers having been destroyed during the course of the war, either by the Japanese or by opportunistic slaves, slave ownership was consequently impossible to prove. This did not result, however, in any significant decline in the size of
Korea’s slave population; that would not occur for another hundred years, culminating with the abolition of slavery in 1894. What likely occurred was that the slaves who escaped to commoner status during the confusion of the war either slipped back into slavery at a later date, or were replaced by commoners who became slaves themselves. This latter group would have done so of their own volition as a way to escape starvation and an inability to pay the heavy taxes that the government was forced to impose, signing away their freedom and the freedom of their descendants to the most influential local family that would take them. For a typical peasant this entailed entering into a sharecropping arrangement, scratching out a meager livelihood on a small patch of ground on which he paid a fixed rent.
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Changes were also taking place at the opposite end of the social scale. The government, its tax revenues down to a mere fraction of prewar levels, was forced to sell upper-class yangban status and official titles to the highest bidder to raise desperately needed funds. The number of yangban in
Korea accordingly increased, and with it the number of individuals eligible to serve as public officials. This in turn intensified the factional fighting that resumed once peace was restored, for there were now more men competing for a fixed number of government posts. The same political infighting that had so divided the Korean government prior to the Japanese invasion would thus reach a peak of intensity in the years 1600–1650 and would continue until the closing days of the Choson dynasty, leaving the government embroiled in an endless series of obscure political wranglings, blind to the changes taking place in the outside world.
*
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While Hideyoshi’s invasion of
Korea and attempt to conquer China failed to achieve even one of its objectives, it contributed to the downfall of the Ming dynasty in ways the taiko never could have foreseen. In sending armies to Korea to block Hideyoshi’s advance, Ming China, which had been in poor financial shape to begin with, was forced to expend more manpower and wealth than it could possibly afford, ultimately weakening itself to the point where it would be unable to respond effectively to threats arising elsewhere. It has been estimated that ten million taels—368,550 kilograms—of silver were spent to send the first expeditionary army to Korea in 1593–95, and another ten million in the second campaign of 1597–98, a total of 737,100 kilograms of the precious coin.
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Another estimate puts the total cost of the war for the Ming at twenty-six million taels, just under a thousand metric tons of silver.
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Such a tremendous outflow of wealth had drained the imperial treasury by the end of the war, a fact that would have a profound impact on
China’s ability to defend itself, for by the late sixteenth century its armies were composed largely of mercenary soldiers, men who served only when they received payment every month. No silver, therefore, meant no national defense.
The situation was exacerbated by the generally weak state of the Chinese empire at the start of the war, a weakness manifested notably in its inability to maintain an army large enough to meet its consider
able needs. With a limited number of troops available, the only way Beijing could respond to Korea’s call for help was to strip forces from other parts of the empire, weakening its defenses in one place to build them up in another. This shifting about of China’s armed forces would have the greatest impact on the northeast frontier, where the Middle Kingdom ran into Manchuria. It had traditionally been a trouble spot that required careful guarding, for mounted Jurchen tribesmen—they would later call themselves “Manchus”—were in the habit of launching raids across the border wherever counterbalancing forces were not stationed to hold them back. By the last decade of the sixteenth century these scattered tribes had become a serious threat, for they were now united under a chieftain named Nurhaci who was intent on creating a state of his own. Beijing saw this threat emerging. With its armed forces tied up in Korea, however, there was little it could do but try to co-opt Nurhaci with court titles and opportunities for tribute trade. The Jurchen warrior remained obliging for a time, consolidating his position and building up his strength as the Chinese looked helplessly on, knowing what was coming but lacking the resources to stop it.
The inevitable finally happened in 1616: Nurhaci broke with
Beijing and established an independent empire of his own, one that covered all of Manchuria right up to China’s northeast border. He called his new state Chin, “Gold,” after the regime that had ruled that area in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before succumbing to the Mongols of Kublai Khan. Then he began to spread his reach, sending his armies into Chinese territory to seize cities near the border, forcing Beijing to respond. Straining its resources to the limit, the Ming government scraped together an expeditionary force of 90,000 men, which it sent north in 1619 under reinstated Commander in Chief Yang Hao in the hopes of crushing Nurhaci and reasserting its control. As a tributary state, Korea was expected to contribute to the enterprise. Seoul obliged with a 10,000-man army, but it did so with reservations, for it was clear that the Ming dynasty now was weak and might not emerge the victor. The two Korean commanders appointed to lead the force (one of them was Kim Ung-so, who had figured prominently in the war with Japan) were accordingly ordered to hold their men back when the fighting began, and to surrender if things went badly—which they did. The final confrontation in April of 1619 was a disaster for the Chinese. As the Koreans delayed their advance as per orders from Seoul, Nurhaci’s massed cavalry took on the four separate Ming columns one by one, killing a total of 46,000 Chinese troops and two commanding generals, including “Big Sword” Liu Ting. A third general who escaped the initial carnage died in a later engagement. The fourth general, Li Rubo—the same Li who had served in Korea back in 1593 in the expeditionary force commanded by his elder brother Li Rusong—committed suicide when charges were subsequently leveled against him. Commander in Chief Yang Hao, who was held responsible for the debacle, languished in prison for nine years before being put to death.
With the Ming now in peril, Korea’s king Kwanghae, who had suc
ceeded his deceased father Sonjo in 1608, together with the support of an Eastern splinter faction called the Great Northerners, tried to shift the government from its traditional pro-Ming stance to one of nonalignment, balancing his kingdom between the sinking Ming and the rising Chin. The effort would prove Kwanghae’s undoing. The Western faction, which had been biding its time in the political wilderness, seized on the issue and used it to oust Kwanghae from the throne in 1623, to be replaced by his nephew, crowned King Injo, and a return to unwavering Ming support. Behind the self-serving political motives involved, the move was a testament to the loyalty the Koreans felt toward the Ming. Many of the men in power sincerely believed that Korea owed Beijing an undying debt for the aid it had provided in the war with Japan. Unfortunately for them, it also gave the state of Chin, now ruled by Nurhaci’s son Abuhai, a reason to invade the peninsula, first in 1627 and then again in 1636 when the Koreans continued to resist. When King Injo finally surrendered and the Manchu troops went home, they left behind a large stone tablet on the banks of the Han River, an inscription carved in Manchu on one side and Chinese characters on the other: “God gives frost as well as dew; behold his severity as well as his loving kindness.”
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As a sign of their supplication, the Koreans were required to send two of their princes as captives to the Manchu court, make regular tribute payments, and provide troops for the ongoing cam
paign to conquer the Ming, which by that time was almost complete.
One of the last acts of the dying Ming dynasty was to send a request for military aid to—of all countries—
Japan. In 1649 Ming loyalists, driven out of Beijing in 1644 by the Manchus and sheltering on islands offshore from what is now Shanghai, mingling with pirates with Japanese connections, sent an envoy to Nagasaki bearing a copy of the Buddhist Tripitaka as a gift to elicit soldiers from Japan. The mission was a failure. The authorities at Nagasaki were interested in the Buddhist scriptures and offered to buy them for a substantial amount of silver. They refused, however, to receive the Ming envoy as a representative of a superior court, nor did they have any interest in talk of military aid. After a discouraging week in the port, the Ming envoy concluded that it would be “inappropriate to sell the court’s imperial possession like a peddler,” and so re-boarded his vessel and sailed back to China with his priceless cargo intact. The Tripitaka was returned to its monastery, and the Ming dynasty disappeared.
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The fall of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing (Pure) was not as traumatic as many previous dynastic changes. It has even been called “the least disruptive transition from one major dynasty to another in the whole of Chinese history.”
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It was so because in the end the Ming were weakened to the point where a power vacuum effectively existed in the region around
Beijing, one that the Manchus simply had to march into and fill. Once in power, moreover, the Manchus left things largely as they were, for they admired Ming culture and society and had no desire to change things (beyond requiring that everyone wear Manchu dress and that males shave the top of their heads and braid their hair in back into a long Manchu-style queue). Indeed, the Manchus portrayed themselves as protectors of a great tradition that the enfeebled Ming were no longer able to preserve. Other than the initial resentment caused by the imposition of the queue, the Qing dynasty thus would not be regarded by the Chinese so much as a time of “suffering under barbarian domination,” as had been the case during the Yuan dynasty, when China was ruled by the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan. Many Chinese in fact welcomed the stability that the Manchus brought.