Ch 3 - Paekche and Silla

Trouble in Paradise

The lives of Silla's royal aristocrats stood in stark contrast to the harsh life of Silla's underclass. The military resented the aristocracy and Silla's lower classes despised them both. Royal clans battled over succession as wealthy warlords dominated the countryside unfettered by edicts from the king. The gradual erosion of Silla's economy constituted a grave problem around which the kingdom's very survival hinged.

Not everyone benefitted from the expansion of cultural and economic activity in Silla. The common people paid a tremendous price for the years of bloody warfare that accompanied Silla's unification of Korea. The Silla government put a heavy tax and debt burden on the population to maintain the status and life style of the aristocracy and to support its armed forces. The financial burden impoverished an increasingly large segment of the peasant population. Unable to pay their taxes or reduce their debts, thousands of peasants dropped into slavery. The government assigned numerous artisans and laborers to various palaces and government agencies in the status of slaves. There they worked to supply the needs of the royal household or to produce ships and weapons for the military. Slavery became a very prevalent feature of Silla society wherever the aristocracy firmly entrenched itself, particularly in the capital city.

The wealth and luxury enjoyed by Kyongju's aristocracy stood in stark contrast to the harsh life of a Silla peasant. Scattered throughout the countryside, Silla's farming population lived in hamlets where perhaps ten or so blood-related peasant family households had built small clusters of mud-walled, thatched-roofed homes. A distinguishing feature of Silla society was the "labor" village. Created at essentially the same administrative level as the village, a vast number of these unique communities housed either conquered peoples or those found guilty of crimes against the state. Here people lived, for all practical purposes, as slaves performing such tasks as farming, raising livestock, or other manual labor.

King Kyondok tried to calm the growing disaffection by instituting new political reforms, many of which were based on the Chinese style of government. The aristocracy remained unimpressed and renewed their pressure to break the king's authoritarian power. Many Silla men had been educated in China where they acquired the egalitarian idea that government officials should be selected on merit alone, regardless of social class or royal affiliation. The more conservative elite, mostly members of the royal Kim clan, saw this new attitude among the aristocracy as a direct threat to their own ruling power.

The military class resented the royal aristocracy and the taxpaying commoners despised them both. Silla's peasants, tradesmen, artisans, and the common laborers and slaves who worked for them also despised the aristocracy and the military. The mounting unrest in Silla society gave birth to an entirely new class of people;  revolutionaries. In 768, these rebels took up arms against the throne in an open revolt that took nearly three years to suppress. A similar rebellion broke out twelve years and another king later, only this time the consequences were far more serious.

A rebellious aristocrat named Kim Yang-sang, the tenth generation descendant of King Naemul, led a revolt that killed King Hyegong and put Kim on the Silla throne as King Sondok. This act formally drew a sharp line of contention among Silla's aristocracy. On one side stood the Pak clan descendants of Muyol, who rigidly held to a belief in a strong, Chinese-style central government and the subordination of the aristocratic class. In direct oppositioin stood the Kim clan descendants of Naemul, who strongly believed in preserving the power and privileges of the aristocracy.

Silla rapidly sank into a state of social and political chaos as the deep and unresolved split in the royal Kim clan led to a chronic state of civil war that persisted for 150 years. Through open revolt or palace coup, no fewer than twenty kings succeeded each other during this period. Among the last twenty monarchs of Silla, only nine died apparently natural deaths. The remainder died violently or under suspicious circumstances. Royal infighting eventually weakened the power of Silla's central government to the point that it nearly disappeared.

The chaotic situation in Kyongju left the aristocracy and Silla's provincial elite free to do pretty much whatever they pleased. Many of Silla's powerful gentry families relocated in the countryside away from the capital and built huge fortifications from which they exercised their power around population centers. For several generations, they exercised a de facto control over their own particular region of the kingdom. These were the "castle lords," songju, or "generals," changgun, who lived much like the great warlord families of Sui and Tang China. Many of these castle lords recruited their own private armies from among the local population. These private armies protected the castle lord and his assets and occasionally supported him in the frequent attempts to take the Silla throne. They also helped their castle lord expand his holdings, feud with other lords, and continue the ruthless exploitation of the peasantry.

Silla established a number of military garrisons at strategic locations along its frontier to defend the kingdom. Foremost among these outposts were the massive fortifications of Puk-chin, the Northern Garrison at Samchok, and the P'aegang-jin Garrison at modern Pyongsan. These were land defenses however, unable to contend with the new challenge to Silla that appeared early in the ninth century, the threat from sea pirates. Both Chinese and Japanese pirates actively hunted the Yellow Sea and the relatively narrow Tsushima Strait between Korea and the southern Japanese islands. These marauders made numerous attacks on Silla shipping and raided the countryside in the southwestern provinces, taking both crops and women as booty.

On the island of Wando, just off the southwest coast of Cholla Province, the Chang family lived the life of Silla gentry. Operating from their island home, this well-established family was a powerful force in the development of maritime trade in the region. One of the family's sons, Chang Po-go, traveled to China in his youth and eventually pursued a successful military career in the army of Tang China. The unchecked activities of Japanese pirates and the frequent incidents of his own countrymen being captured and sold into slavery in Chinese markets so outraged Chang that he returned to Silla and made a direct appeal to King Hungdok. Chang Po-go's military background in China and his family status on Wando Island persuaded the king to support the establishment of a naval base at Ch'onghae on Wando Island.

King Hyondok created the Ch'onghae Garrison in 828, and appointed Chang Po-go its first commander. Hyondok soon ordered the creation of a number of other coastal garrisons, such as the Tangsong Garrison at modern Namyang just southwest of Seoul, and the Hyolgu Garrison on Kanghwa Island. Gathering a force of some 10,000 men under the command of other family members, Chang Po-go patrolled the coastal waters off Silla and soon stopped the depredations of Chinese pirates along the China-Silla-Japan trade route. He simultaneously controlled and managed a flourishing commercial trade with both China and Japan and practically monopolized the Yellow Sea.

The Kim clan's internal struggles over royal succession continued unabated in Kyongju. The death of King Hyondok set in motion yet another struggle for the crown. As if it were a matter of royal protocol, the death of a Silla king triggered a fierce battle for the throne in Kyongju. The king's cousin, Grand Councilor Kim Kyu-jong, supported by his son Kim U-jing, contested the crown against another of his sons, Kim Che-yung. Kim Kyu-jong died in the fighting that raged in the palace, leaving his son Che-yung to ascend to the Silla throne as King Hui-gang. Kim U-jing and his supporters left Kyongju following the bloody coup and fled southwest to the Ch'onghae Garrison. They were joined there by another losing faction in the coup, that of Kim Yang, who also had his eyes on the Silla crown.

During the aristocratic in-fighting that put King Hui-gang on the Silla throne, Kim Myung's open support earned him an appointment to the position of Grand Councilor. An ambitious man in his own right, Kim Myung used the powerful post as a springboard to the throne. Well-positioned to overthrow the king, Kim Myong fomented a palace coup in 838. Wounded and trapped in the palace, King Hui-gang hanged himself in despair and Kim Myong took the throne as King Minae. Kim Myong reigned for less than a year.

Chang Po-go's powerful position on Wando Island left him unfulfilled. As he began looking for new fields to conquer, he made the fateful decision to personally intrude into the ongoing political strife in Kyongju. Sympathetic to Kim U-jing's cause, Chang sent some 5,000 of his garrison troops and a number of his most capable commanders to the capital to support Kim's bid for the crown. The joint forces of Kim and Chang entered the capital in a successful assault against King Minae's throne in 839. Chang's armed troops hunted down and killed King Minae in the western suburbs of Kyongju. Kim U-jing took the crown as King Sinmu and in the months that followed he purged all those who had opposed him. Chang Po-go's support in the coup earned him a subsistence grant of 2,000 households. After all that effort however, King Sinmu died in his own bed after only three months on the throne.

Kim U-jing's son inherited the throne as King Munsong and rewarded Chang with even more honors and titles. To celebrate his new stature, Munsong declared that he would take one of Chang Po-go's daughters as his second wife, a proposition that sent the royal court into a frenzy. Stunned by the vocal and heated uproar over his potential marriage to "an islander," King Munsong took the sage advice of his ministers and quietly backed out of the marriage. Still incensed, the aristocracy turned against Chang Po-go and found him guilty of heresy against the social order. The aristocracy's reaction enraged Chang Po-go. Blocked from participating directly in state politics and unable to create an independent political force strong enough to challenge the Kyongju government for supremacy, Chang looked for alternatives.

Chang Po-go apparently planned to stage a revolt against the king, but the idea of another armed insurrection against the crown split loyalties among his key officers. The revolt ended tragically in 846, when Chang Po-go was murdered by Yom Chang, one of his own commanders. Troops under the command of Yi Changjin, one of Chang's more trusted generals, successfully defended the Ch'onghae Garrison against government forces for a while, but within five years Yom Chang captured and destroyed the fortress. The government abolished the Ch'onghae Garrison and relocated its 10,000 troops to areas where they no longer posed a threat of insurrection.

The intense political turmoil within the aristocracy began showing signs of abating by the middle of the ninth century, a time when Silla's aristocracy turned extremely decadent. As Kyongju's ruling nobility increasingly struggled to support the grandeur of the aristocracy and indulge their taste for an opulent and pleasurable life, their financial needs grew ever more demanding. They completely ignored the welfare of the people and the nation as a whole. Through neglect and indifference, ruling power shifted away from the capital at Kyongju toward new power centers in outlying areas of the kingdom. The growing strength of the castle lords in the countryside weakened the power of the central government. Unfettered by edicts from the king, the castle lords freely exercised economic jurisdiction in the villages they dominated. They levied taxes on the peasants and extracted forced labor from them without mercy. The government soon found it virtually impossible to collect taxes from the peasants. The shift in financial control of the kingdom and the growing erosion of Silla's economy constituted a grave problem around which the kingdom's very survival hinged.

With the attainment of political power beyond their reach, many castle lords turned their attention beyond the Korean peninsula and began developing their own private commercial trading activities. Some even sent their own private embassies to Changan in China. Spurred by the wealth created through maritime trade, new settlements soon appeared on the Chinese mainland in areas along the Shandong Peninsula and in Jiangsu Province. The benefits derived from seaborne commerce created many wealthy families. The Ch'onghae Garrison and the cities of Kangju (modern Chinju), Naju, Kaesong, and Namyang became major trading centers.

Faced with a shrinking tax base and desperate to preserve the old aristocratic order, the central government resorted to the unbelievable measure of forcibly collecting taxes from county and provincial areas. The immediate effect paralleled what happened to China under similar circumstances;  it drove the already heavily burdened peasantry into seething rebellion. High taxes and the forced labor demands of both the government and the castle lords forced large numbers of peasants to abandon their land and roam the countryside. Countless peasant insurgent groups rose spontaneously across the kingdom during the last decades of the ninth century and a seemingly unending succession of peasant revolts erupted in every corner of Silla.