Ch 13 - The Hermit Kingdom

Closing Doors

The Manchus conquered northern China and established the Qing Dynasty. Choson became a reluctant vassal of the newly-formed Manchu Dynasty, a fate that sealed its destiny. The Korean peninsula gradually began to shut itself off completely from the rest of the world and became known as the Hermit Kingdom.

On January 4, 1637, a massive army of Manchu, Mongol and Chinese troops crossed the frozen Yalu River under the personal command of Emperor Tian Cong. The cavalry advanced so swiftly that, before the beacon fires along the mountain tops could alert Seoul, the vanguard of the invading force managed to cross the Chongchon River at Anju, some 75 miles inside Choson's northern border. With too little time to prepare for a defense of the capital, the queen, the princes, and all women and children of the court officials hurriedly evacuated to the safety of Kanghwa Island. That night, before King Injo and his royal staff left the city, word came that an advance unit of 300 Manchu cavalrymen had already arrived in the area and had blocked the road to Kanghwa Island.

With access to their island refuge denied, King Injo and his royal court, along with 13,800 soldiers fled the capital. While a party of government officials treated the Manchu soldiers with great courtesy and diverted them with food and wine, Injo and his ministers quietly slipped out of Seoul. After leaving through a small side gate, the small party made its way eleven miles south to the citadel of Namhan-sansong situated in a high mountain basin. The fortress and its nearly five-mile-long defensive wall had been completed in 1626, and if strictly rationed, the supplies available within the fortress would support the defenders for perhaps two months. The remainder of the royal household, safe on Kanghwa Island, awaited forces gathering in the provinces that would soon come to their aid. A request for help had been sent to the Ming authorities and they expected China would soon send its troops to help. Unknown to the royal party at the time however, a strong winter storm churning in the Yellow Sea turned back the fleet carrying the message. There would be no help from China.

The Manchus easily defeated the few soldiers that could be summoned from the provinces and scattered the rest into the frozen countryside. Seoul surrendered almost immediately. On January 26, Emperor Tian Cong arrived to take personal command of the siege. Meanwhile, the Manchus assaulted Kanghwa Island. They commandeered some barges and, after their artillery sank some thirty Choson ships, Manchu infantry crossed the Salt River and laid siege to the one thousand man island garrison. Kanghwa Island quickly fell to the Manchus. The nearly 242 prisoners taken in the assault included the queen, the royal consorts, the royal princes and the wives and children of the high court officials. Ming Emperor Zhu Yujian issued orders to his officers that no harm be done to the captives and sent eunuchs to attend to their needs.

King Injo and his troops showed no sign of weakening as they withstood a siege from the main Manchu army against the nearly impenetrable citadel at Namhan-sansong that lasted over a month. On the fortieth day of the onslaught, as the defenders braced themselves for yet another attack, an unbelievable message reached the fortress from the Manchu camp describing the fall of Kanghwa Island. Faced with such devastating news, Injo finally gave in to the pleas of officials who advocated peace. Left with no alternative, the royal party agreed to surrender and accept whatever terms the Manchus may present. On February 24, 1637, after a forty-five-day siege, King Injo and a small party of twenty to thirty retainers silently rode down from their mountain fortress and crossed the cold, bleak winter fields toward Samjondo, a small postal station on the south bank of the Han River. Injo, the King of Choson, escorted by his ministers, walked the remaining mile and a half to the enemy encampment.

A sacred nine-tiered altar had been erected amidst the ochre tents of the Manchu army encamped along the banks of the Han River. Accompanied by the sound of music, Emperor Tian Cong, ruler of the Manchus, strode onto the altar between ranks of his officers dressed in their battle armor. Amidst the ceremony and spectacle of the moment, King Injo and his party bowed their heads to the ground nine times at the foot of the altar, acknowledged submission to Tian Cong, and pledged to surrender the seal of state and the imperial patent of investiture that Injo's ancestors had received from the Ming court of the Chinese emperor.

According to Emperor Tian Cong's terms, Choson vowed to sever its ties with Ming China, to do homage to the state of Qing as a suzerain power and to deliver Injo's two eldest sons, the Crown Prince Sohyon and his brother, the Prince of Pongnim, as hostages of the Manchu army. Furthermore, Choson would supply annual tribute to Tian Cong and provide military troops, supplies and equipment on demand to assist the Manchus in their war against China. The first delivery would be fifty ships that were immediately dispatched for an attack against General Mao on Kado Island. With the two young Choson princes as hostages, the victorious Manchu army rode northward through the snow to the high plains of Manchuria. The deed was done. In the aftermath of the surrender, three court officials who had argued the loudest against making peace with the Manchus were captured and taken to the Qing capital at Mukden, where they were executed.

Following the subjugation of Choson, Emperor Tian Cong's Manchu armies returned to Mukden to ready themselves for the major assault against the decaying Ming Dynasty. The Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Yujian, last of the Ming dynasty rulers to reside in the Forbidden City, ruled a corrupt and decadent bureaucracy in which Confucian bureaucrats exploited high office to amass fortunes and gave themselves over to hedonism, sartorial showmanship, and perverse sexuality. A long stretch of cold, wet weather and flooding spoiled harvests, diminished tax receipts, and drove impoverished peasants into the cities. Bandit warlords and peasant mobs ravaged whole provinces, compounding the deadly impact of plagues in the cities and famine in the countryside. Dutch assaults on the Portuguese closed down the trade at Macao. When Spain's King Philip IV limited the amount of silver that could be shipped from Acapulco in the 1630s, the Chinese merchant community in Manila was all but exterminated in strife with the Spanish authorities.

Dying from within and threatened from without by powerful Manchu armies that appeared along its northern border, Ming Emperor Zhu Yujian's own armies were of dubious loyalty and impotent to resist all his enemies at once. In April 1644, Li Zicheng, the greatest of China's rebel warlords, crossed the Yellow River southwest of Beijing in his drive toward the Ming capital. Some ministers urged the recall of General Wu Sangui's army from the north to drive off the bandits, but that would leave the northern frontier undefended against the Manchus. Others advised the Emperor to use his own charisma to rally the people and raise and lead a militia, but Emperor Zhu Yujian was no soldier and could not even ride a horse. Still others urged him to flee Beijing for southern provinces still loyal to the Ming. Even his royal astronomers reported that the Pole star had "slipped" from its throne in the northern sky - a sure augury of the end of an age."

The drizzle blanketing the city on April 25 only added to the sense of gloom and despair as Li Zicheng rode through the gates of Beijing unopposed and occupied the Forbidden City. Cloistered within the Imperial Court, the emperor called his last council and announced the end of his reign. In their shame and despair, the Empress and thirteen of his court ministers committed suicide. Late that night, after sending his male heirs into hiding, Emperor Zhu Yujian walked to a pavilion on a nearby hill, inscribed the character for "Son of Heaven" beside his chosen spot, and hanged himself. The once glorious Ming Dynasty, so promising at its start, died that afternoon along with him.

Li Zicheng despised the Ming imperial bureaucracy and blamed its moral depravity for China's ruin. By the time the Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Yujian took the Celestial Throne in 1628, the eunuchs had already managed to decimate the Ming government. Emperor Zhu Yujian, determined to avoid any more such problems, began running the government himself, an almost insane proposition given the centuries of decline that had already encrusted the aging dynasty. The challenge proved insurmountable, as the diligent emperor appointed more than fifty Grand Secretaries during his brief seventeen year reign. The constant depletion of the imperial treasury through corruption, the constant rebellions and fighting against the Manchus and the nearly constant need to finance and maintain even basic government services, had stripped Ming resources bare. Throughout its last decades the once burgeoning Ming treasury ran deep deficits. By 1643, the country's treasuries were bare.

Li Zicheng had no problem with the idea of creating a new dynasty, but when obsequious Ming officials offered to instruct him in the duties of emperorship, he put forty-six officials to death and heavily taxed the rest to help pay off his soldiers. In an attempt to bolster his power, Li made offers of alliance and bribes to General Wu Sangui, whose army along the Great Wall represented the only real barrier between the capital and Emperor Tian Cong's Manchus. After long deliberations, General Wu decided to accept Li's offer.

The Manchus had been conducting incursions into northern China ever since the late 1630s, but Emperor Tian Cong died in 1643, before he could see the results of his great dream of conquest. The emperor's crown was placed upon his six-year-old son, Fulin, as the reigns of ruling power were taken by the young heir's regents, Prince Jirgalang and Prince Dorgon. At the same time Li Zicheng was moving against Beijing, Prince Dorgan proceeded towards the Ming capital at the head of a large army. General Wu Sangui burned with a vengeful anger against Li Zicheng and saw an alliance with the Manchus as his only hope for defeating the peasant rebels threatening Beijing. In May 1644, General Wu "invited" Prince Dorgon through the Great Wall and into northern China in hopes his armies would restore the Ming dynasty. That the Manchus were able to induce men like General Wu Sangui to collaborate is a measure not only of his disgust with the Ming, but of Abahai's "nourishment policy" that welcomed defectors.

In the weeks that followed, Li Zicheng grew impatient waiting for General Wu Sangui's forces and turned against the general's family, massacring the lot and hanging the head of Wu's father from the city walls. Once Li's rebels learned that their days in the capital were numbered, his undisciplined troops multiplied their outrages and went on a rampage through the streets of Beijing and succeeded in burning part of the Forbidden City. It was clear to all that Li Zicheng would never possess the Mandate of Heaven. In righteous anger the residents of Beijing hacked and burned as many as two thousand rebels.

After quickly defeating peasant rebels en route to the Ming capital of Beijing, Prince Dorgon and his highly disciplined Manchu soldiers arrived in the imperial city in June 1644. They were greeted not as feared invaders, but as bearers of a heavenly mandate to restore tranquility. They literally marched into the city and made it their own. Soon after looting Beijing, Prince Dorgan made a great spectacle of burying Emperor Zhu Yujian and invited Ming officials to resume their posts. He also vowed to capture Li Zicheng, but the motive behind the display was to place his nephew, Abahai's son, the young Fulin on the Peacock Throne of China. Thus began the Qing, or Manchu Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history.

Having already taken control of northern China, the Manchus created a civil administration built on the Chinese model. The Manchu government differed slightly its predecessor in the composition of its hierarchy. Instead of a president and vice-president sitting at the head of each ministry or government board, the position was occupied by a Manchurian prince. Each Manchurian prince had five assistants beneath him, of which at least one was Mongol and one was Chinese. This is known as the "Manchu-Mongol-Chinese" ruling system, a method that established the model for the Qing government until its downfall in 1911.

In contrast to the Japanese invasions less than thirty years earlier, the Manchu invasion of Choson amounted to a brief adventure and only a small part of the country had been a battlefield. Nevertheless, wherever the Manchu cavalry rode in Choson's northwest provinces, it ravaged and plundered villages and left a trail of widespread killing across the countryside. The fresh devastation fanned anew Choson's deeply felt sense of cultural superiority over the Manchus and the festering animosity soon gave way to an intense open hostility toward the Qing state.

In accordance with the Manchu treaty of 1637, relations between the Qing and Choson consisted of the exchange of ceremonial envoys, symbolic observances and trade between the two countries. During most of the Qing period, Choson sent one regular embassy to China every year, usually at the time of the winter solstice. Numerous special embassies and missions traveled to China on various occasions, such as the accession or death of an emperor, or when the Choson court wished to report the accession or death of a king, or when it wished to request investiture for a king or queen. During the 245 years between 1637 and 1881, a total of 435 special embassies and tribute missions traveled to China.

The amount of fixed annual tribute sent by Choson to the Qing court amounted to almost ten times the amount of Chinese imperial gifts sent to members of Choson's royal family. The original tribute demand consisted of 100 ounces of gold, 1,000 ounces of silver, 200 pieces of grass cloth, 200 pieces of mixed silk and cotton cloth, 4,400 pieces of cotton goods of various colors, 2 mats with dragon patterns, 20 mats with variegated patterns, 100 deer-skins, 400 otter-skins, 142 leopard skins, 200 black squirrel-skins, 10 small knives, 5,000 rolls of large and small paper, and about 12,000 pounds of rice. Not once in two and a half centuries did Choson receive an exemption from tribute payment, even in times of national emergency such as famine, flood, or rebellion. The amount of tribute however, gradually diminished over the years and much of it was actually remitted to Choson "as a special act of grace."

Persistent and stubborn defiance in Choson caused the Qing rulers to impose severe restrictions on communications between the two countries, apparently to prevent possible contact between Ming loyalists in China and pro-Ming factions in Choson. With the single exception of trade and the exchange of ceremonial envoys, no officially sanctioned contact existed between the two countries. The city of Uiju on the Yalu River, a city with massive thirty-foot high walls and guard towers that commanded an expansive view of the surrounding countryside, became the official gateway between Korea and China. When official visitors either entered or left Choson, they had to first pass inspection at the customs house and guard gate. While they were in Choson, their every move was closely watched. City officials sealed the gates of Uiju after dark and immediately arrested any unauthorized person nearby.

Choson embassies traveled in China under close escort and without detour along a prescribed land route from the Choson border through Fenghuangcheng and Shanhaiguan to Beijing. The Chinese government closely controlled the movement of Choson embassies in Beijing and, except for official business, discouraged or prohibited all contact with Chinese officials. On arrival in Beijing, the number of Choson traders was reported to the throne and only then did the court give the embassy permission to trade. Among the items that were prohibited to all foreigners trading in China at the time were any kind of weapons or the materials to make them, and China's official dynastic histories.

One condition of the peace negotiations conducted in 1637 created an official market on the island of Chung-gang, near Uiju, for the regular conduct of official trade on the lower Yalu River. A second market opened in the northeast at the town of Hoenyong. Soon, yet another market appeared in the Choson frontier town of Kyongwon, where licensed Chinese merchants attended semi-annual trade fairs. If the Beijing trade was chiefly for the benefit of the Koreans, the border trade fairs greatly benefited the local Manchu bannermen stationed in the Fengtian and Fenghuang military districts who sought to obtain daily necessities from Choson. All trade was restricted to the border region between Choson and the Qing Empire and no trade was permitted by sea. The Yi government added new restrictions by outlawing fishing on the high seas and prohibiting its citizens from disclosing any domestic information to outsiders. Although Chinese junks could sail close in to land, Choson denied them landing rights. These restrictions had little effect on the many smugglers who slipped in and out of the hundreds of little bays and coves along the Choson coastline and managed to conduct a thriving business in covert trade between Choson and China.

Beyond the Yalu River to the north lay a fifty-mile-wide strip of uninhabited territory that isolated Choson from China over a distance of nearly one hundred miles. This buffer region became, in effect, a "No Man's Land," and soldiers of the Manchu emperor or Choson border guards executed anyone on the spot who tried to cross it without authority. Nevertheless, over time this land became a haven for roving groups of bandits, a refuge for the illegal trading of horses, and a profitable market for the sale of products from both Choson and China. Beyond the buffer zone between Choson and China lay the ancient frontier border known as the Inner Willow Palisade, the "Barrier of Stakes." This three-hundred-mile-long palisade along the Choson-Manchurian border, with its principal entry gate just outside the Manchurian city of Fenghuangcheng, was maintained to check illegal border traffic.

By the late seventeenth century, wealthy Choson merchants began accompanying tribute missions to China to participate in the annual trade fairs held at Fenghuangcheng. All measure of goods could be found within this strictly regulated marketplace. From Choson came ginseng, ramie cloth, gold and silver. Qing products included such goods as silk, medicines, precious stones, and books. While both the Choson and Manchu governments regarded trade as an important source of revenue, neither government profited much from it.

Certain bureaucrats and some merchants in both countries, especially members of the Choson embassy, found the Beijing trade to be highly lucrative since either the Yi or the Qing government picked up all their expenses during the trip to and from China. Lured by the prospect of sure profit, many Choson merchants and even smugglers reportedly journeyed to China every year, disguised as personal servants or attendants of official members of an embassy or mission. Some Chinese merchants in Beijing amassed fortunes from their monopoly of Choson trade. Although viewed as incidental in nature, this tribute system led to the development of networks of vested bureaucratic and commercial interests in both countries, a fact that contributed to the durable and stable relations between the two countries during the Qing period.

Choson's fateful status as the reluctant vassal of the Qing Manchus sealed its destiny for the next two hundred and fifty years. Having discovered how painfully troublesome it was to live in open contact with its warlike neighbors, Choson increasingly desired to maintain as much physical isolation from China as practical. While the Qing authorities gradually relaxed controls over the movement of visiting Choson envoys in Beijing, the Yi government in Seoul continued to cloister Qing envoys in a mansion with no outside contact.

The personal surrender of King Injo, acknowledging subservience to the "pagan" tribes of the Manchu, was a devastating blow to the Choson monarchy and the yangban. Choson's strong sympathy toward Ming China only intensified the deep sense of humiliation and disgrace. Distrust of the orthodox Neo-Confucian yangban began to grow in the minds of the peasants, who felt they had been denied an opportunity to resist the Manchu armies. Battered for centuries by its larger and more voracious neighbors, the Korean peninsula gradually began to shut itself off completely from the rest of the world and entered a period not unlike that of the European Dark Ages. The kingdom of Choson became known as, "the Hermit Kingdom."