Prehistory and Gojoseon
Homo erectus made his appearance on the Korean peninsula as early as 400,000 years ago. Modern humans have existed in the region of northeast Asia for almost 40,000 years. The people identified by archaeologists as the ancestors of today’s Koreans are believed to have arrived in successive waves from southern Siberia and Manchuria from around 6,000 BCE onwards. They were semi-nomadic, followed shamanistic religious practice, and spoke an Altaic language.
The foundation of the first state entity on the peninsula is shrouded in myth. According to the Samguk Yusa, a compendium of historical events, legends, and folktales from ancient Korea from the thirteenth century, the state of Gojoseon was founded by the demigod king, Dangun, in the fiftieth year of the reign of Chinese emperor Yao. This corresponds with the year 2333 BCE. The story goes that Hwanin, the Lord of Heaven, had a son named Hwanung, who wanted to live on earth. Hwanung descended from Heaven at Taebaek, now known as Baekdu, the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula. There he founded a city named Sinsi, the City of God. A tiger and a bear prayed to Hwanung that he make them human, and Hwanung instructed them to remain in a cave for one hundred days, eating only garlic and mugwort. The tiger soon gave up, but the bear kept to the bargain and was transformed into a woman. Hwanung took her as his wife, and together they produced a son, Dangun. After becoming king, Dangun built a city named Asadal (near present-day Pyongyang) and established the state of Gojoseon.
Archeological evidence suggests the existence of city-states on the peninsula from the eleventh century BCE onwards. Gojoseon, ruled by kings who claimed to descend from Dangun, became the most powerful and advanced of these. It absorbed other city-states in a kind of confederation structure and controlled territory from the Daedong River to the Liao River in present-day China by the fourth century BCE.
Gojoseon had hostile relations with the Chinese state of Yan and lost much of its northern territory following a war around 300 BCE. Two centuries later, in 108 BCE, Emperor Wu of the Western Han dynasty destroyed Gojoseon completely and set up four commanderies to rule Gojoseon’s former territory. Due to local resistance, though, three were recalled, leaving only one, the Lelang Commandery (“Nakranggun” in Korean). The Lelang Commandery’s exact location is the subject of controversy, but it survived until 313 AD, serving as a conduit by which Chinese culture—particularly Confucian thought and the Chinese writing system—entered the Korean peninsula.
The state responsible for ending the Lelang Commandery was Goguryeo, a pre-Korean state that began in southern Manchuria around the Yalu River. By the fifth century, the territorially and culturally ambitious Goguryeo had expanded its control to the northern part of Korea as well as almost all of Manchuria and parts of Inner Mongolia. Goguryeo established the Korean peninsula’s first Confucian college in 372 and was also the first of Korea’s kingdoms to adopt Buddhism, in the very same year.
The Three Kingdoms, and Unifying Shilla
While Goguryeo was building up its power in the north, two other states began to emerge in the southwest and southeast of the peninsula. These were Baekje and Shilla, respectively. During this so- called proto-Three Kingdoms Period, Baekje began absorbing a set of less powerful states in the southwest known collectively as the Mahan Confederacy (between the first and third centuries), and Shilla achieved the same feat in the southeast with a collection of chiefdoms known as the Jinhan (between the first and fourth centuries). Shilla later conquered Gaya, another confederacy located around the Nakdong River Basin by the south coast, in 562.
Goguryeo, Baekje, and Shilla shared a common language (Old Korean, or Godae Gukeo), a shamanistic religious tradition that came from the Siberian heritage of ancient Korea, and an increasing acceptance of Chinese culture. However, these three states also existed in a state of political and military rivalry. Following the annexation of Gaya and the formation of an alliance with Tang China in 648, Shilla began to gain the upper hand. In 660, aided by the Tang, Shilla conquered Baekje. Together, the Tang and Shilla also attacked Goguryeo the following year but were repulsed. In 668, Goguryeo finally fell to Shilla, which thus became the state that unified the Korean peninsula.
Goguryeo’s former territories in Manchuria were lost, however. Tang China’s purpose in allying with Shilla had always been the eventual conquest of Korea, and so, following the Korean unification, the two former allies fell into conflict, fighting several battles throughout the 670s. Shilla eventually repelled the Tang but at the cost of all the land north of the Daedong River. Nationalistic Korean historians sometimes lament Shilla’s alliance with the Tang because of this. Kim Yu-shin, the general who led Shilla’s unification of Korea, has statues dedicated to him in South Korea, yet North Korean defectors report that General Kim is vilified there for his role in the forfeit of Goguryeo land.
Shilla led Korea through an era of prosperity and peace that lasted until around the mid-eighth century. It adopted Buddhism as state religion and encouraged the development of Confucianism, with the opening of a national Confucian college in 682. Despite the wars of the 670s, it also managed to rebuild relations with Tang China, which was at the time the most advanced state in the world, and certainly the most powerful in East Asia.
Fall of Shilla, and Koryo
Early pre-unification Shilla was marked by shifts in power between three competing clans, with the names of Park, Kim, and Seok. As the state developed, the Kim clan gained the upper hand and established a monarchy. They adopted a highly stratified social structure, based on so-called “bone rank.” At the top was the “sacred bone” class, which comprised those directly related to the king. Beneath this was the “true bone” class of lesser royals and members of the Park and Seok clans. Below the true bone class were six further ranks. Those at the top, at rank six, could become vice ministers of the government but rise no higher. Ranks five and four could become lower-level civil servants. Little is known about ranks one, two, and three, but they are assumed to represent the general populace. This system was entirely hereditary, and thus social mobility in the state of Shilla was nonexistent.
Those in level six, often highly educated and ambitious intellectuals, felt restricted by the system’s rigidity, and by the eighth century, rebellions began to issue from this class. Peasant farmers also revolted in 889 over excessive taxation, and regional differences that had previously been held at bay began to resurface. Shilla started to crumble, and a former general, Gyeon Hwon, established the breakaway kingdom of Hubaekje (later Baekje) in 900. One year later, a Shilla noble named Gung Ye established Hugoguryeo (later Goguryeo). By 901, Korea was thus once again three separate kingdoms.
By 918, Hugoguryeo had become the strongest of the three. However, Gung Ye had grown into a paranoid despot, killing even his wife and two sons and proclaiming himself a Buddha. Four of his generals plotted to assassinate him and installed his chief minister, Wang Geon, as the new king. Wang Geon became King Taejo (Taejo means “The Great Progenitor”). He renamed his young state Koryo, from which the English-language name of Korea is derived.
In 935, a weakened Shilla submitted to Taejo; one year later, he defeated Hubaekje. Thus, Korea was reunified under a new dynasty. Taejo was careful to act as a benevolent ruler. He gave land and titles to those who submitted to him, including Gyeongsun, the last king of Shilla, though he extended no such privileges to anyone from Hubaekje, a state he despised. Skilled in diplomacy, Taejo maintained good relations with Song dynasty China. He reclaimed some of the land lost to China after the fall of Goguryeo, thus increasing Korea’s territory. At the same time, Koryo underwent increased Sinicization. For instance, the Chinese civil service examination system, which selected would-be bureaucrats based on their knowledge of history, Confucian classics, and Confucian ethics, was adopted by the Koryo state. This examination system remained in place until 1894.
Theoretically, the examination system meant that anyone could rise to a position of authority. In practice though, Koryo did not offer real social mobility. Social classes were established based on profession and were preserved by hereditary transfer. The children of a member of the artisan class would be artisans too. Children of the peasant classes were not allowed to hold government posts. An outcast class, comprised of butchers, entertainers, and people performing other tasks considered base by the aristocracy, was forced to live in ghetto-like areas, away from the rest of society.
Confucianism as an ethical system and political ideology would increasingly dominate Koryo, but spiritual life remained Buddhist. Koryo sponsored the golden age of Korean Buddhism, with the erection of many temples and the creation of masterpieces such as the Tripitaka Koreana, which remains the most complete corpus of Buddhist texts in existence, carved completely without error into more than eighty thousand wood blocks. Eventually, though, the administrative elite, which was principally Confucian, grew tired of the power that the Buddhists had accumulated and sought to reduce the religion’s role in the state. Buddhism and Confucianism had coexisted peacefully in Korea for centuries, but from the fourteenth century onwards, this was no longer to be the case.
Beginning in 1231 and continuing into 1258, the Mongols, who had conquered China and established the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan, invaded Korea repeatedly. Koryo was forced into a tributary relationship with the powerful khans. Its kings were married off to Mongol princesses, which resulted in a string of half-Korean, half-Mongol monarchs. The khans’ overlordship would last until the 1350s, by which time their influence had fundamentally weakened the stability of the Koryo state. Yet Mongol dominance also resulted in numerous cultural exchanges that would shape the history of the peninsula. Many elite Koreans either visited, or were held captive in, Beijing, the capital of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The scholar An Hyang, for instance, was introduced to neo-Confucianism there and brought neo-Confucian texts back to Korea with him when he returned. This brand of Confucianism would become Korea’s governing philosophy and continues to influence Korean society to this day.
During the 1370s and 1380s, a talented general named Yi Seong-gye succeeded in driving the remaining Mongol garrisons out of the north of Korea, while also defeating the Japanese pirates who had been attacking the east coast. He became the leader of a faction within the Koryo court that favored allying with Ming dynasty China and opposing the Mongols, whose control of China was crumbling. In 1388, he was ordered by the government to attack Ming forces, but instead he launched a coup against the rulers of Koryo. In 1392, he declared himself king of the new Joseon dynasty. His descendents, the Yi family, would form the house that ruled Korea until 1910.
Joseon
Joseon Korea turned away from Buddhism and installed neo-Confucianism as the official state ideology. One critical change this ushered in was a reduction in the status of women. During the Koryo dynasty, women had equal rights to inheritance, and could be designated heads of households; under the Joseon state, this was no longer the case. Shamanism, the indigenous religion of the Koreans, was also marginalized: practitioners were relegated to the lowest social class, the cheonmin—a group that also included slaves.
The highest social class was known as the yangban. Members of this group owed their status to the civil service examination, since those who could pass it were awarded land and titles for three generations. In between the yangban and the cheonmin were the jungin, a middle class comprised of professionals, such as doctors, and the sangmin, the ordinary workers (usually farmers) who made up more than half of the total population.
The early Joseon period saw the reign of the king considered the most exemplary Korean ruler of all, King Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450). Sejong expanded and secured Korea’s northern territory to roughly where the North Korea-China border lies today. During his reign, great strides were made in agricultural output, literature, medicine, and science. Sejong was also responsible for the creation of Hangul, the native Korean alphabet. Prior to this, Koreans had only used Chinese characters, which were too complex and numerous for the masses to master, as they had no few real educational opportunities. For these achievements, Sejong is the only king of a unified Korean state to have been posthumously acclaimed as “the Great.”
Though the early Joseon period was a time of progress, by the late fifteenth century, infighting had broken out at court, weakening the power of the state. Later, in 1592, Japan launched the Imjin Waeran invasions against Korea, as the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi sought to use the peninsula as a stepping-stone on his way to conquer Ming China. The Koreans managed to finally repel the Japanese in 1598 with the assistance of China, as well as the metal-plated “turtle ships” of General Yi Sun-shin, whose defeat of the Japanese navy makes him one of Korea’s greatest heroes. The cost of the war to Korea was vast, however: hundreds of thousands of Koreans are estimated to have died as a result of the invasion, and one-third of the nation’s agricultural land was left unusable, causing poverty and famine.
Korea thus entered the seventeenth century extremely weakened, and fell into a tributary relationship with the Manchurian Qing dynasty that lasted until 1895. The rigid hierarchicalism of society also began to weaken during this portion of the Joseon period. The fortunes of many yangban had been ruined in the wake of the Japanese invasions, while the jungin professional class was beginning to rise. Some jungin managed to accumulate great fortunes through trading, an activity traditionally disdained by the yangban. Seeking to increase their social standing, many jungin began “buying in” to the yangban, swelling the ranks of the official elite and undermining the Joseon class system. Because of this practice, former yangban families such as the Kimhae Kim have millions of members today. It also explains the extraordinary prevalence of family names like Kim, Lee, Park, and Choi in Korea. Collectively, these four names account for half of the population.
Later Joseon was marked by rebellion, internal division, and increased outside influence. In the late eighteenth century, Christianity—brought in largely by Koreans who encountered the religion in China—began to attract its first converts, despite the opposition of a hostile government. A series of popular peasant revolts, such as one led by Hong Gyeong-nae in 1811, and the growth of a movement named Donghak, posed a serious challenge to the government toward the end of the century. Powerful families such as the Andong Kim reduced Joseon’s ruling Yi family to mere figureheads and were draining the country’s resources through corruption and outright thievery.
All of these factors weakened the government, while foreign powers were starting to exert influence and force trade on the peninsula. Though Korea attempted to pursue a policy of isolationism—which earned it the sobriquet of the Hermit Kingdom—France, Britain, the United States, and Russia all entered Korean waters without permission in the late 1800s, with sometimes violent results. Japan, then resurgent following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, also had designs on the country that had repelled them almost three hundred years before. In 1876, by means of the gunboat diplomacy first demonstrated by the West, Japan forced Korea into signing the unequal Treaty of Ganghwa, which opened the country to trade with the island nation.
In 1894–1895, China—Korea’s long-standing “big brother” state—and Japan went to war, principally over control of Korea. Japan’s victory ended Chinese influence over the peninsula and coincided with the official ending of the Joseon social structure based on yangban, jungin, sangmin, and cheonmin classes. A process of brutal colonization culminated in the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910, granting Japan “all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.”
The Modern Era
The period of 1910–1945 represents a nadir in Korean history. It was the first time that this oft-invaded nation had fallen under the full control of a foreign power. Japan ruled the country through governors-general who imposed order via police and military force and punished dissenters severely. It is, however, an uncomfortable fact that Japanese political control was implemented not only by Japanese administrators but with the help of large numbers of Korean collaborators, who ranged from ex-Joseon officials and landowners in the governor-general’s pay to people from the lower classes who took work in the police or as informers.
Particularly during the 1930s and early 1940s, Japan governed Korea with extreme cruelty. As many as 200,000 women were made into sex slaves. Men were used as forced laborers. All people were required to take Japanese names, speak Japanese, and worship at Shinto shrines. And while Japan did pursue industrialization, particularly in the north of Korea, the beneficiaries of the ensuing economic growth tended to be either Japanese, or their Korean collaborators.
Though the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 resulted in Korean liberation, joy was short-lived. The Allied victors, the United States and the Soviet Union, occupied and divided the country on a supposedly temporary basis (without consulting Koreans), with the former responsible for territory south of the 38th Parallel and the latter the north. The original intention was to reconstitute Korea as a free, independent country, and the newly formed UN drew up plans to hold elections to determine a Korean government. However, Moscow opposed this. Instead, in the North a new regime led by former independence fighter Kim Il-sung was formed, under the tutelage of Joseph Stalin. In the South, the U.S. military backed a staunchly anti-Communist, American-educated candidate named Syngman Rhee. Rhee would lead the South until 1960.
The two superpowers quickly turned from allies to enemies. By 1948, the U.S.-backed South was holding elections, which the Soviet-backed North boycotted. Rhee, the ultimate victor in this process, became president of South Korea and formally assumed power from the U.S. military, inaugurating the new Republic of Korea on the August 15, 1948, under a constitution promulgated one month previously. On September 9, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed, with Kim Il-sung as its prime minister. The formal establishment of two independent states completed the division of Korea.
Neither North nor South Korea viewed this division as acceptable in the long term. Both parties had launched border raids and skirmishes across the 38th parallel, but on June 25, 1950, the North began a full-scale invasion. Kim Il-sung’s forces made rapid gains and by August controlled the entire Korean peninsula, save for a small area around the southeastern port city of Busan.
On September 15, acting for UN Command, U.S. general Douglas MacArthur staged a landing at the west coast city of Incheon, with 40,000 American and South Korean troops. By September 25, they had retaken Seoul and began pressing into North Korea, with the intention of reaching the Chinese border. China, which had been under Communist control since the previous year, sent 200,000 troops down into Korea across the Yalu River on October 25, in support of Kim Il-sung. For the rest of the war, the South Korea-UN and North Korea-China forces fought each other to a stalemate.
By the time the armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, an estimated three million people had lost their lives as a result of the three-year conflict. Of this total, around 2.5 million were Korean civilians. The total combined population of North and South Korea at the time was just 30 million. Furthermore, the peninsula’s infrastructure—roads, government buildings, bridges—was almost completely destroyed. The destruction of around half of all houses on the peninsula resulted in destitution for millions of those who had managed to survive the war itself.
South Korea was born into ruin and poverty. Even at the end of the 1950s, GDP per capita was well below $100. Life expectancy was around fifty-four years. The political situation was equally dismal: the nation was presided over by an authoritarian, corrupt regime under President Rhee. It could maintain power only through violence and did little to improve the people’s standard of living.
In the intervening half-century though, South Korea has somehow overcome the weight of its tragic history to become arguably the greatest national success story of recent times. It is a story of rapid economic, political, cultural, and artistic achievements. These advances alone deserve our attention, but the overall story of the people and culture from which they sprang should also be more widely known.