Ch 2 - Tales of Three Kingdoms

Koguryo vs China

China clamped down on the growing power of Koguryo and reasserted its control in Korea. The emerging power of the northern nomads pressured Koguryo and pushed China towards a complete breakdown of order.

In the early 3rd century AD, the Gongsun warlords ranked among the most powerful families in the State of Wei. They dominated much of the Liaodong Peninsula and the Lolang Commandery when Koguryo's King Sansang died at Kungnae-song in 227 AD. Wi-gung, his illegitimate son, ascended the Koguryo throne as King Tongch'on. Determined to recover lost territory, Tongch'on began to rebuild Koguryo's former strength in hopes of the offensive against the Gongsun warlords in the Liaodong region. General Gongsun Kang died before he could press the attack however, and his younger brother, Gongsun Kung, was appointed to replace him. Along with the prestigious appointment, the State of Wei gave him the military title, "General of Chariotry and Cavalry." No glorious title could compensate for the young warlord's own weakness and self-indulgence and he proved wholly incapable of withstanding Koguryo's growing strength. Within six years, Tongch'on's warriors captured the city of Xianping at the mouth of the Yalu River and successfully cut the land route linking mainland China with its colony at Lolang. The disastrous defeat prompted Gongsun Yuan to depose his uncle and throw him in prison. It made little difference however, since by this time the Gongsun warlords had lost all control over Koguryo.

In an attempt to protect himself from possible reprisals by his patrons in the Wei capital at Xuchang, General Gongsun Yuan heedlessly allied himself with the State of Wu, then trying to encircle its northern rival. Using secretive, skillful diplomacy, the Wei court induced Gongsun Yuan to break his alliance with Wu and murder the Wu envoys visiting the warlord's capital garrison at Xuantu. To prove his loyalty, Gongsun Yuan did as requested and sent the envoy's heads to the Wei court. Word of the executions caused a minor panic in Xuantu. A group of between three and four hundred people, including a number of surviving Wu officials, escaped over the city walls and fled east to Kungnae-song to seek the protection of King Tongch'on. It was at this point that Koguryo became drawn into the quagmire of Chinese interstate politics.

The Wu officials persuaded King Tongch'on to ally himself with Wu against both Wei and the traitorous warlord Gongsun Yuan. Tongch'on agreed to the alliance and ordered his envoys to escort the Wu officials back to China by sea along with a gift of one thousand sable pelts for the Wu court. Koguryo presented the Wu court in Nanjing several hundred of its finest mountain ponies as a gift the following year. King Tongch'on still sought to dominate the Liaodong territory however, and three years after entering his self-serving alliance with the State of Wu, Tongch'on suddenly switched sides. He accentuated the strength of his new position by executing the Wu envoys visiting Kungnae-song and sending their heads to the Wei court.

Angered by General Gongsun Yuan's treachery against his own sponsors, the State of Wei went on the offensive against the warlord in 237 AD. The Wei army launched a major military expedition into the Xuantu military district, aiming directly for the capital garrison in Liaodong. Thousands died in the fighting that raged across the Liao River valley for several months, including General Gongsun Yuan. Liaodong finally fell after the Chinese decimated the capital garrison's population. The following year, General Sima I, Wei's most famous military commander, led a massive land and sea invasion against Koguryo to reassert Chinese control in Korea. His army met little substantive resistance and subjugated both the Lolang and Daifang commanderies almost simultaneously. Following this second major military campaign, Koguryo no longer mattered very much to the Chinese.

General Sima I divided the responsibility for governing the Samhan tribes in the south between the Lolang and Daifang commanderies. These two colonial districts administered the lands from the Liao River across the Liaodong Peninsula and into west central Korea as far south as the Han River. He instructed his commanders to confer titles and gifts upon the local Samhan tribal chieftains to win them over to his new Wei Dynasty. Ironically, the necessary official documents contained "discrepancies in translation." Whatever error the Samhan chieftains read, it antagonized and angered the people to the point of open rebellion. Tribes from the Samhan region began attacking Chinese troops camped in the Daifang district with regularity.

With the military situation in Liaodong settled, and Chinese attention focused in southern Korea, King Tongch'on resumed his raiding activities in the north. It may have been that Koguryo's warriors merely got back to their "normal" tribute raids among the farming villages, or that Tongch'on became active again in response to General Sima I's conquest of the Lolang and Daifang commanderies. Whatever the reason, the Chinese interpreted the activity as a great provocation. In 244-45 AD, China mounted a massive expedition of reprisal against Koguryo. Wei Chinese armies led by General Guan Qiujian defeated Tongch'on's warriors, assaulted the Koguryo capital at Kungnae-song, and sacked the city. Tongch'on and the remnants of his forces escaped to the distant northeast coastal region of Korea, where he and a number of his retainers took refuge among the Okcho tribes.

In their attempt to disrupt local development and prevent the growth and consolidation of power among the Samhan States, Chinese military forces swarmed out of the Lolang and Daifang commanderies in 246 AD. The Koreans put up stiff resistance to the massive attack southward across the Han River and inflicted a number of defeats on the Chinese in fighting that raged across the Han river basin. Kung Tsun, governor of the Daifang Commandery, died in the fighting. Eventually however, the stronger Chinese army crushed the uprising and reestablished much firmer control over the southern peninsula.

With southern Korea no longer much of a problem, the following year General Guan Qiujian dispatched the Governor of Xuantu, General Wang Qi, on a military campaign against the Okcho and Eastern Ye territories to capture King Tongch'on. General Wang's armies overran the northern and eastern peninsula tribes without effort and took several thousand prisoners who were later deported to China for resettlement. Despite the fact that King Tongch'on evaded capture for a second time, General Wang could still claim a successful campaign, for he had virtually destroyed Koguryo's tributary system, the basis of its power. The Okcho and Eastern Ye campaign was the strongest reassertion of Chinese authority Korea had seen since the days of the original Han conquest. Although Koguryo remained intact as a kingdom, the Chinese had reduced it to such impotence that it became an insignificant factor on the Korean peninsula for nearly fifty years.

The Three Kingdoms period in China was a time of incessant warfare among the States of Wu, Wei, and Shu Han. The State of Wei managed to destroy and annex Shu Han in 263 AD, but in less than two years a Wei general usurped the Wei throne from Cao Cao's heirs, took the title of Emperor Wu (yet another "Marshal Emperor") and founded the Western Jin Dynasty in 265 AD. Emperor Wu ushered in a period of relative order and prosperity, trying valiantly to restore the old Han system. Diplomatic contacts with other states were resumed and, driven by a desire to curb the power of China's great families, the royal court in Luoyang attempted a number of important fiscal and political reforms. The official tax census during his reign dropped to 16,163,863, a strong indication that a large segment of China's population was beyond effective taxation or control by the central government. No single man could turn back the tide of history however, and by not forcefully breaking up the aristocracy's large estates and getting the peasants back on the tax registers, Emperor Wu's brief flirtation with glory ended almost as quickly as it began.

After conquering the southern state of Wu in 280 AD, Emperor Wu managed to reunite the country briefly, but the Western Jin proved to be a one-man dynasty, established by a strong general and lost within a few generations by his heirs. By the reign of Emperor Min (313 to 317 AD), the familiar signs of dynastic decay were firmly in-place:  the collapse of the central government, decentralized military control of the provinces, the rise of powerful warlords, famine, widespread banditry and messianic peasant movements. Just when the Chinese commanderies had their hands full dealing with troublesome local populations in Korea, the entire region of northern China suffered a complete breakdown of social order. Turkic-Mongol hordes of Xiungnu warriors began exerting continuous pressure on northern China in the latter half of the third century and the resulting chaos became an epidemic. The effects of all this disorder in the heart of China quickly spread to outlying military and frontier districts, including the Lolang and Daifang commanderies in Korea. Just as quickly, the ever-mobile nomads moved into the resulting power vacuum.

The Murong tribe of the Xianbei nomads, who fought as auxiliaries against Koguryo with the armies of General Kuan-ch'iu Chien in the campaigns of 244-245 AD, settled into the northern frontier region of Liaodong. Within a single generation they became powerful enough to begin plundering neighboring Chinese territories. The young Xianbei chieftain Murong Hui commanded a major force that overran and conquered the Puyo kingdom in 285 AD. The Xianbei so completely devastated China's old ally in Manchuria that Puyo's King Uiryo committed suicide in despair.

China was far from debilitated however, and still had the capacity to project a major military force against external threats. A Chinese expeditionary force came to Puyo's rescue and defeated Murong Hui after a number of fierce engagements. The late Puyo king's son, Uira, returned to the Puyo throne. Pressured by expansive nomadic tribes in northeastern Manchuria, the Xianbei in west central Manchuria, and Koguryo in the south, the Puyo royal clan and court nobles led a large number of refugees through Koguryo territory into northeastern Korea, where the lineage of the Puyo royal clan found sanctuary among the Okcho tribes.

The pendulum of conquest, which for centuries had swung outward from China into the northern steppes, began its inevitable return to the heart of the Middle Kingdom. Many of the Xiungnu warriors that surrendered to China and settled as semi-agricultural tribes along China's northern borders had been absorbed into the Chinese defense system. As the Chinese Empire disintegrated, these tribes, and the still purely pastoral nomads further north, found it easy to penetrate deep into the North China Plain in their search for better pastures and loot. In 304 AD, Murong Hui declared his independence from China, settled his tribe at Jicheng near modern Tianjin, and established a capital west of Liaodong. From this new strategic position, the Xianbei severed the land link between China and Korea and gradually brought the entire Liaodong Peninsula under their control. The emergence and subsequent expansion of the Xianbei Earlier Yen state did not come without resistance. Whenever the Xianbei sought to extend their control beyond their bases in Liaodong, Koguryo warriors fought them with fierce tenacity.

China attempted to placate the northern tribes and secure their collaboration by resorting to the age-old tactic of conferring rank and titles. The Xiungnu leader received the grand title Shanyu, "Supreme Ruler of the Five Hordes."  It proved to be a fruitless offering. In 312 AD, Shanyu launched a whirlwind assault into northern China. Four years later, his armies sacked the Jin capital at Luoyang, burned the city, captured Emperor Min, and slaughtered some thirty-thousand inhabitants . Vast numbers of Chinese attempted to escape Xiungnu depredations by fleeing southward to the relative safety of Sichuan Province and regions south of the Yangtze River basin. The Xiungnu held firm control of most of northern China .

Koguryo resumed raiding in force within the Lolang and Daifang commanderies around 310 AD. King Mich'on, the great-great-grandson of King Tongch'on, fought the Chinese for years without a break. He eventually seized the initiative in the former domain of Old Choson and within three years wrested the entire Lolang Commandery from China, thereby taking control of the entire Taedong River basin.

The year after the Xiungnu conquest of Luoyang, Chinese refugees pouring across the Yangtze River multiplied the region's population several times over. In 317 AD, a Jin prince in the capital at Nanjing (appropriately meaning "Southern Capital") declared himself Emperor Yuan and created the Eastern Jin Dynasty. The burgeoning capital city grew into a great metropolis that continued the luxurious ways of the former Han Dynasty. Emperor Yuan gradually consolidated his control over the territory south of the Yangtze River, but his government was weak and continually at the mercy of its great warlord generals. Though it was obsessed with the idea of reconquering the North, its numerous wars against the Xiungnu produced few permanent gains. The government, controlled by changing groups of aristocratic clans, was plagued by revolts and attempts against the throne almost from its inception.

With the remnants of Puyo isolated in the north and the turmoil in northern China continuing unabated, Koguryo's preoccupation with protecting its western frontier erupted in bloody warfare to maintain control of the Liao River basin. This time it had disastrous consequences. After forming a weak alliance with the northern Xianbei tribes and the Yü-wen nomads, Koguryo launched an assault against Murong Hui's capital at Jicheng. The unstable tribal alliance quickly broke apart however, and the Murong retaliated by seizing territory from King Mich'on and annexing the entire Liaodong Peninsula.

The nearly twenty-five-year-long struggle between China and Koguryo was accompanied by a major power shift in China that resulted in the emergence of the north China state of Yen. During the winter of 342-43 AD, only eleven years after King Mich'on's son and successor, King Kogugwon, ascended the Koguryo throne, the Xianbei chieftain Mu-jang Huang led a massive invading army out of Yen and laid siege to Koguryo's capital at Kungnae-song. After sacking the city and setting the royal palace ablaze, Yen troops took nearly fifty thousand prisoners, including the queen mother, and marched them back to Yen. They even raided the tomb of Kogugwon's father, King Mich'on, and dug up his corpse. Defeated in battle, Koguryo accepted the Yen emperor as its suzerain and finally established peaceful relations with its western neighbor. The peace did not last long.