Ch 7 - The Death of Koryo

Usurpers and Freebooters

Koryo's pro-Mongol faction seized power in Kaesong and fought to protect its position of power and wealth. The regional development of maritime trade brought a new threat to Koryo in the form of sea pirates. Beset by economic problems at home, Japanese maritime traders turned to piracy to make a living. Emboldened by their success, these pirates routinely raided and plundered Chinese coastal areas and the Korean peninsula.

Koryo's entrenched bureaucracy never forgave King Kongmin for his reform efforts. They interpreted Kongmin's policy of cutting all ties with the Yuan and establishing relations with Ming China as a direct threat to their status and feared that further attempts at reform might yet be made. Kaesong's pro-Mongol faction battled to protect its position and hoped to renew ties with the Mongols who helped them gain and hold their wealth in the first place. The power of the influential and conservative landowners took on an ugly character in 1374, when a military hero and high official named Yi In-im led a small yet strong anti-Ming faction that assassinated King Kongmin. The anti-Ming group enthroned an eleven-year-old boy reportedly born to a palace slave girl (the monk Sin Ton's mistress) as Kongmin's successor. The adolescent monarch, King U, owed his seat of power to Yi In-im, the man who held the real power behind the throne. King U became the only king in Korea's long history never to have had a posthumous title for his reign.

Yi In-im and his backers reversed Koryo's foreign policy from pro-Ming back to pro-Yuan shortly after the pro-Mongol faction seized power in Kaesong. They sent envoys to the Mongol Yuan court in Liaoyang and, in a thinly disguised measure designed to forestall Ming displeasure, sent a special envoy to the Ming court in Nanjing. The Nanjing delegation asked Emperor Taizu to select a posthumous title for King Kongmin, an act meant to symbolize Koryo's "younger brother" status in relation to China. The Chinese were suspicious about Kongmin's sudden and unexplained death and had real doubts about the legitimacy of King U. The Ming court remarked that the Koryo court was trying to use the boy to legitimize a usurper and justify the murder of a sitting king.

Emperor Taizu delayed choosing a posthumous title for Kongmin. Instead, he demanded a heavy tribute in horses and precious metals and asked the Koryo court to send an official of senior status as ambassador to China. Once the massive annual tribute payment arrived from Koryo, Taizu relented. He sent the royal patent and golden seal to Kaesong, trappings that symbolized Koryo's vassal status with China and recognized King U as the legitimate ruler of Koryo. The Mongols, on the other hand, recognized the legitimacy of King U immediately. Hoping to use military force from Koryo to reestablish itself in China, the Yuan court asked Koryo to send troops for a joint attack against a Ming fortress. Neither Yi In-im nor his pro-Mongol faction in Kaesong wanted to go quite that far in their relationship with the Yuan. Instead, Koryo cautiously maintained a state of uneasy neutrality between two hostile powers.

In the wake of Mongol domination and the great cost in lives and resources committed to drive the Red Turbans from the northern peninsula, Koryo faced an entirely new outside threat;  Japanese pirates. In earlier days, Koryo sailors were the master mariners and chief traders in the Yellow Sea and the waters between Japan and the Asian continent. The Japanese took to the sea cautiously at first, but by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they began to dominate shipping and commercial activity throughout the East China Sea.

Japan's commercial success prompted some of the country's military leaders, known as shoguns, whose own shaky regimes needed a financial boost, to look for ways to share in the profits. In complete disregard for the theory of imperial rule, a number of shoguns permitted themselves to be vested as "Kings of Japan" by the Chinese Ming dynasty. They then sold their credentials to private Japanese sea traders, thus giving them legal and official status in their China ventures. Despite the interest in foreign trade by the Ashikaga shoguns and Japan's Buddhist monasteries, over time the leadership in overseas commercial ventures fell to local feudal lords, warriors and merchants in western Japan. Though primarily traders, Japan's adventurous and hardy mariners were not averse to a little piracy when the opportunity arose. Many maritime traders from northern Kyushu and the offshore islands of Tsushima and Iki turned to piracy to make a living ( - Japanese Pirate Raids).

Koryo's problems with coastal pirates evolved along with the regional development of maritime trade. Asian maritime history is replete with instances of piracy. During the first half of the eleventh century, Jurchen pirates dominated the East Sea and raided both Korea and Japan. They pillaged the small island of Ullung off Koryo's east coast so often that people widely believed it to be uninhabitable. At one time Koryo stationed a fleet of seventy-five warships at Wonsan Bay specifically to defend itself against these raiders. Seaborne Japanese marauders began raiding Koryo as early as the reign of King Kojong (1213-1259).

The first recorded raid occurred in 1223, when a small band of pirates attacked Kumju. These early raids were minor in scale and occurred on sporadic intervals. In the one hundred and five years between 1223 and 1328, Japanese pirate raids averaged less than one every ten years. Pirate raids during the first half of the fourteenth century were little more than a minor nuisance and in the twenty-four years between 1350 and 1374, pirate raids averaged about three a year. By the reign of King Kongmin however, coastal pirate raids had become a devastating problem. At the height of their activity between 1375 and 1388, pirates conducted a total of 378 raids against Koryo, averaging more than 27 a year.

Pirate crews were often a mixed lot that combined the naval skills of both Chinese and Koryo sailors. The pirate's bold spirit of adventure however, was essentially a Japanese contribution. Emboldened by their successes in the waters off Koryo, East Asia's pirates moved from being hit-and-run bandits to become organized military marauders who made deep in-country raids and the character of their attacks changed from mere acts of thievery to full scale combat. Pirate raids took a terrible toll on Korea during the reign of King Kongmin (1351-1374) and initial attempts to challenge them usually ended disastrously. When troops were put aboard ships to fight the pirates in 1351, military commanders failed to engage the Japanese. Instead, as soon as pirate ships were spotted, they withdrew or avoided closing in to fight. By this time, the pirates had complete maritime supremacy in the Korean waters. They increasingly shifted their activities to the China coast and routinely raided and plundered Chinese coastal areas as well as the Korean peninsula.

Armed with little more than sheer audacity, pirates usually arrived by sea unchallenged and landed in force. After attacking and pillaging a town, they utterly destroyed it, killing everyone who could not escape. These vicious raids forced peasants in both China and Koryo to evacuate the rich coastal farmlands in depth, leaving the land to fallow. Evacuation did nothing to deter the pirates, it simply drew them further inland. Not even remote mountain villages were safe from their predation. No longer satisfied with confining their raids to coastal towns, these daring adventurers marched overland or sailed far up the Kum, the Naktong, and the Yangtze Rivers to attack larger cities.

In their boldness, Japanese pirates even launched an attack against Kanghwa Island, literally at the backdoor of the capital in Kaesong. They cut Koryo's economic lifeline from the southern provinces by seizing hundreds of grain ships in a single haul. The spreading realization that pirates could appear at any time at any place virtually paralyzed maritime traffic along the Korean coast. Once this happened, the transportation of tax grain from the southern provinces to the capital came to a virtual halt.

The depredations of Japanese pirates became intolerable. Koryo's aristocracy, concentrated in Kaesong, faced an imminent economic collapse and came to view Japanese pirates as a menace to Koryo's very existence. True to their nature, they crystallized their concern into government action, not because of the loss of farmland and peasants, but because of the potential loss of tax revenues. The Kaesong government tried to stop the piracy through diplomacy, but every diplomatic overture to Japan produced the same frustrating result - nothing happened. The Ashikaga Shogunate found itself incapable of suppressing the pirates.

Turning to the Chinese for help, the Kaesong royal court hired six Chinese ship captains to deal with the problem, but they were quickly defeated in an engagement with Japanese pirates in 1358. Six years later, King Kongmin dispatched a fleet of eighty ships manned by veteran troops from the northern frontier. The fleet sailed to Cholla Province to provide an escort for the tax grain ships. Despite being warned of an impending ambush, the fleet commander fell into a classic trap. When two Japanese ships feigned a retreat, the Koreans gave chase. The Japanese surrounded the Koreans and destroyed sixty ships in the ensuing battle.

In 1373, royal court officer U Hyon-bo offered an eloquent admonishment of King Kongmin in a memorial to the throne. Challenging critics who claimed that Koryo should not engage the Japanese at sea and that building ships would increase the burdens on the population, U Hyon-bo wrote,

"Pirates cannot be attacked from land. That condition is very clear. Moreover, in the driving off of pirates and preventing violence, our basic desire is on behalf of the people. Can critics think of minor distress of the people and give great grief to the country? Now, along the Tong and So River defenses are placed. When the pirates come sailing on the sea at will, our army stands on the shore and can do nothing more than look on with folded arms, even with a million picked troops. When it is a matter of water, what can they do? We ought to build ships, carefully equipped and armed, and following the currents in long columns block their principle routes."

That same year, Choe Yong, a leading army general, began soliciting for new warships. He wanted to increase Koryo's navy by 2000 warships and put all of the Korean military on them to fight the Japanese pirates. In October 1373, King Kongmin watched a dramatic demonstration of the newly constructed warships with their fire arrows and fire tubes. Four years later, the King would witness an even more impressive firepower demonstration.

The Song Chinese were aware of gunpowder's explosive properties as early as 1044. Ever since Wujing Caoyao produced the first known recipe for making saltpeter, the principal ingredient of gunpowder, the formula remained a closely guarded Chinese state secret. Choe Mu-son, a minor government official in Kaesong, recognized that his country desperately needed better and more powerful weapons to effectively fight Japanese pirates. Through his diplomatic contacts with the Yuan court, Choe learned about the existence of gunpowder and worked tirelessly to duplicate the Chinese formula. He finally learned the secret in 1377, with a little help from a member of the Chinese Yuan diplomatic mission. With the formula for gunpowder in hand, Choe Mu-son held the key that unlocked the solution to Koryo's difficulties.

While Koryo diplomats struggled to end the piracy problem with words, the determined Choe Mu-son persuaded Koryo's royal court to create the Superintendency for Gunpowder Weapons and appoint him as its first director. Working under government sponsorship, Choe directed his foundry in the manufacture of a large variety of firearms, especially cannon. His experiments in equipping ships with his new guns to deal with the problem of piracy helped equip Koryo's navy with new, heavily-armed warships. Ships armed with Choe Mu-son's new cannons saw their first action against Japanese pirates in the Yellow Sea off the mouth of the Kum River in 1380. The Japanese were taken by complete surprise by Koryo warships firing heavy cannon. The Koryo fleet reportedly destroyed some 500 Japanese pirate ships by direct gunfire and setting fire to ships with flaming arrows. In 1389, Pak Wi led a naval assault force of over one hundred ships against the pirate lair on Tsushima Island, reportedly sending some 300 pirate ships to the bottom.

Fresh from his earlier military successes in the north, General Yi Song-gye also turned his attention to the pirate problem. In a series of successful campaigns, his forces repelled numerous pirate attacks in northeastern Koryo. Over the next few years Yi Song-gye fought a series of engagements that drastically reduced the power and effectiveness of the pirates. They continued to raid Koryo, but during the last decade of the fourteenth century, pirate attacks dropped to less than four per year.