Ch 7 - The Death of Koryo

New Directions

Ming Emperor T'ai-tsu established complex rituals, developed a new legal code, and tightened the bureaucracy to consolidate his absolute rule. The Ming government essentially annexed Koryo's entire northeastern territory once under Mongol command. The Koryo military removed the pro-Mongol faction from power in Kaesong and took control of the government. General Yi Song-gye led a nearly bloodless coup that toppled the Koryo government and mounted the Phoenix Throne in Kaesong as the first ruler of a new Korean dynasty.

Emperor Taizu's Ming Dynasty firmly controlled all of China proper by 1382. Considered by Chinese and Western historians to have been one of China's greatest emperors, if not its greatest emperor. Zhu Yuanzhang had risen to the imperial throne from the peasant class and felt no connection to the old ruling traditions. He set out with firm determination to repair what he saw as defects in the Yuan regime and established his own traditions.

The Yuan's greatest defect, he believed, was its diffusion of imperial government power among a host of provincial governors and administrators. Emperor Taizu began his consolidation of authority over the new Chinese nobility, men who had fought with him in his rise to power, by demanding they live at his court in Nanjing. He enforced his new stature by establishing a host of complex rituals and ceremonies to give himself and his office an imperious, almost divine atmosphere. He also tightened his authority over the bureaucracy to give himself absolute control of the government. There would be no dissension or criticism of the Emperor from administrators or scholars. Always conscious of his lowly birth and heritage, Taizu had about 10,000 scholars and their families executed in two purges during his administration for insulting his majesty.

Discipline and punishment were used to further enhance his rule. He adopted the earlier Sui and Yuan practice of publicly beating incompetent or corrupt bureaucratic officials. Almost no one survived these beatings, mainly on the buttocks, administered by over a hundred club-wielding soldiers. Emperor Taizu understood the potential threat posed to the stability of the throne by the empress, court eunuchs, concubines, and court ladies. Chinese history is filled with cases where court eunuchs assumed power behind the throne or where a boy emperor was ruled by the Dowager Empress and her family. Taizu instituted a number of measures to severely curtail the power of these groups in the imperial court.

Perhaps Emperor Taizu's greatest single innovation was his abolishment of the office of Chief Minister, the person in charge of the imperial administration. The Chief Minister reported directly to the Emperor, but he also controlled the administration of government affairs. Under his sway, the imperial administration had been more or less independent of the emperor;  emperors came and went, but the bureaucracy lived a life of its own as if nothing had happened. By eliminating the Chief Minister's office, Taizu effectively took over the entire administration of China and all administration officials became his servants. Taken together, Taizu's dramatic reforms put all the power of the imperial government in his hands and made him one of the most powerful emperors in Chinese history. It also set in place the seeds of the eventual downfall of the Ming Dynasty.

Beginning in 1364 and continuing to his death in 1396, Emperor Taizu spent a great deal of time working on and writing a new legal code for the Chinese. The resulting code, the da Ming lu, is China's most famous legal code. Starting from scratch, Taizu built a code of laws that was meant to address the practical needs of the Chinese people. The da Ming lu contained two sets of laws:  the lu, or "unchanging laws," and the li, a supplemental set of laws intended to meet changing conditions. Emperor Taizu and his immediate successors intended the li to be used only sparingly, fearing that if laws were changed too easily, people would lose confidence in them.

Emperor Taizu ordered a number of surveys taken, including a population census. The data obtained was recorded in government registers and used by the central government to regulate taxation and manage a growing population. Having risen to power as a rebel peasant himself, Taizu well understood the danger of social mobility and attempted to prevent it by making all occupations hereditary and grouping all members of Chinese society into three large hereditary classes:  peasants, craftspeople, and soldiers.

Scholarship and philosophy, two fields that had fallen on hard times under the Mongols, underwent a rebirth under Taizu. He not only sponsored scholarship in China, but studied quite a bit himself. He made a significant contribution to scholarship by reinstructing the civil-service examination system. Under Emperor Taizu, the formidable civil service examination became a three part examination at the district, provincial and imperial levels. To pass this new examination, candidates had to possess extremely detailed knowledge of the Chinese classics and an ability to compose essays and write with a high level of style in a rigorously difficult format. Emperor Taizu's reforms made the civil service examination a standard part of Chinese life and government administration up to the early twentieth century.

The sharp foreign policy disagreement in Kaesong over the issue of whether to be pro-Mongol or pro-Ming Chinese set off contentious debates that beset the government for generations. Ming China had become increasingly suspicious of Koryo's renewed association with the Mongols and the new de facto leadership under Yi In-im's conservative pro-Mongol faction. They also viewed Koryo's territorial ambitions in eastern Manchuria with alarm. Before Kaesong could reach a decision, Ming China shifted the whole tenure of its relationship with Koryo.

The Chinese turned away Koryo envoys enroute to the Ming court on the pretext that Koryo was sending them old and weak horses in tribute. Tensions over this crucial foreign policy protocol had not been resolved when, in 1388, the Ming dynasty proclaimed its intention to establish a commandery headquartered in the Ch'ollyong Pass at the southern end of the Hamgyong plain. The occupation of the area by the Ming Chinese army was tantamount annexing the entire northeastern territory once under the command of the Mongol Ssangsong Commandery. Even the pro-Ming officials in Kaesong viewed the move as a fearful encroachment into Koryo. It outraged the Koryo military. Wild rumors spread through Kaesong about outrageous Ming demands for young girls, eunuchs, artisans, and livestock. Koryo's senior military commander, General Choe Yong, consulted with General Yi Song-gye and determined that in order to reduce the perceived threat from Ming China, they would have to remove the pro-Mongol faction from power in Kaesong. Accordingly, Choe Yong, with support from Yi Song-gye and Cho Min-su, quickly removed Yi In-im and his group in a coup d'état and General Choe took personal control of the government.

There was a growing feeling in Kaesong that Koryo needed to take some kind of preemptive action against China. Advisors to King U goaded him into attacking the powerful Ming Chinese. Against universal opposition and in violation of the long-standing practice of not invading its neighbors, King U went a step further and insisted on attacking China proper. In the spring of 1388, General Choe Yong, with the backing of King U, decided to send a military expedition into the Liaodong region of Manchuria. General Yi Song-gye, who had experienced combat with the Mongols and the Jurchen and witnessed the fall of the Mongols at the hands of Ming armies, fully understood China's great power. He strongly opposed the campaign from its inception and, from a military perspective, felt the expedition was a useless endeavor. He harbored grave doubts whether Koryo, in its present weakened state, could reasonably expect any success against the Ming army. He feared that moving such a large body of troops into the northwest would strip the nation's southern defenses and leave Koryo exposed to renewed predatory raids by Japanese pirates.

General Choe Yong's expeditionary army assembled and got underway within two months, commanded by King U's two best generals, Cho Min-su and Yi Song-gye. General Choe launched the campaign from his command headquarters in Pyongyang at the onset of the summer rainy season. By the time Yi Song-gye and Cho Min-su reached the Yalu River, heavy rains had turned the countryside into a sea of mud. Disease and desertion took a heavy toll on the Koryo peasant soldiers encamped on Wihwa Island near the mouth of the Yalu. The bleakness of the situation convinced Yi Song-gye that he faced certain defeat.

Yi Song-gye sent a messenger back to Kaesong with a formal request that General Choe cancel the military campaign and permit him to withdraw his troops. Neither Choe Yong nor King U would abide by such a request however, and ordered him to proceed with the attack. Yi Song-gye knew that if he followed orders and pressed the attack against the Chinese it would lead to the defeat of Koryo and perhaps personal disgrace, even death. If he retreated however, it would be seen as rebellion against his king, his government, and his country.

On a rainy summer day along the banks of the Yalu River in 1388, Yi Song-gye made a personal decision that doomed the Koryo dynasty and forever altered Korean history. Without waiting for a reply from Kaesong, he ordered his troops off Wihwa Island and marched them directly back to the capital. Instead of attacking the Chinese, he and General Cho Min-su took on Choe Yong and King U. After overpowering the royal court's defenders and killing General Choe Yong, Yi Song-gye and Cho Min-su seized the throne from King U and took control of the government. The nearly bloodless coup had the enthusiastic support of a handful of men from the rising Neo-Confucian literati, members of an emerging political class disenchanted with the decrepit Koryo dynasty and its domination by a corrupt Buddhist aristocracy allied with the Mongols.

Rather than terminating the Koryo dynasty all at once and making himself king, Yi Song-gye shrewdly chose instead to consolidate his position first. He elevated King U's son, Crown Prince Chang, to the throne and proclaimed Neo-Confucianism the ideological orthodoxy of the new regime. In Nanjing, the Ming court refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Koryo's new king, just as they had done in the case of King U. Cho Min-su urged King Chang's removal from the throne. In 1389, after sitting less than a year as a convenient figurehead for the generals, a brief purge deposed King Chang on the pretext that he was not a legitimate heir to the throne, but a grandson of the Buddhist monk Sin Ton. Yi Song-gye and his supporters brought Wang Yo to the throne, a true member of the Wang royal house and a descendant of King Sinjong. Just as King U had been a puppet under Yi In-min, King Kongyang became a puppet of Yi Song-gye.

While carefully maintaining all the outward symbols and structures of Koryo's government, Yi Song-gye methodically instituted a thorough reform program that would transform Koryo into a model Confucian state from the inside out. Yi Song-gye and his heirs created new political, social and cultural institutions closely patterned on those of Song and Ming China. The newly risen literati class, Confucian scholar-officials who occupied most of the lower levels of Koryo's bureaucracy, long resented their inadequate compensation. They fervently hoped Yi Song-gye's reforms would follow the lines of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism. Since they already held the government posts needed for action, literati reform advocates directed new reform measures be put into effect immediately, even over the opposition of moderates within the government.

Koryo's new rulers faced the difficult challenge of gaining the upper hand in the seemingly never-ending battle with wealthy landowners, men who held the real power in the kingdom. Yi Song-gye clearly saw that he would have to break their stranglehold on the country before he could accomplish anything. In order to succeed, he would have to strip the old ruling elite of their landholdings and restore a sound fiscal basis for government, particularly military operations. Over a two year period between 1388 and 1390, his newly formed government conducted a massive cadastral survey of the kingdom. With a current land survey in hand, Yi Song-gye destroyed the legal basis of the landlords' power in a single dramatic gesture. He ordered all the old land registers, both public and private, piled high in the Kaesong marketplace and burned. In a single day, Yi Song-gye obliterated the economic foundation that supported Koryo's powerful families. He destroyed the stature and influence of the old aristocracy and erased the last vestiges of conservative power in the government.

The following year Yi Song-gye further energized the reform process by completely reorganizing the military and having himself appointed commander-in-chief. After securing the allegiance of the military by appointing loyal officers to all the higher military posts, he proceeded unopposed with further land reforms. The basic statute governing the new land system in Koryo, the Rank Land Law, went into effect that same year. The new law classified most of the land in Korea under the broad category of state land. The practical effect of this reclassification permitted the government to confiscate the old agricultural estates. Yi Song-gye compensated his supporters by assigning tracts of coastal lands, islands and newly reclaimed lands reserved for the support of the army to all civil and military officials. The resulting redistribution of landholdings in Koryo secured a new economic foundation for Korea.

Koryo's new Rank Land Law contained some significant innovations for the country. First, in order to prevent an estate holder from siphoning government revenues for personal gain, it held the owners of large estates just as liable for paying land taxes as the independent farmers. The Rank Land Law also brought rents under control for the first time by prohibiting landlords from charging rents in excess of one tenth of the tenant's crop. The law forbade landlords from evicting tenants without sufficient cause and forbid tenants from selling or otherwise abrogating their rights of tenancy without prior permission. In essence, the Rank Land Law secured government income, prevented the exploitation of farmers, firmly attached farmers to their land and, most importantly, aided in securing a more stable society.

Yi Song-gye, one of the two most widely acclaimed military commanders of the age, took control of the kingdom's economic power and made land reform a reality. His seizure of power as leader of the new Confucian literati class and his military post of Commander-in-Chief gave him control of the bureaucracy and the military. A few of his more powerful opponents had already been eliminated, including his one-time compatriot General Choe Yong. The only remaining obstacle to establishing a new dynasty in Koryo was the formality of the act itself. Yi Song-gye and his supporters swiftly forced the abdication of the puppet king Kongyang and sent him into exile to Wonju. Next, they executed most of the king's more prominent relatives to prevent rebels from rallying around the former royal family. Finally, Chong To-jon and others among the literati bureaucrats put Yi Song-gye forward by acclamation to ascend the throne. On the morning of August 5, 1392, the fifty-nine-year-old former army general mounted the Phoenix Throne in Kaesong as the first ruler of a new Korean dynasty.

The end of the Koryo dynasty and the establishment of a new dynasty caused a true dilemma among many Confucian government officials. Confucianism enjoined complete loyalty to the monarch at all times and made no provision for such a dramatic event as this. The Chinese had developed the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, an idea that aristocratic-minded Koryo did not accept. The dilemma ultimately split the government into two groups. Those officials who felt duty bound to stand by the old dynasty supported King Kongyang. Those officials who saw the old dynasty as no longer capable of ruling supported Yi Song-gye. Koryo's highest government office, the Privy Council, carefully moved to give the new dynasty every appearance of legitimacy by formally declaring the end of the Koryo dynasty and proclaimed Yi Song-gye to be the rightful king. Just as it had been done for the founder of the Koryo dynasty, Yi Song-gye received the posthumous title Taejo, Grand Progenitor, the title by which he is known to history. So began the royal house of Yi.