The War in the East: Japan, China, and Corea

by Trumbull White

The possession of Fusan by the Japanese was, until 1876, a perpetual witness of the humiliating defeat of the Coreans in the war of 1592-1597, and a constant irritation to their national pride. Yet with all the miseries inflicted on her, the humble nation learned rich lessons, and gained many an advantage even from her enemy. The embassies which were yearly dispatched to yield homage to their late invaders were at the expense of the latter. The Japanese pride purchased the empty bubble of homage by paying all the bills.

The home of the Manchoos was on the north side of the Ever-white mountains. From beyond these mountains was to roll upon China and Corea another avalanche of invasion. By the sixteenth century the Manchoos had become so strong that they openly defied the Chinese. Formidable expeditions previous to the Japanese invasion of Corea kept them at bay for a time, but the immense expenditure of life and treasure required to fight the Japanese drained the resources of the Ming emperors, while their attention being drawn away from the north, the Manchoo hordes massed their forces and grew daily in strength. To repress the rising power in the north, and to smother the life of the young nation, the Peking government resorted to barbarous cruelties and stern coercion. Unable to protect the eastern border of Liao Tung the entire population of three hundred thousand souls, dwelling in four cities and many villages, were removed westward and resettled on new lands. Fortresses were planned in the deserted land to keep back the restless cavalry raiders from the north. Thus the foundation of the neutral strip of fifty miles was unconsciously laid, and ten thousand square miles of fair and fertile land west of the Yalu were abandoned to the wolf and tiger. What it soon became it remained until yesterday—a howling wilderness.

In 1615 the king of the Manchoo tribes was assassinated as the result of a plot by the Ming emperor. This exasperated the tribes to vengeance and they began hostilities. China now had to face another great invasion. Calling on her vassal, Corea, to send an army of twenty thousand men, she ordered them to join the imperial army about seventy miles west of the Yalu River. In the battle which ensued the Coreans were the first to face the Manchoos. The imperial legions were beaten, and the Coreans seeing which way the victory would turn, deserted from the Chinese side to that of their enemy. This was in 1619. Enraged by alternate treachery to both sides from the Coreans, the Manchoos invaded Corea in 1627, to which time the war had been prolonged. They crossed the frozen Yalu in February, and at once attacked and defeated the Chinese army. They then began the march to Seoul. Town after town was taken as they pressed onward to the capital, the Coreans everywhere flying before them. Thousands of dwellings and stores of provisions were given to the flames and their trail was one of blood and ashes. After the siege of Seoul began, the king sent tribute offerings to the invaders, and concluded a treaty of peace, by which Corea again exchanged masters, this time confessing subjection to the Manchoo sovereign. As soon as the invading army had withdrawn, the Corean king, confident that the Chinese would be ultimately successful over the Manchoos, annulled the treaty. No sooner were the Manchoos able to spare their forces for the purpose than they again marched into Corea and overran the peninsula.

The king now came to terms, and in February, 1637, utterly renounced his allegiance to the Ming emperor, gave his two sons as hostages, and promised to send an annual embassy with tribute to the Manchoo court. After the evacuation of Corea the victors marched into China, where bloody civil war was raging. The imperial army of China had been beaten by the rebels. The Manchoos joined their forces with the imperialists and defeated the rebels, and then demanded the price of their victory. Entering Peking they proclaimed the downfall of the house of Ming. The son of the late king was set upon the dragon throne, and as we have seen in a foregoing chapter the royal house of China came to be a Manchoo family.

When, as it happened the very next year, the shogun of Japan demanded an increase of tribute to be paid in Yeddo, the court of Seoul plead in excuse their wasted resources, consequent upon the war with the Manchoos, and their heavy burdens newly laid upon them in the way of tribute to their conqueror. Their excuse was accepted. Twice within a single generation had the little peninsula been devastated[devastated] by mighty invasion that laid waste the country.

COAST NEAR CHEMULPO.

In 1650 a captive Corean maid, taken prisoner in their first invasion, became sixth lady in rank in the imperial Manchoo household. Through her influence her father, the ambassador, obtained a considerable reduction of the annual tribute that had been fixed by treaty. Other portions of the tribute had been remitted before, so that by this time the tax upon Corean loyalty became very slight, and the embassy became one of ceremony rather than a tribute bringing.

In the seventeenth century some information about Corea began to reach Europe, first from the Jesuits in Peking, who sent home a map of the peninsula. There is also a map of Corea in a work by the Jesuit Martini, published in 1649 in Amsterdam. The Cossacks who overran northern Asia brought reports of Corea to Russia, and it was from Russian sources that Sir John Campbell obtained the substance of his history of Corea. In 1645 a party of Japanese crossed the peninsula, and one of them on his return wrote a book descriptive of their journey. In 1707[In 1707] the Jesuits in Peking began their great geographical enterprise, the survey of the Chinese empire, including the outlying vassal kingdoms. A map of Corea was obtained from the king’s palace at Seoul and sent to Europe to be engraved and printed. From this original most of the maps and supposed Corean names in books published since that time have been copied.

The first known entrance of any number of Europeans into Corea was that of Hollanders belonging to the crew of the Dutch ship Hollandra which was driven ashore in 1627. Coasting along the Corean shores, John Wetterree and some companions went ashore to get water, and were captured by the natives. The magnates of Seoul probably desired to have a barbarian from the west, as useful to them as was the Englishman Will Adams to the Japanese in Yeddo, where the Corean ambassadors had often seen him. This explains why Wetterree was treated with kindness and comparative honor, though kept as a prisoner. When the Manchoos invaded Corea in 1635, his two companions were killed in the war, and Wetterree was left alone. Having no one with whom he could converse he had almost forgotten his native speech, when after twenty-seven years of exile, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, he met some of his fellow Hollanders, and acted as interpreter to the Coreans.