Hungrily they turned their faces toward China.
In spite of the intense chagrin of the foiled Chinese leader, so great was his admiration for the valor of the besieged that he sent the Koraian commander a valuable present of rolls of silk. The Koraians were unable to pursue the flying invaders, and few fell by their weapons. But hunger, the fatigue of crossing impassable oceans of worse than Virginia mud, cold winds, and snow storms destroyed thousands of the Chinese on their weary homeward march over the mountain passes and quagmires of Liao Tung. The net results of the campaign were great glory to Korai; [[44]]and besides the loss of ten cities, 70,000 of her sons were captives in China, and 40,000 lay in battle graves.
According to a custom which Californians have learned in our day, the bones of the Chinese soldiers who died or were killed in the campaign were collected, brought into China, and, with due sacrificial rites and lamentations by the emperor, solemnly buried in their native soil. Irregular warfare still continued between the two countries, the offered tribute of Korai being refused, and the emperor waiting until his resources would justify him in sending another vast fleet and army against defiant Korai. While thus waiting he died.
After a few years of peace, his successor found occasion for war, and, in 660 A.D., despatched the expedition which crushed Hiaksai, the ally of Korai, and worried, without humbling, the latter state. In 664 Korai lost its able leader, the regicide prime minister—that rock against which the waves of Chinese invasion had dashed again and again in vain.
His son, who would have succeeded to the office of his father, was opposed by his brother. The latter, fleeing to China, became guide to the hosts again sent against Korai “to save the people and to chastise their rebellious chiefs.” This time Korai, without a leader, was doomed. The Chinese armies having their rear well secured by a good base of supplies, and being led by skilful commanders, marched on from victory to victory, until, at the Yalu River, the various detachments united, and breaking the front of the Korai army, scattered them and marched on to Ping-an. The city surrendered without the discharge of an arrow. The line of kings of Korai came to an end after twenty-eight generations, ruling over 700 years.
All Korai, with its five provinces, its 176 cities, and its four or five millions of people, was annexed to the Chinese empire. Tens of thousands of Koraian refugees fled into Shinra, thousands into Pu-hai, north of the Tumen, then a rising state; and many to the new country of Japan. Desolated by slaughter and ravaged by fire and blood, war and famine, large portions of the land lay waste for generations. Thus fell the second of the Corean kingdoms, and the sole dominant state now supreme in the peninsula was Shinra, an outline of whose history we shall proceed to give. [[45]]
CHAPTER VII.
EPOCH OF THE THREE KINGDOMS.—SHINRA.
When Shinra becomes first known to us from Japanese tradition, her place in the peninsula is in the southeast, comprising portions of the modern provinces of Kang-wen and Kiung-sang. The people in this warm and fertile part of the peninsula had very probably sent many colonies of settlers over to the Japanese Islands, which lay only a hundred miles off, with Tsushima for a stepping-stone. It is probable that the “rebels” in Kiushiu, so often spoken of in old Japanese histories, were simply Coreans or their descendants, as, indeed, the majority of the inhabitants of Kiushiu originally had been. The Yamato tribe, which gradually became paramount in Japan, were probably immigrants of old Kokorai stock, that is, men of the Fuyu race, who had crossed from the north of Corea over the Sea of Japan, to the land of Sunrise, just as the Saxons and Engles pushed across the North Sea to England. They found the Kumaso, or Kiushiu “rebels,” troublesome, mainly because these settlers from the west, or southern mainland of Corea, considered themselves to be the righteous owners of the island rather than the Yamato people. At all events, the pretext that led the mikado Chiu-ai, who is said to have reigned from 192 to 200 A.D., to march against them was, that these people in Kiushiu would not acknowledge his authority. His wife, the Amazonian queen Jingu, was of the opinion that the root of the trouble was to be found in the peninsula, and that the army should be sent across the sea. Her husband, having been killed in battle, the queen was left to carry out her purposes, which she did at the date said to be 202 A.D. She set sail from Hizen, and reached the Asian mainland probably at the harbor of Fusan. Unable to resist so well-appointed a force, the king of Shinra submitted and became the declared vassal of Japan. Envoys from Hiaksai and another of the petty kingdoms also came to the Japanese camp and made friends with the invaders. After [[46]]a two months’ stay, the victorious fleet, richly laden with precious gifts and spoil, returned.