Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

The king now came to terms, and made a treaty in February, 1637, in which he utterly renounced his allegiance to the Ming emperor, agreed to give his two sons as hostages, promised to send an annual embassy, with tribute, to the Manchiu court, and to establish a market at the Border Gate, in Liao Tung. These covenants were ratified by the solemn ceremonial of the king, his sons and his ministers confessing their crimes and making “kow-tow” (bowing nine times to the earth). Tartar and Corean worshipped together before Heaven, and the altar erected to Heaven’s honor. A memorial stone, erected near this sacred place, commemorates the clemency of the Manchiu conqueror.

In obedience to the orders of their new masters, the Coreans despatched ships, loaded with grain, to feed the armies operating against Peking, and sent a small force beyond the Tumen to chastise a tribe that had rebelled against their conquerors. A picked body of their matchlock men was also admitted into the Manchiu service.

After the evacuation of Corea, the victors marched into China, where bloody, civil war was already raging. The imperial army [[159]]was badly beaten by the rebels headed by the usurper Li-tse-ching. The Manchius 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 Tâtar (vassal) was now a “Tartar.” The son of their late king was set upon the dragon-throne and proclaimed the Whang Ti, the Son of Heaven, and the Lord of the Middle Kingdom and all her vassals. The following tribute was fixed for Chō-sen to pay annually:

100 ounces of gold, 1,000 ounces of silver, 10,000 bags of rice, 2,000 pieces of silk, 300 pieces of linen, 10,000 pieces of cotton cloth, 400 pieces of hemp cloth, 100 pieces of fine hemp cloth, 10,000 rolls (fifty sheets each) of large paper, 1,000 rolls small sized paper, 2,000 knives (good quality), 1,000 ox-horns, 40 decorated mats, 200 pounds of dye-wood, 10 boxes of pepper, 100 tiger skins, 100 deer skins, 400 beaver skins, 200 skins of blue (musk?) rats.

When, as it happened the very next year, the shō-gun of Japan demanded an increase of tribute to be paid in Yedo, the court of Seoul plead in excuse their wasted resources consequent upon the war with the Manchius, and their heavy burdens newly laid upon them. Their excuse was accepted.

Twice, within a single generation, had the little peninsula been devastated by two mighty invasions that ate up the land. Between the mountaineers of the north, and “the brigands” from over the sea, Corea was left the Issachar among nations. The once strong ass couched down between two burdens. “And he saw that the rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant, and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute.”

The Manchius, being of different stock and blood from the Chinese, yet imposed their dress and method of wearing the hair upon the millions of Chinese people, but here their tyranny seemed to stop. Hitherto, the Chinese and Corean method of rolling the hair in a knot or ball, on the top of the head, had been the fashion for ages. As a sign of loyalty to the new rulers, all people in the Middle Kingdom were compelled to shave the forefront of the head and allow their hair to grow in a queue, or pig-tail, behind on their back. At first they resisted, and much blood was shed before all submitted; but, at length, the once odious mark of savagery and foreign conquest became the national fashion, and the Chinaman’s pride at home and abroad. Even in [[160]]foreign lands, they cling to this mark of their loyalty as to life and country. The object of the recent queue-cutting plots, fomented by the political, secret societies of China, is to insult the imperial family at Peking by robbing the Chinese of their loyal appendage, and the special sign of the Tartar dominion.

As a special favor to the Coreans who first submitted to the new masters of Kathay, they were spared the infliction of the queue, and allowed to dress their hair in the ancient style.

The Corean king hastened to send congratulations to the emperor, Shun Chi, which ingratiated him still more in favor at Peking. In 1650 a captive Corean maid, taken prisoner in their first invasion, became sixth lady in rank in the imperial household. Through her influence her father, the ambassador, obtained a considerable diminution of the annual tribute, fixed upon in the terms of capitulation in 1637. In 1643, one-third of this tribute had been remitted, so that, by this last reduction, in 1650, the tax upon Corean loyalty was indeed very slight. Indeed it has long been considered by the Peking government that the Coreans get about as much as they give, and the embassy is one of ceremony rather than of tribute-bringing. Their offering is rather a percentage paid for license to trade, than a symbol of vassalage. Nevertheless, the Coreans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found out, to their cost, that any lack of due deference was an expensive item of freedom. Every jot and tittle, or tithe of the mint or anise of etiquette, was exacted by the proud Manchius. In 1695, the king of Chō-sen was fined ten thousand ounces of silver for the omission of some punctilio of vassalage. At the investiture of each sovereign in Seoul, two grandees were sent from Peking to confer the patent of royalty. The little bill for this costly favor was about ten thousand taels, or dollars, in silver. The Coreans also erected, near one of the gates of Seoul, a temple, which still stands, in honor of the Manchius general commanding the invasion, and to whom, to this day, they pay semi-divine honors. Yet to encourage patriotism it was permitted, by royal decree, to the descendants of the minister who refused, at the Yalu River, to allow the Manchius to cross, and who thereby lost his life, to erect to his memory a monumental gate, a mark of high honor only rarely granted.