A History of Korea (15 page)
Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
Kim Ch’unch’u would gain fame as the ambitious enabler of Silla’s unification. He laid the diplomatic groundwork, through his trips to China as Silla’s royal envoy, for the indispensable alliance with the Tang dynasty. For this, he would also be eventually excoriated by some modern historians for setting a precedent of subservience. Later, after being enthroned as King Muy
l in 654, Ch’unch’u cemented this relationship with China, which paid off when, in early 660, the Tang emperor sent 130,000 Chinese troops to the western coast in order to join Silla in its attack on Paekche forces. Paekche would fall that summer in the famous Battle of Hwangsanbl. Ch’unch’u died the following year, and it would be his son, the next Silla king, who would oversee the completion of the unification project under the direction of Kim Yusin.
If Kim Ch’unch’u has faced a mixed reception among modern historians, Kim Yusin has continued to enjoy a positive assessment.
The military hero of the unification wars, Kim Yusin’s popular standing has as much to do with the many legendary stories of his exploits as with his historically verifiable accomplishments, which were spectacular to begin with. First, he played a central role, as Kim Ch’unch’u’s brother-in-law, in providing the political and military support for Ch’unch’u to ascend to the throne in the first place. He served thereafter as Ch’unch’u’s right-hand man in efforts to solidify the alliance with Tang China, consolidate and strengthen monarchical control, and carry out the military campaigns against Paekche. As the leader of Silla’s forces, Kim Yusin is credited with defeating and eventually conquering Paekche, and with mapping out the plan to conquer Kogury. The defeat of Kogury, again in partnership with the Tang forces, came finally in 668, but not without the threat of Silla itself becoming absorbed by the Chinese ally. When Tang forces remained in Korea to enforce the Chinese emperor’s claims to dominion over the peninsula as a whole, Kim Yusin led the resistance in what has come to be known as the Silla–Tang War of the 670s. Kim’s eventual success in driving out the Chinese from the peninsula was tempered by the compromise reached for the sake of peace, namely the limitation of Silla’s advance into Kogury’s old territory. While modern historians would lament this outcome, Kim Yusin’s heroic status remains untainted. In fact it has spawned a modern romanticization of Kim and especially of the troupe of young men that had trained him, the
Hwarang
.
The
Hwarang
, literally the “Flower Youth” Corps, appears to have risen to prominence during the reign of Queen Sndk’s father, King Chinp’yng. The
History of the Three Kingdoms
, which seems to have used as a reference a work called the
Chronicles of the Hwarang
(
Hwarang segi
), includes a few passages that portray the
Hwarang
as a youth group that inculcated the spirit of camaraderie, learning, and service. Kim Yusin was the most famous
Hwarang
graduate, but prominent also were his son, Wnsul, and Kwanch’ang, a brave youth who died in the decisive battle against Paekche in 660. The legendary standing of these three, and the relative absence of
Hwarang
actions in the records after the
seventh century, point again to the appropriation of people, events, and legends for the historical legitimation of the Silla unification. Such an exercise was not limited to the Silla unification, however. Even before, but particularly after, the controversial discovery of a manuscript of
The Chronicles
of the Hwarang
in the late 1980s, political and cultural leaders in South Korea pointed to this troupe as a model for traditional values, patriotism, national service, and even the martial arts.
Paekche, the Third Kingdom
The debate about the national legitimacy of Silla’s unification of the Three Kingdoms is itself based on the notion of the Three Kingdoms being somehow “Korean” because what later became Korea occupied the same geographical territory as the Three Kingdoms. Such a structuring of the past according to what happened later—what historians call the fallacy of
teleology—
overlooks the political as well as nationalistic motivations for devising such narratives of legitimation and primordial national character. Furthermore, this premise tends to downgrade other important elements of ancient history on the peninsula, in particular the “third kingdom” of Paekche. In addition to being a major political and cultural entity, Paekche best reflected the complex, close ties between the peninsular polities and those in the islands to the east that, around the same time as the Silla unification, formed what we now call Japan.
At one time Paekche might have been the most dynamic and powerful of the three kingdoms. It enjoyed the economic advantages of occupying the peninsula’s fertile south-central and southwestern regions, which also provided easier access to China for trade and cultural exchange. Although the mythologies of this kingdom date its founding to the first century BCE by migrants from the north, historical records more soundly place its emergence in the fourth century CE. The early
Paekche state, however, was driven from its original position around present-day Seoul further southward, and for the last two centuries of its existence until 660, Paekche territory commanded the southwestern portion of the peninsula. There it developed a sophisticated political and economic system, but achieved its most impressive advances in religion and culture. Indeed Buddhism’s paramount position in Paekche civilization appears to have inspired the most outstanding examples of religious artifacts from the ancient era.
Paekche transmitted many of these cultural advances, including technologies in metallurgy and architecture, to the polities that began forming simultaneously across the strait in the Japanese islands. The archaeological and historical evidence, including from ancient Japanese sources, of consistent, active interaction between the archipelago and the states on the peninsula is overwhelming. So strong were the ties between the early Japanese state and Paekche, in particular, that when Paekche battled Silla in the unification wars, aid arrived from the islands, and after Paekche’s defeat in 660, many of its rulers fled to Japan. These developments reinforced a connection that likely dated back several centuries. But how close was this connection? Did, for example, Paekche rulers contribute to establishing the Japanese royal line, and if so, to what extent? In 2001 the Japanese emperor himself acknowledged the Paekche contributions to his ancestry, which further complicated the historical claims on both sides. But the larger lesson is that there were no such things as Korea and Japan before the seventh century, and that these two countries began as political constructs rather than as primordial civilizations.
