A History of Korea (20 page)

By the time of the Unified Silla kingdom, the original highest rank of Hallowed Bone had dissipated, and the monarchy and top officials came from the True Bone ranks. Those in Head Rank Six to Head Rank Four (presumably the head ranks reached down all the way to one) comprised the hereditary elites and could attain government office, but they encountered limitations in gaining the highest posts. Chang appears not to have fit into any of these upper head ranks, and so his attempts to ingratiate himself into the governing order likely generated gasps of shock at such a violation of social norms. He was, in other words, a prime example of both the flexibility and rigidity of the Silla social hierarchy—able to rise to prominence as a local strongman engaged in maritime commerce, but unable to overcome the barriers to social and political power at the center.

Probably the best known example of the constraints to talent imposed by the Silla social hierarchy was Ch’oe Ch’iw
n, the most prominent intellectual figure of the era and archetype of the Confucian scholar-official in traditional Korea. Ch’oe, born into Head Rank Six a decade after Chang Pogo’s death, traveled to China to study at the age of twelve, likely following the example of many precocious Sillans of the age. Ch’oe’s talents, however, were exceptional. He passed the Tang civil service examination, a remarkable feat on its own, and before he turned twenty had already achieved renown, particularly as the scribe and advisor to the Tang official in charge of putting down a major rebellion.
(This uprising would eventually lead to the fall of the Tang dynasty itself.) Ch’oe managed to return home to Silla in his late-twenties and took high office. He appears soon, however, to have chafed at the barriers, in both promotion possibilities and policy implementation, put up by the Silla sociopolitical hierarchy, and withdrew from the capital to take provincial posts and eventually to retire to the haven of a Buddhist temple. His works—including a famous “Ten-Point Policy Recommendation” to the final female Silla monarch, Queen Chins
ng, as well as a chronicle of his observations while in the service of the Tang emperor—displayed the full range of his scholarly expertise, from Buddhism and Confucianism to poetry. Only a fraction of his voluminous writings remains today, but they were prized and rediscovered throughout the subsequent course of Korean history. Like those of Chang Pogo himself, Ch’oe Ch’iw
n’s life and times offer a window into the final phase of a golden age in ancient Korea, when Silla showed both its maturity and its old age.

SILLA AND NORTHEAST ASIA

That Ch’oe Ch’iw
n and Chang Pogo both made their reputations and gained seminal experience in China before applying these lessons back in their homeland illuminates the vibrant connections that Silla enjoyed at the crossroads (or cross-straits) of the northeast Asian region. In fact, Chang Pogo’s influence extended to Japan and likely beyond northeast Asia, and indeed there might not have been a Korean historical figure better-known outside northeast Asia until the twentieth century. Most of the sources upon which his biographical portrait has been constructed and embellished, in fact, are from China and Japan. Especially influential were the writings of the great Tang poet Du Mu, whose familiarity with Chang reflects Chang’s considerable fame and what appear to be strong connections to the Chinese elite, and the chronicles of the Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin.

According to Ennin’s fascinating “Account of Travels in Tang for the Purpose of Seeking the Law,” the Sillans in Shandong
constituted a thriving community that dominated the regional maritime trading system. Centered around the Korean Buddhist temples, the Sillans built a home away from home, carrying forth with their own ways of life and trading. Indeed Ennin witnessed a major Korean-Buddhist festival that endured for three days, another festival commemorating Silla’s victory over Kogury
150 years earlier (!), and other expressions of Silla’s collective identity. Although Ennin never recounts meeting him, Chang Pogo, not the king of Silla, is the looming authority figure to whom this community answered. So moved was Ennin by the kind treatment and protection offered to him by Chang’s surrogates in the Shandong Silla society that the monk wrote the great man a letter of gratitude. To Ennin, Chang was clearly the mastermind and dominant figure behind this intricately and efficiently designed network of merchants, monks, and others who plied back and forth from the Korean peninsula to the eastern coast of China.

From this base of operations Chang’s agents in turn connected to a vast trading network that stretched all the way to eastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula, merchants from which, it appears, also visited Silla. The items that flowed through these passages in northeast Asia originally reflected the official commerce in tribute goods such as ginseng and silk, but by the time Chang achieved his dominant position based in Ch’
nghae Fortress, trade items also included animal products such as horns, falcons, and sealskins, and particularly ceramic goods. In fact, Chang appears to have facilitated significantly the process of not only circulating Chinese ceramics, among the best in the world, but also of applying Chinese ceramics technologies to further develop a native Korean ceramics industry on the southern coast of the peninsula. The prime locations connected with Korean ceramics, including Kangjin and Namhae Island, are usually associated with the subsequent Kory
era, but this development might have begun in Chang’s time. Excavations of both ceramic factories and shipwrecks from the era have added to this impression that Korea’s maritime power once served as a stimulus for economic activity in the country. Such a connection between Korea’s seafaring potential and internal development has reached another peak over the
past thirty years in South Korea, with its export-oriented industrial growth and the preeminent position of Korean companies in the global shipbuilding industry.

Indeed Chang Pogo’s commanding influence over trade in northeast Asia tells us much about Silla’s relationship to the region as a whole, and it stimulates further thinking about the standing of Silla in the longer trajectory of Korean history. In one sense, Chang Pogo’s activities suggest that this period represented a peak in Korea’s capacity to take advantage of its geography at the center of northeast Asia instead of being victimized by these circumstances, as it did repeatedly both before and after Chang. Furthermore, Chang’s story shows that, in this particular era of Korean history at least, trade and commerce could indeed play a dominant role in the country’s economy, enough to allow one particular merchant to use his wealth and power to play political mediator and, indeed, even kingmaker. Both tendencies—Korea’s commercial prominence in northeast Asia and the force of economic activity in the realms of politics, society, and culture—are being pursued by Korean leaders in the early twenty-first century. Since the 1990s a steady stream of Chang-related developments has rekindled interest in, and furthered the mythologizing of, Chang Pogo: the establishment of tourist-oriented memorials and museums in Shandong, site of the temple complex that Chang established; and pop culture products in Korea such as the “God of the Seas” hit television series. These developments, however, also have the potential of contributing further to expansive visions of Korean identity and standing in the context of globalization and regional integration. Chang serves, then, as an embodiment of the dreams of Korean prominence in the region through regional integration. If it could be done before, so the thinking goes, it can be done again, with Koreans in the lead.