A History of Korea (34 page)

This presents, then, another reminder that the Mongol period, while certainly a time of humiliating subjugation to a foreign power, also left a more favorable imprint on Korean culture and identity. We certainly cannot discount the horrific circumstances of the long Mongol siege of the mid-thirteenth century, or of the way Lady Ki and countless other captives went to China in the first place. But her rise to the heights of the Mongol court—and hence to a status as perhaps the most powerful person in the world at one time—shows her as a fitting representative of how Koreans throughout history adapted to the realities of power among their neighbors. Korea’s first experience of integration into a truly global order—a mixture of brutal conquest, humiliating submission, and cultural exchange—shared its core features with the experience of other subject peoples in the Mongol empire who spanned all the way to Europe. The implications for the longer view of Korean history are especially important when comparing this interlude to the periods of foreign domination and intervention in the twentieth century.

In the short term as well, there were significant repercussions. The end of the Mongol period, for example, induced a concerted backlash among Korean elites, who, after two centuries of disruptions caused by both domestic and foreign usurpers, sought to restore a more stable and inward-looking form of rule. And in arousing the Red Turban rebellions, the Mongols were responsible for the rise of Yi S
nggye, a Korean military leader who made his name in repelling Red Turban invaders (as well as the so-called “Japanese pirates”) during the late Kory
era. Together, these two outcomes of Mongol rule contributed directly to the fall of the Kory
dynasty itself, and to the birth of a new dynastic order in Korea under Yi’s command.

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Kory
-Chos
n Transition

CHRONOLOGY

1383	First meeting between General Yi S nggye and Ch ng Toj n
1388	General Yi S nggye’s overthrow of the Kory ruling order
1392	Establishment of the Chos n dynasty
1398	Yi Pangw n’s purge of Ch ng Toj n; abdication of the throne by Yi S nggye
1400	Yi Pangw n’s ascension as the third Chos n monarch, King T’aejong
1418	Beginning of the reign of King Sejong the Great, son of King T’aejong
1446	Promulgation of the Korean alphabet