A History of Korea (9 page)

The Kogury
commander assigned to relay this message to the Sui forces,
lchi Mund
k, would go down in Korean historical lore as one of its most heroic figures, not for negotiating a surrender to the Chinese—for this was but a ploy—but for destroying the Sui army during its slow retreat back to China. As it trod northward along the northwestern coast of the peninsula and found its way to the Salsu River (known as the Ch’
ngch’
n River today),
lchi readied his troops. As the Sui soldiers crossed the river, the Kogury
forces unleashed a barrage of attacks that utterly destroyed the Chinese army. Among the strategies deployed was the releasing of dammed water up-river that overwhelmed many of the Chinese soldiers. The Korean historical records note that the Sui army, which had begun with over 300,000 soldiers laying siege to Pyongyang, numbered a mere 2700 when it reached Liaodong several weeks later. It would go down as one of the monumental defeats in world history; rarely had such an enormous force—beginning with over a million soldiers—suffered such a devastating defeat from a severely outmanned counterpart. For the Kogury
, and for Koreans looking back on their history of constant
suffering at the hands of foreign invaders, this episode constituted a victory of epic proportions.

The stupendous scale of this defeat did not deter the Sui emperor, however, from launching another invasion the next year, and yet another in 614. Both subsequent efforts also failed to conquer Kogury
, but the kingdom was undoubtedly weakened by these campaigns. The Sui dynasty, though, also paid a price; it began to collapse shortly thereafter, partly because of the enormous cost of these conquest attempts. The succeeding unified Chinese dynasty, the Tang, followed up with campaigns of its own in the 640s, but these, too, met with failure due to fierce resistance under the direction of the military dictator of Kogury
, Y
n Kaesomun. It was evident that the Chinese would not be able to destroy Kogury
on their own, and indeed it took an alliance with the peninsular kingdom of Silla, which had chafed at Kogury
’s imposing presence, for this to take place. The political unification of the Korean peninsula would finally come in 668 through the destruction of Kogury
at the hands of the joint Silla-Tang forces.