China's Failed Imperialism in Japan & Korea
A History of Mankind (361)
In 608, when a Japanese warlord claiming the title of emperor sent actual Emperor Yang a letter seeking to establish equal relations between the two rulers, the Chinese ruler was so upset that he ordered that no insolent letters from foreign kingpins should ever reach him again1.
All the same, three years later, a chance encounter with a Korean envoy led to Emperor Yang’s ill-fated decision to force the king of “Goguryeo” to visit China to submit in person or face the consequences.
Japan wasn’t so much a problem as an occasional source of irritation for China. Irregular ties between China and Japan reached a peak in the 3rd century, when Queen Himiko, likely based in the state of Yamato to the south of Japan’s main island, Honshu, is attested by Chinese sources as displaying great enthusiasm for Chinese technology and culture. At the time, prestige derived from direct imports from China, avoiding the usual Korean middlemen, helped to shore up the power of Japanese warlords who were able to secure such products.
Following Himiko’s death, ties lapsed until more than a dozen Japanese missions visited the southern dynasties to request titles, seals of office, bronze mirrors and military banners. A reason for Emperor Yang’s anger is the contrast between such obsequiousness and the fact that Japanese envoys, by the 7th century, no longer sought titles or recognition from China.
The Japanese states of Honshu had evolved quickly over the 6th century, becoming adept imitators of Chinese customs and fashions. Over the 7th century, Buddhist preachers like Korea’s Hvekwan and China’s Chizo did much to anchor the religion firmly in Japan’s culture and tradition, so that by the 8th century it was Japanese monks and scholars, like Chizo’s disciple Doji, who traveled to China in search of texts and learning.
Mostly through Korea, the Japanese introduced the Chinese writing system and established a legal code on the Chinese model. The oldest Japanese book, the Kojiki chronicle of historical and mythological evens, was written in Chinese, with only some Japanese songs transcribed using Chinese characters as phonemes; a century later, after the Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin traveled through China in the 830s and 840s, he wrote his impressions about the country in Chinese for learned Japanese, the local audience who could read the language2.
Indeed, it probably was because of China’s influence that Japan, perennially divided among competing warlords, did eventually have emperors picked among the elites as representative leaders of the archipelago – for tasks such as writing letters of salutation to their Chinese counterparts.
A Chinese-style capital was built in 645 on the old ramshackle Yamato port of Osaka, with a palace of which little survives to this day, although the capital was moved inland within a decade, possibly to increase the emperor’s safety from naval raids. Looking to give the position an appropriate gravitas, and in the absence of any written history worth recovering, some of the first Japanese scholars crafted over the next few years a list of ancient emperors that, like those of many other countries, were almost entirely fictitious.
A strong sense of national belonging, born of isolation, geography and a very homogenous ethnic mix, is evident in the fact that Japanese elites later accepted almost without complaint the list, and the self-evidently absurd idea that Japan had been ruled by emperors since the time of Emperor Jimmu in the 7th century BC.
It’s not until the mid-6th century that Kimmei, traditionally regarded as Japan’s 29th emperor, can be attested as a living, existing person who resided in Yamato. He was barely older than the oldest business corporation in the world to survive to the 21st century: Osaka-based Kongo Gumi, a construction firm founded by three Korean craftsmen who took a commission from Japan’s semi-legendary Prince Shotoku, a great patron of Buddhism, in 578.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Japanese emperors, at best, may have had a limited role in gathering military support for campaigns against the so-called “Emishi,” known as “Hairy People” by Chinese chroniclers. These were Ainu tribesmen who fought Japanese encroachment in northern Honshu until the mid-9th century. After their defeat, some of the Emishi were absorbed among the Japanese population, while others moved north to the Ainu island of Hokkaido — which remained untouched by Japanese colonization until the 17th century and was only annexed to Japan in the late 19th century.
Japan, thus, was for the Chinese was a distant, dirt-poor, cold land that was both almost inaccessible and of little interest except for those inclined to mystic beliefs about magical potions of immortality. That wasn’t the case with Korea, long been seen as a barbarian land of promise in need of Chinese civilizing.
This perception, however, was less true in the early 7th century than it had been before. The three Korean states of Goguryeo, Baekje/Paekche and Silla, with the latter on the peninsula’s most isolated eastern coast, had evolved quickly and prospered through their role of intermediaries for most trade of Chinese luxuries into Japan.
Goguryeo, in particular, had expanded significantly after the collapse of the Han Dynasty, extending its control over much of the modern Chinese region of Manchuria/Dongbei. From their fortified capital at Pyongyang, Goguryeo kings felt themselves strong enough to raid Sui territory in alliance with Manchurian tribesmen, as they did in 5983.
This raid infuriated then-emperor Yang Jian, who ordered a large-scale, land-and-sea invasion of Goguryeo that was only stopped by terrible weather and later apologies from the Korean king. The aborted invasion certainly was in the mind of his son and successor when Emperor Yang in 611 announced a punitive expedition against the Korean upstarts – in a spirit similar to Rome’s Trajan when, in the 2nd century, he marshalled forces to humble Dacia in a way that, he felt, his own predecessor Domitian hadn’t dared4.
The bloody conquest of Dacia eventually became the crowning — if thorny — glory of Trajan’s reign, still commemorated in the Column standing in central Rome. For Emperor Yang, however, the Korean campaign was, from the very beginning, an absolute disaster.
An extra tax paid for the whole campaign, further irritating the gentry and those unfortunate enough to be made to pay it. Resources were marshalled from all across the empire: experienced riverine boatmen were brought from the Huai and Yangtze River valleys to build a fleet of seagoing vessels along the northern shore of the Shandong Peninsula; 30,000 javelin-throwers – probably aborigines – from the far south, 30,000 crossbowmen and 600,000 peasants carrying supplies on wheelbarrows5 marched all the way to the staging area near modern Beijing6.
Grumbling about the expenses and effort involved in all of these preparations, coming so soon after the exertions already imposed on millions to build grand palaces and what later became the Grand Canal, was widespread even before any Chinese armies entered Goguryeo.
Rumors, that proved to be false, spread that the profligate emperor had built for himself a costly “labyrinth of pleasure” with secret chambers filled with concubines (contemporary accounts provide the obviously inflated of 100,000 palace women) and elixirs in the city of Jiangdu, modern Yangzhou just northeast of the old southern capital at Jiankang/Nanjing. These rumors only worsened tensions among generals, officials and the rank-and-file – particularly since they mirrored old mythology about dynastic decadence involving orgies in alcohol-filled pools and the like.
Desertion, contributing to fill bands of mountain rebels, was a major problem as the army finally headed north in 612 and spread across Manchuria, looking to occupy all the main Goguryeo cities and strongholds. The dispersion, combined with Emperor Yang’s constant micro-managing of the operations, led to ineffectiveness, with the city of Liaodong/Liaoyang, 700 kilometers northwest of modern Beijing, becoming a particularly tough nut to crack.
A naval assault on the Goguryeo capital at Pyongyang, sitting about 20 kilometers inland from the Taedong River mouth, resulted in disaster7. The whole situation was compounded by supply difficulties and a overall lack of communications across the army that would have been familiar to the Persian commanders who invaded Greece in the early 5th century BC, with an army just as massive and unwieldy: when Chinese troops pulled back to winter quarters, their losses numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
In the spring of 613, the army restocked with sophisticated siege engines and refilled with new recruits and marched back into Manchuria, for what would be a short campaign: by the summer, the troops withdrew after a rebellion near Luoyang, led by the son of a prominent general, gathered strength. The rebellion was crushed and its leaders executed in gruesome fashion, but another rebellion in the Yangtze River valley forced the emperor to dispatch one of his finest generals, Wang Shichong, there as effective southern viceroy; and Wang commanded a significant number of soldiers that couldn’t be sent again to Goguryeo.
Undeterred, Emperor Yang launched another campaign targeting Goguryeo in the spring of 614, one that went as badly as the first one. As desertions mounted, the army turned to massive executions of those caught trying to escape; the campaign petered out after Goguryeo sued for peace, with the Chinese emperor unwilling to settle with the Koreans but apparently satisfied that they had been humbled, at least to some extent.
Back in China, rebellions kept popping up all over the place, and various plots, real of imaginary, led to mass executions. Concerned that northern rebels would overrun Luoyang, the emperor moved south to Jiangdu, the city where he had allegedly built his pleasurable labyrinth; there, he contemplated the collapse of his empire, under the attack of no fewer than a dozen warlords all over China, with a literary bent and aplomb not unlike those deployed by Mark Antony at Alexandria over 600 years prior.
In the spring of 618, the unavoidable denouement arrived as his last loyalists mutinied. The emperor was hastily strangled and replaced by one of his grandsons, aged thirteen, who was effectively controlled by the leader of the loyalist mutiny. This leader was the northern aristocrat Li Yuan, scion of a prominent family with roots in the Northern Zhou, whose grandfather had been a close associate of the great Yuwen Tai who created the “fubing” militia system.
China filled with rebels and claimants to the throne, and the unavoidable, recurrent, Yellow Turban-style agrarian violence against representatives of the upper-classes reemerged: Meng Haigong, one of the rebel leaders, ordered the execution of anyone who could quote from the Confucian classics8, implicitly asking for the wipeout of all the educated classes wherever his troops were in control.
In 619, the Year of Sorrow for Heraclius and Muhammad on the other side of Eurasia, the political situation improved slightly and some of the rebellions were put down. So Li Yuan had the teenager murdered and made himself emperor, founding the new Tang Dynasty under which China would reach the apex of its power and global influence.
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The letter, from Prince Shotoku, was a bit insolent: he claimed to address the ruler of the land of the setting sun, as ruler of the land of the rising sun, wordplay based on the Chinese characters used for the name of Japan itself (“Nihon” in Japanese, “Riben” in Chinese: 日本), which can be read as “Land of the Rising Sun.”
See “Enin’s Diary: the Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law,” trans. by Edwin O. Reischauer (Ronald Press Company, 1955). In his preface, Reischauer notes the difficulties presented by certain colloquialisms used by Ennin in the text – being a foreign speaker, it’s not really clear whether he took note of phrases and usages of great interest for modern scholars, or whether he just wrongly transcribed a few things. Ennin was, however, an excellent and reliable chronicler: “When Ennin quotes hearsay, the text is full of accuracies, but when he records what he himself did or saw there is an extremely high degree of accuracy in details.”
Graff, Op. Cit.
This is what Mark Edward Lewis writes in “China Between Empires”: “Emperor Yang’s willingness to employ a classic strategy of division and domination against the Turks, while insisting, beyond reason, on the actual conquest of northern Korea, probably stemmed from his belief that nomads remained alien, while sedentary peoples belonged within the Chinese realm.”
Joseph Needham, the 20th century historian of Chinese science and technology, wrote that the Chinese wheelbarrow design was “conceived as a substitute for a pack animal.” They had long been in use before.
The “History of the Sui Dynasty,” written when the Goguryeo campaign was still a living memory, offers a description of the dress and equipment of the soldiers of the twenty-four armies: units were carefully distinguished by banners and differences in uniform colors and equipment. Each army had not one but two military bands. The first, of ninety-four pieces, consisted mainly of different types of drums, while the second, of thirty-seven pieces, included bells, flutes, whistles, and horns. Graff, Op. Cit.
The Chinese admiral, under orders to wait and support a land-based attack, tried to surprise the Korean defenders of Pyongyang with an assault up the Taedong; having been beaten, he took station on the coast, and was unable to support (and feed, with grain carried in his ships) the land-based attack when it finally arrived weeks later.
Graff, Op. Cit.
What I find interesting is the historical interactions between China and Korea / Japan are so few and far between. Japan’s relationship and interactions with mainland Eurasia bears virtually no resemblance to that other island nation, Japan’s evil twin on the opposite side of Eurasia, namely Great Britain. From being a backwater Roman province, to a colonized land of apartheid under the Anglo-Saxons, to an invaded and conquered possession of the Normans and Plantagenets, to a plucky underdog rising Protestant power under the Tudors, to finally global maritime Empire and currently the most obedient of American vassal states, … the history of Britain is so intertwined with Europe, politically, economically, dynastically, etc. You get none of this with Japan, and Korea’s history bears no resemblance to Denmark, a minor insignificant peninsula in the shadow of a behemoth. For the Chinese, the Koreans and Japanese are far off rather exotic peoples expected to render tribute or else. But these peoples never participated in the grand pageant of Chinese history like the northern nomads did they? Despite the great influence of China, the so-called Sinosphere bears no historical resemblance to Christendom / Europe. It seems Chinese influence was just one way, and spread out over millennia with centuries of isolation in between. How strange, Korea was close enough to invade and Japan is just a short boat ride across the sea … strange that the Koreans and Japanese didn’t participate in Chinese history the way the British and Danes participated in European history.
Amazing