A Brief History of Korea

Podcast Transcript

For thousands of years, Korea has stood at the crossroads of East Asia, shaped by powerful neighbors but never defined by them.

It has been home to ancient kingdoms, Buddhist temples, Confucian scholars, devastating invasions, colonial rule, war, division, and one of the most remarkable economic and cultural transformations in modern history.

Despite everything, they find themselves in the 21st century, independent but divided.

Learn more about the history of Korea on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In this episode, I’m going to provide a high-level summary of the history of the Korean Peninsula. Although many of the subjects to be covered may warrant dedicated episodes in the future, this discussion focuses on the pivotal historical events that made Korea.

Korea is one of the great civilizations of East Asia. Yet its history has been unlike that of any of its neighbors, and it has often been subject to their rule.

At the heart of Korea’s origin story is a foundational myth preserved by early chroniclers in a series of narratives known as the Tangun.

According to the 13th-century manuscript, which was likely compiled by a monk from earlier oral traditions, Hwanung, the son of the Lord of Heaven, descended to Earth to live closer to people. The legend notes that a bear and a tiger prayed to him to become human.

Hwanung gave them a test: stay out of the sunlight and eat only garlic and mugwort for 100 days, and he would make them human. The tiger quit, but the bear persevered and transformed into a woman named Ungnyeo. She married Hwanung and their son, Dangun, established the kingdom of Asadal near the modern-day city of Pyongyang.

There are many Paleolithic sites throughout the Korean Peninsula, and some studies suggest that humans have occupied it for more than 20,000 years.

Urban consolidation of the area began more than 7,000 years ago with the formation of rice-cultivating Neolithic communities along Korea’s river systems. Archaeologists trace the rise of these communities through their distinctive artifacts, including bronze daggers, massive stone tombs, and impressive pottery.

The history of the region becomes clearer from Chinese writings dating back to 1000 BC, during the Zhou dynasty, which first mentions the Korean Peninsula as Choson. Our knowledge of Korean history largely comes from Chinese sources due to the region’s limited literary development until the development of the Korean script in the 15th century.

Although the early inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula relied on an oral tradition, they adopted Chinese characters following interactions between the Gojoseon or Old Chos?n Kingdom and the Han Dynasty approximately two millennia ago.

During chaotic periods of Chinese history, such as the Warring States Period, Chinese peasants often migrated in large numbers to Korea. After the Han conquest of the Gojoseon kingdoms, China launched a state-sponsored colonization of the peninsula.

Confucianism and the establishment of an imperial bureaucracy staffed by a civil service exam system were adopted in the Korean peninsula. Korean kingdoms, which had often been decentralized, quickly began consolidating into larger states governed according to Chinese principles of Imperial centralization.

The “Three Kingdoms Period” in Korea, not to be confused with the Three Kingdoms Period in China, ran from 57 BC to the mid-7th century. During this period, three rival, highly centralized kingdoms dominated the Korean Peninsula and large parts of Manchuria: Goguryeo (go-goo-ryuh), Paekche, and Silla (sheel-lah).

Of this group, the Silla emerged as the key player on the peninsula, thanks in large part to their military alliance with the Tang Dynasty in China. The Silla-Tang alliance enabled Silla to unify Korea under Silla rule.

While this partnership helped them assume dominion over the peninsula, it immediately created challenges as the Tang sought to colonize Korea, prompting the Silla to take up arms to drive them out in the late 7th century.

The Silla gradually moved away from certain core Chinese values, including Confucian meritocracy. In the 6th century, Silla leaders adopted a lineage-based social organization called the Bone Rank system, or Golpum.

The Golpum created a rigid caste system that divided people into royalty, nobility, and commoners. At the top tier, only those with royal blood held eligibility to join the royal court and leadership class, angering those who had previously risen on merit.

This system did not just outline political leadership; it also defined Korea’s social customs. Your bone rank determined your attire, your profession, housing, marriage options, and wealth.

A 7th-century Korean source, the Samguk Sagi, illustrated how the system imposed limitations on lower groups in Korean society, and why many of them were driven to migrate to China: “In Silla, the bone rank is the key to employment. If one is not of the nobility, no matter what his talents, he cannot achieve a high rank. I wish to travel west to China, display rare resources and perfect meritorious deeds, and thereby open a path to glory and splendor that I might wear the robes and sword of an official and serve closely the Son of Heaven.”

When the rival Goryeo Dynasty took control of the peninsula in the 10th century, it systematically dismantled the hereditary caste system, replacing it with a meritocratic, Confucian Chinese Civil Service system. The system flourished until the Mongol invasions reached the Korean peninsula in the 13th century.

The Koreans fought valiantly against the Mongols, but they were impossible to resist. The Mongols destroyed the Goryeo dynasty in Korea, ultimately driving the ruling class into exile.

The Mongol occupation resulted in the widespread ruin of Korea. Through a campaign of massive cultural destruction, they razed native treasures like the Hwangnyongsa Pagoda, incinerated Korean literature, and dismantled the fundamental structures of the nation’s governance and heritage.

The death toll is unknown, but historians place the number at nearly a million.

The leader of Mongol China, Kublai Khan, made the Korean Peninsula a subject state of the Great Khanate. This subservient arrangement required unquestioned obedience and mandated that the Korean leadership reside at the Mongol court.

To achieve the next phase of their expansion, the invasion of Japan, the Mongols required a massive naval fleet. To that end, the Mongols systematically stripped the Korean landscape of trees. They clear-cut the forests of Korea, sacrificing even young trees to supply the Mongol navy, ushering in a wave of ecological devastation.

Korea required centuries to recover from this calamity.

The resurrection of the Korean state fell to Korea’s most famous dynasty, the Choson. The Choson dynasty ruled Korea after the Mongols left and governed the peninsula until the dawn of the twentieth century. The Choson oversaw a golden age, in which Seoul began to emerge as the prominent administrative center.

Seoul became synonymous with the resurgence of the Chinese-style civil service bureaucracy and subsequently became a center of learning. Outsiders knew little of Seoul, for in the wake of the Mongol occupation, the Choson adopted a very strict form of isolation. Korea became referred to as the Hermit Kingdom.

Unlike their Asian neighbors, the Choson resisted all European involvement and limited their interaction to trade agreements with Japan and diplomatic exchanges with Qing China.

Despite this isolation, the Choson enjoyed a technological boom. The Choson fully maximized the legacy of movable-type printing, which Korea originally developed centuries before the Gutenberg press.

The Choson took full advantage of this foundation by developing a new written script known as the Hangul alphabet. Scholars have praised this writing system for its simplicity and ease of use. Containing only 28 phonetic symbols that capture the intricacies of Korean speech, it was widely taught in schools, leading to an explosion in literacy across the peninsula.

The expansion of literacy created an equality of opportunity in state-sponsored bureaucratic exams. This expansion of learning didn’t stop with Confucian exams; it continued in the halls of Korean science.

The dynasty’s most famous ruler, King Sejong, established the Hall of Worthies, a royal research institute that produced innovations to improve Korean life.

Like the House of Wisdom during the Abbasid Caliphate, this institute achieved great things, including the invention of advanced rain gauges, water clocks, and sundials, as well as revolutionary agricultural manuals tailored to Korean soil.

Following a destructive period of conflict with Japan in the 16th century, the Choson Dynasty ushered in a remarkable era of stability.

Known as the ‘Two Centuries of Peace,’ this isolationist era lasted from the early 1600s to the mid-19th century, during which the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan and the Korean state maintained peaceful diplomatic ties.

This peace and stability gradually came to an end in the late 19th century as an industrial and imperial Japan expanded its regional hegemony, forcing Korea to sign its first unequal treaty in 1876.

This opened the door for European and Western powers to follow suit, rapidly fracturing the nation’s isolation. Korean independence collapsed in 1910 as the rapidly expanding Japanese state swallowed the peninsula.

Korea’s experience under Japanese military rule proved a dark and painful chapter. Koreans find the period so painful that they refer to its initial decade as the dark period. Koreans suffered from forced labor, sexual abuse, and military conscription.

Observers have widely chronicled these abuses, including British journalist Fred McKenzie, who covered the trauma of Japanese occupation firsthand: The forms of torture freely employed include, among others:— The stripping, beating, kicking, flogging, and outraging of schoolgirls and young women… The burning of men, women, and children by searing their bodies with hot irons… Stringing men up by their thumbs, beating them with bamboo and iron rods until unconscious…”

Japan’s control over Korea was a campaign of resource extraction. They gave no thought to the human rights of the Korean people. Despite this, Japan ended up building modern infrastructure across Korea. The Japanese built extensive railway networks, telegraph lines, modern seaports, hydroelectric dams, and heavy industrial chemical plants.

Japan did not intend to develop Korea; it was simply pursuing its own interests. Nonetheless, the process did put Korea on a path towards modernization in the post-WWII period.

The defeat of the Japanese in the Second World War opened the door to the partition of Korea, with Communist North Korea aligning with the Soviet Union and China, and the South aligning with the United States.

These challenges ultimately played out in the Korean War, which I have covered in a previous episode. Technically, the war has never ended. There has only been a ceasefire, which has been in effect for over 70 years.

North and South Korea have evolved into vastly different states. North Korea has continued the tradition of being a hermit state, isolating itself and its people from the rest of the world.

Since the end of the Korean War, South Korea has undergone one of the most dramatic transformations in modern history. It emerged from the war devastated, impoverished, and politically unstable.

After decades of turmoil, South Korea has emerged not only as one of the wealthiest countries in the world but also as one of the most culturally powerful, with K-pop and Korean movies and television consumed worldwide.

The story of Korea isn’t over. South Korea currently has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, which means it will experience massive social upheaval in the future, no matter what happens.

Despite centuries of invasion and control by its neighbors, the Korean Peninsula today is independent, albeit divided.