By 918, Hugoguryeo had become the strongest of the three. However, Gung Ye had grown into a paranoid despot, killing even his wife and two sons and proclaiming himself a Buddha. Four of his generals plotted to assassinate him and installed his chief minister, Wang Geon, as the new king. Wang Geon became King Taejo (Taejo means “The Great Progenitor”). He renamed his young state Koryo, from which the English-language name of Korea is derived.
In 935, a weakened Shilla submitted to Taejo; one year later, he defeated Hubaekje. Thus, Korea was reunified under a new dynasty. Taejo was careful to act as a benevolent ruler. He gave land and titles to those who submitted to him, including Gyeongsun, the last king of Shilla, though he extended no such privileges to anyone from Hubaekje, a state he despised. Skilled in diplomacy, Taejo maintained good relations with Song dynasty China. He reclaimed some of the land lost to China after the fall of Goguryeo, thus increasing Korea’s territory. At the same time, Koryo underwent increased Sinicization. For instance, the Chinese civil service examination system, which selected would-be bureaucrats based on their knowledge of history, Confucian classics, and Confucian ethics, was adopted by the Koryo state. This examination system remained in place until 1894.
Theoretically, the examination system meant that anyone could rise to a position of authority. In practice though, Koryo did not offer real social mobility. Social classes were established based on profession and were preserved by hereditary transfer. The children of a member of the artisan class would be artisans too. Children of the peasant classes were not allowed to hold government posts. An outcast class, comprised of butchers, entertainers, and people performing other tasks considered base by the aristocracy, was forced to live in ghetto-like areas, away from the rest of society.
Confucianism as an ethical system and political ideology would increasingly dominate Koryo, but spiritual life remained Buddhist. Koryo sponsored the golden age of Korean Buddhism, with the erection of many temples and the creation of masterpieces such as the Tripitaka Koreana, which remains the most complete corpus of Buddhist texts in existence, carved completely without error into more than eighty thousand wood blocks. Eventually, though, the administrative elite, which was principally Confucian, grew tired of the power that the Buddhists had accumulated and sought to reduce the religion’s role in the state. Buddhism and Confucianism had coexisted peacefully in Korea for centuries, but from the fourteenth century onwards, this was no longer to be the case.
Beginning in 1231 and continuing into 1258, the Mongols, who had conquered China and established the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan, invaded Korea repeatedly. Koryo was forced into a tributary relationship with the powerful khans. Its kings were married off to Mongol princesses, which resulted in a string of half-Korean, half-Mongol monarchs. The khans’ overlordship would last until the 1350s, by which time their influence had fundamentally weakened the stability of the Koryo state. Yet Mongol dominance also resulted in numerous cultural exchanges that would shape the history of the peninsula. Many elite Koreans either visited, or were held captive in, Beijing, the capital of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The scholar An Hyang, for instance, was introduced to neo-Confucianism there and brought neo-Confucian texts back to Korea with him when he returned. This brand of Confucianism would become Korea’s governing philosophy and continues to influence Korean society to this day.
During the 1370s and 1380s, a talented general named Yi Seong-gye succeeded in driving the remaining Mongol garrisons out of the north of Korea, while also defeating the Japanese pirates who had been attacking the east coast. He became the leader of a faction within the Koryo court that favored allying with Ming dynasty China and opposing the Mongols, whose control of China was crumbling. In 1388, he was ordered by the government to attack Ming forces, but instead he launched a coup against the rulers of Koryo. In 1392, he declared himself king of the new Joseon dynasty. His descendents, the Yi family, would form the house that ruled Korea until 1910.
Joseon
Joseon Korea turned away from Buddhism and installed neo-Confucianism as the official state ideology. One critical change this ushered in was a reduction in the status of women. During the Koryo dynasty, women had equal rights to inheritance, and could be designated heads of households; under the Joseon state, this was no longer the case. Shamanism, the indigenous religion of the Koreans, was also marginalized: practitioners were relegated to the lowest social class, the cheonmin—a group that also included slaves.
The highest social class was known as the yangban. Members of this group owed their status to the civil service examination, since those who could pass it were awarded land and titles for three generations. In between the yangban and the cheonmin were the jungin, a middle class comprised of professionals, such as doctors, and the sangmin, the ordinary workers (usually farmers) who made up more than half of the total population.
The early Joseon period saw the reign of the king considered the most exemplary Korean ruler of all, King Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450). Sejong expanded and secured Korea’s northern territory to roughly where the North Korea-China border lies today. During his reign, great strides were made in agricultural output, literature, medicine, and science. Sejong was also responsible for the creation of Hangul, the native Korean alphabet. Prior to this, Koreans had only used Chinese characters, which were too complex and numerous for the masses to master, as they had no few real educational opportunities. For these achievements, Sejong is the only king of a unified Korean state to have been posthumously acclaimed as “the Great.”
Though the early Joseon period was a time of progress, by the late fifteenth century, infighting had broken out at court, weakening the power of the state. Later, in 1592, Japan launched the Imjin Waeran invasions against Korea, as the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi sought to use the peninsula as a stepping-stone on his way to conquer Ming China. The Koreans managed to finally repel the Japanese in 1598 with the assistance of China, as well as the metal-plated “turtle ships” of General Yi Sun-shin, whose defeat of the Japanese navy makes him one of Korea’s greatest heroes. The cost of the war to Korea was vast, however: hundreds of thousands of Koreans are estimated to have died as a result of the invasion, and one-third of the nation’s agricultural land was left unusable, causing poverty and famine.
Korea thus entered the seventeenth century extremely weakened, and fell into a tributary relationship with the Manchurian Qing dynasty that lasted until 1895. The rigid hierarchicalism of society also began to weaken during this portion of the Joseon period. The fortunes of many yangban had been ruined in the wake of the Japanese invasions, while the jungin professional class was beginning to rise. Some jungin managed to accumulate great fortunes through trading, an activity traditionally disdained by the yangban. Seeking to increase their social standing, many jungin began “buying in” to the yangban, swelling the ranks of the official elite and undermining the Joseon class system. Because of this practice, former yangban families such as the Kimhae Kim have millions of members today. It also explains the extraordinary prevalence of family names like Kim, Lee, Park, and Choi in Korea. Collectively, these four names account for half of the population.
Later Joseon was marked by rebellion, internal division, and increased outside influence. In the late eighteenth century, Christianity—brought in largely by Koreans who encountered the religion in China—began to attract its first converts, despite the opposition of a hostile government. A series of popular peasant revolts, such as one led by Hong Gyeong-nae in 1811, and the growth of a movement named Donghak, posed a serious challenge to the government toward the end of the century. Powerful families such as the Andong Kim reduced Joseon’s ruling Yi family to mere figureheads and were draining the country’s resources through corruption and outright thievery.
All of these factors weakened the government, while foreign powers were starting to exert influence and force trade on the peninsula. Though Korea attempted to pursue a policy of isolationism—which earned it the sobriquet of the Hermit Kingdom—France, Britain, the United States, and Russia all entered Korean waters without permission in the late 1800s, with sometimes violent results. Japan, then resurgent following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, also had designs