Do Koreans even exist? part 6. Stories

6. Stories

What do you do when Blood, Language, Soil, Stuff, and Books no longer speak?

You rely on the memories of those who came before you.

     Distorted.

     Impossible to verify.

     True, only because it is shared.

     Between mother and son.

     Grandfather and granddaugther.

     Legends tied to the family.

     Stories passed down through the generations.

So old, no one remembers where they came from.

Believed because it's on the same frequency as your soul.

Samhan: Mahan. Jinhan. Byunhan.

and Jin-guk in the Korean Peninsula.

Buyeo in the Songhua-Liao World.

Perhaps, Dongye, Okjeo, the Four (Five) Han Commanderies.

Gojoseon.

and Mumun. Fucking Mumun.

At least from a time perspective we have considerably narrowed down the window in which we can claim Korea came from:

~1,500 BCE to ~100 BCE.

Going forward from ~700,000 BCE, we got to ~1,500 BCE.

Going backwards from 2026, we got to ~100 BCE.

Each moment in time confirmed through our Duck-Test:

Soil (Land): Yes.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes.

Blood (DNA): Yes.

Words (Language): Yes.

Books (Written records): Yes.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ Yes.

The two biggest things we learned during our journey?

Korea = Korean Peninsula + Songhua-Liao World

and

Korean = Korean + Mohe + others?

But the records are scarce.

And Korea still eats its dead.

- ה -

Let's knock out the easy ones.

Not easy because we have a lot of records or proof.

Easy because there's no use arguing whether they are Korean or not.

And, they don't affect our timeline at all.

Mahan, Jinhan, Byeonhan (Samguk; 三國)...and Jin-guk (辰國): 2C BCE?-1C CE?

We've met them all before.

To recap:

Mahan (마한/馬韓) is where Baekje emerges from.

Jinhan (진한/辰韓) is where Shilla emerges from.

Byeonhan (변한/弁韓) is where Gaya emerges from.

According to the records, Mahan, Jinhan, and Byeonhan all emerge from Jin-guk (辰國). 

Or they didn't. 

That's how shallow our understanding is.

We know very little about Samhan, so obviously we know even less about Jin-guk.

Jin-guk existed in some Chinese record from around the 2nd century BCE, perhaps earlier, until at one point Chinese records started writing about Mahan, Jinhan, and Byeonhan.

We're not sure when this happened.

Or if it happened at all.

One thing we do know about them is that while they may have shared some form of common political alliance, each of them was quite different.

For example, compare the tombs of Baekje with those of southern Mahan.

Baekje elites buried their dead in substantial stone-built tombs. Earlier Baekje tombs included massive stone-piled structures, while later Baekje increasingly used stone chambers buried beneath earthen mounds. The chamber itself could be built almost like a small underground room, sometimes entered through a passage.

Then go south to the Yeongsan River basin and everything changes.

Here, the characteristic elite burial was the 옹관묘 (甕棺墓), jar-coffin tomb.

And when I say jar, don't imagine somebody stuffing grandma into a kimchi pot.

These things were enormous.

By the height of the tradition, individual ceramic coffins could exceed two meters in length. Several could then be buried together inside the same mound, with additional coffins being added over time.

Making them was itself an extraordinary technological achievement. Firing a ceramic vessel that large without cracking or collapsing is difficult even with modern equipment. These weren't ordinary household pots repurposed for burial. They were enormous objects specifically manufactured for the dead.

But the really fascinating thing isn't their size.

It's when they disappear.

The Yeongsan jar-coffin tradition continued well into the sixth century CE.

That's a problem if we imagine Baekje swallowing Mahan early and simply turning the entire southwest into ordinary Baekje territory.

Because the dead don't cooperate with that story.

For centuries after Baekje had emerged as the dominant Mahan state farther north, powerful people around the Yeongsan River were still burying their elites in a completely different way.

     They built enormous ancestral mounds.

     They filled them with gigantic ceramic coffins.

     They put crowns, swords, gilt-bronze shoes and other symbols of political power inside them.

     And they kept doing it.

Then, during the sixth century, the jars disappear.

Stone chambers appear in their place.

That transition is much more interesting to me than somebody writing that Baekje "conquered Mahan."

Because we can actually watch the political change happen in the ground.

     The people don't suddenly disappear.

     Their settlements don't evaporate.

But the distinctive way their rulers had been buried for centuries comes to an end, and the burial system associated with Baekje takes its place.

So when exactly did southern Mahan become Baekje?

The answer may not be sitting in a sentence in a history book.

It may be sitting in the cemetery.

But regardless, they are all Korean according to our Duck-Test.

Soil (Land): Yes. Deep in the Korean Peninsula.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes. But they blend into each other.

Blood (DNA): Yes. Surprisingly a lot.

Words (Language): No idea. Perhaps, a Koreanic elite over a majority Japonic populace?

Books (Written records): Yes...??? But mostly Chinese sources.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ Yes.

The biggest wrinkle? 

We are unsure whether they spoke Koreanic or Japonic...hell, they may have even spoken Nikhv. 

Nikhv? Exactly.

Since they supposedly existed from 2nd century BCE, they could push our timeline back. But, we simply don't know until when. And we have other states in the north that could more comfortably push us back further, so I'll let it go.

The one thing we are certain:

Samhan was not one centralized state.

Chinese records describe dozens of individual guk, large and small, scattered across the southern peninsula, each with its own leaders.

     Maybe those guk formed federations.

     Maybe several layers of alliances overlapped.

     Maybe “Mahan,” “Jinhan,” and “Byeonhan” were partly outsider labels for a much messier 

     political landscape.

How structured was any of it?

No one knows.

- ה -

Buyeo (부여; 夫餘 / 扶餘) : 3C? or 2C? BCE-494 CE

Some experts want to dismiss Buyeo (부여; 夫餘 / 扶餘) as a primitive tribal proto-state.

But Buyeo itself does not make such dismissals easy.

It existed for more than six centuries.

     It had a king.

     Officials.

     Palaces.

     Warehouses.

     Prisons.

     Laws.

     Tens of thousands of households.

     Powerful regional aristocrats commanding hundreds or thousands of families.

The Sanguozhi gives Buyeo roughly 80,000 households, and says its great regional lords controlled several thousand households each, while lesser ones controlled several hundred. It describes palaces, granaries, prisons, armies, armor, laws, ceremonies, livestock officials, agriculture and regional government. Whatever modern label we want to attach to it, this was not fifty dudes living around a campfire.

It survived invasions that destroyed lesser states. Several of them.

It outlasted states supposedly many times more powerful.

One of the most fascinating things about Buyeo is not:

What they did.

but,

...What others around them didn't.

Let me explain:

1. Buyeo was sitting on some of the best land in Northeast Asia

The early Buyeo center is generally placed around modern Jilin City, on the middle Songhua River.

Behind it rise the mountains leading toward the Jangbaek/Changbai world.

But immediately to the north and northwest the terrain opens.

Into the enormous Songnen Plain.

     Flat land. 

     400 kilometers to the west. 

     200 kilometers to the north.

     Rivers.

     Lakes.

     Grass.

     Rich agricultural soil.

     Excellent grazing country.

The Chinese description is remarkably consistent with the geography. Of all the peoples it lumped together as Eastern Yi, Buyeo was described as occupying the flattest and most open country, with land suitable for the five grains. It was famous for horses, cattle and other livestock. 

Today it looks like this:

Ideal for herders.

Ideal for farmers.

Prime real-estate.

This was not Goguryeo, hidden deep inside mountains, river valleys, and natural fortresses.

Buyeo lived with its front door open.

Agriculture around its population centers.

Pasture extending outward into the plains.

Wide corridors through which horses, goods, 

people...

and armies...

could move.

open rich country is wonderful when you're powerful.

It is horrible when you're weak.

Buyeo survived there for centuries.

2. Buyeo didn't appear out of nowhere.

If we only read Books, Buyeo seems to suddenly materialize somewhere around the Songhua River in the 2nd Century BCE,

It didn't.

People had been living there for a very, very long time.

Remember Hongshan?

Around 4700–2900 BCE, while Hongshan communities around the West Liao were building monumental ritual centers, burying their elites with elaborate jade and creating one of the great prehistoric cultures of Northeast Asia, there were already established populations much farther north and east.

Along the Nen River and across the Songnen Plain, people were making pottery, fishing, hunting and settling beside rivers and lakes thousands of years before anybody wrote the word: Buyeo.

The Nen-Songnen World.

This one goes way back.

At Houtaomuga, beside the Nen River, people were already making pottery around 11,000 BCE.

Think about that date.

More than six thousand years before Hongshan.

Thousands of years before agriculture transformed the Yellow River.

These were still hunter-gatherers living among rivers, wetlands and grasslands, but they were already settling long enough to make some of the earliest pottery in Northeast Asia.

And they didn't disappear.

The names archaeologists give their Stuff change:

Houtaomuga

↓

Angangxi

↓

Xiaolaha

↓

Gucheng

↓

Baijinbao

↓

Hanshu Phase II

The continuity isn't perfect, and these may not be the same People.

That's not the point.

The point is:

This place was not empty.

Don't read that as five different Peoples replacing one another.

Read it as archaeologists digging through thousands of years of human life along the same enormous river system and finding that the Stuff keeps changing.

     Pottery changes.

     Food changes.

     Settlement changes.

     Bronze appears.

     People move when the climate turns against them.

     New influences arrive.

     Old traditions survive inside new ones.

By the second millennium BCE, people of the Nen–Songnen world were already working bronze. Over time their repertoire expanded into weapons, knives, arrowheads, ornaments, horse equipment and other portable objects. Those choices fit the economy and geography we have been mapping: enormous plains, river systems, hunting, farming, livestock, increasing mobility and exchange with neighboring cultural worlds.

This wasn't some empty northern wilderness waiting for civilization to arrive.

It was an ancient center of human activity in its own right.

Hongshan developed to its southwest.

The great Yellow River civilizations developed much farther south.

And up here, along the Nen and Songhua, another population had been adapting to its own rivers, grasslands, forests and brutal climate for thousands of years.

Then, immediately south of them, around modern day Jilin, arose:

Xituanshan Culture (西團山文化).

Now this one matters.

Xituanshan wasn't one little village.

Hundreds of sites belonging to this cultural world have been identified around Jilin and Changchun.

People built semi-subterranean houses beside rivers.

     They farmed millet and soybeans.

     They raised pigs, cattle, sheep, dogs.

     They hunted and fished.

     They spun thread and wove cloth from hemp and animal hair.

     They made pottery.

     Jade items, bone tools, stone tools.

     And bronze daggers, spears, axes, mirrors, fish hooks and jewelry.

     They buried their dead in organized stone-cist cemeteries, sometimes with remarkably 

     differentiated grave goods.

This was not Hongshan.

Nor was this the Yellow River.

Different trajectory.

But not:

Civilization over here.

Primitive barbarians over there.

The Songhua world had been developing on its own for thousands of years.

By the early first millennium BCE it contained permanent agricultural settlements, organized cemeteries, specialized crafts, textile production, bronze weapons and tools, livestock economies, long-distance exchange and communities spread across an enormous region.

In other words:

Exactly the kind of human foundation from which something like Buyeo could emerge.

And Xituanshan did not sit in isolation.

To its north was the enormous Songnen cultural world.

To its west were cultures connected with Liaoning and the steppe.

To its south were other Songhua and Liaodong populations.

And archaeology actually catches them exchanging Stuff. Late Xituanshan pottery has close parallels with Hanshu Phase II pottery to its west and north. Bronze forms connect it southward toward the Liaoning world.

Look back at the map.

Suddenly Buyeo doesn't look like some tribe that crawled out of the forest in the second century BCE.

It looks like the historical name that eventually becomes visible over one very old center of human activity.

The question isn't:

When did Buyeo form?

It's:

At what point do we decide to start calling the people living there Buyeo?

And before we leave this map, remember two things.

Bronze cauldrons (Dongbok).

Dongmyeong myth.

We're going to meet all three again.

3. Buyeo was surrounded by powerful, very powerful people

Look around Buyeo.

This was not some forgotten corner of the world where Buyeo survived because nobody could be bothered to attack it.

To the west were the Donghu.

These guys were not random horse herders wandering the grass plains.

They were so powerful that they treated the formidable Xiongnu as their bitches.

The Xiongnu, constantly rumored to be the ancestors of the Huns.

Yes, the Huns that ended up all the way in Europe scaring the shit out of the Germanii tribes forcing them westward, ultimately resulting in a cascade of events that led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

They were one of the dominant powers of the northeastern steppe.

So west of Buyeo wasn't empty grass.

It was contested horse country occupied by people powerful enough to frighten the Xiongnu and fight one of the Seven Warring States.

To the southwest was Gojoseon.

Again, not a village.

Whatever exact boundaries we eventually give it, Gojoseon was powerful enough that its ruler was remembered as taking the title King, negotiating directly with Yan, threatening war with Yan, and then fighting one of the largest states of Warring States China.

Yan's counterattack under Qin Kai supposedly stripped Gojoseon of an enormous western zone and pushed the frontier east. Exactly how far the famous “2,000 li” represented is arguable, but the event itself tells us what matters:

Yan considered Gojoseon a serious geopolitical problem.

Then came:

Yan.

One of the Seven Warring States.

     Walled cities.

     Cavalry.

     Mass armies.

     Bronze and iron production.

     Bureaucracy.

The ability to conquer hundreds of kilometers of frontier and put administrators behind the army.

Then, Qin.

Then, Han.

Han destroyed Wiman Joseon, planted commanderies across Liaodong and northwestern Korea, and connected this northeastern frontier to one of the largest imperial systems on Earth.

So southwest of Buyeo sat, successively:

     Gojoseon.

     Yan.

     Qin.

     Han.

Not friendly little neighbors.

And one other thing bothers me.

When Wiman overthrew the king of Gojoseon, where did the defeated king flee?

South.

King Jun took his followers, went out to sea and eventually settled among the Han peoples of the southern peninsula.

Before Wiman Joseon itself collapsed, one of King Ugeo's ministers, Yeokgye Gyeong, disagreed with him and left.

Where?

South.

More than 2,000 households reportedly followed him into Jin.

Then Han destroyed Wiman Joseon in 108 BCE.

And where do we again begin finding displaced Joseon people?

South.

Down through the Han River world.

Toward Jinhan.

Toward the southern peninsula.

Now look at the map again.

Buyeo was sitting right there to the northeast.

     Rich land.

     Established population.

     Close enough to reach without sailing around the Liaodong coast or crossing half the peninsula.

Yet when Gojoseon people are actually recorded fleeing political catastrophe, the remembered direction is repeatedly:

South.

Not north.

That doesn't prove Gojoseon and Buyeo were different Peoples.

But if they were simply two branches of the same cultural world, it is a strange pattern.

People usually run toward somewhere they expect to be received.

To the northeast were the Yilou.

The Yilou are useful because they show us another kind of power.

They apparently had no great king.

No giant bureaucracy.

No famous capital.

Chinese writers therefore treated them like primitive forest people.

Unfortunately for everyone trying to conquer them:

they were extremely difficult to kill.

     They lived in horrible mountainous forest country.

     They were famous archers.

     They poisoned their arrows.

     They used boats to raid their neighbors.

Most importantly:

they had paid tribute to Buyeo.

Then sometime in the early third century they stopped.

Buyeo repeatedly attacked them.

And failed.

The Sanguozhi says it plainly: the Yilou were fewer in number, but the terrain was dangerous, their neighbors feared their bows, and Buyeo could not subdue them.

So even the supposedly “primitive” people east of Buyeo were capable of telling the regional giant:

No.

And eventually, immediately to the south, Goguryeo.

Hella aggressive Goguryeo.

Goguryeo consumes almost everything around it.

     Little polities in the Changbai valleys? Gone.

     Okjeo? Swallowed.

     Xuantu? Constantly attacked.

     Liaodong? Fought over for centuries.

     Lelang? Gone.

     Daifang? Gone.

Goguryeo's basic foreign policy often appears to have been:

Mine now.

And yet:

Buyeo remained.

For centuries.

The Jinshu even preserves the remarkable claim that before 285 CE Buyeo had never previously been broken by another state.

Then finally the Murong Xianbei did it.

     In 285 Murong Hui smashed Buyeo.

     Its king committed suicide.

     Members of the royal family fled.

     Jin helped restore them.

     Then the Murong came back.

In 346 Former Yan struck again, captured the Buyeo king and reportedly carried away more than 50,000 people.

Buyeo survived even that.

Barely.

And only centuries into Goguryeo's rise does the old kingdom finally disappear.

In 494 CE, under attack from the Mulgil, the remaining Buyeo ruler and his people entered Goguryeo.

Not some enormous final Goguryeo conquest.

They came in.

Absorbed.

The political name disappeared.

The people didn't.

Think about that.

     Donghu to the west.

     Gojoseon, Yan and Han to the southwest.

     Yilou to the east.

     Goguryeo to the south.

     Xianbei repeatedly smashing into them.

And Buyeo sits on an enormous open agricultural plain for more than six centuries.

That is not a proto-state.

It's something else.

4. Buyeo existed at the edge of the Chinese scribal world

Buyeo's other problem is simpler.

It was far away.

Not impossibly far away.

But far enough from the major Chinese political centers that people in China had very little reason to write detailed histories about it until Buyeo began mattering to them.

The first reasonably secure surviving appearance of the name is in Sima Qian's Shiji, around 100 BCE.

And notice how it appears.

Not in some grand history of Buyeo.

In a discussion of Yan and trade:

"Yan bordered the Wuhuan and Buyeo to its north and profited from the peoples and commodities of the northeastern world."

That's it.

Buyeo exists because somebody in China was explaining the economy of somewhere else.

Later, when relations became more important, the records suddenly become much richer.

     Kings.

     Embassies.

     Wars.

     Officials.

     Customs.

     Burials.

     Agriculture.

     Horses.

     Prisons.

     And the enormous harvest festival called Yeonggo (迎鼓).

Again:

The moment Buyeo enters the written record 

is not necessarily the moment Buyeo began.

It is the moment somebody writing a surviving book decided:

Those people matter enough to write down.

And somehow Buyeo escaped the naming abuse surprisingly well.

夫餘 / 扶餘.

Read the characters literally and you get nonsense ranging from:

“man + surplus."

to the later:

“support + surplus.”

Compare the characters they chose for some of their other neighbors.

貊: Maek.

A word for some kind of beast.

靺鞨: Mohe.

Two glorious leather-radical characters.

Leather-shoe guys.

夷: Yi.

Barbarians with bows.

And then:

扶餘.

“Support surplus.”

Apparently someone in the naming department liked these guys.

But we have a date.

1500 BCE - 100 BCE. 

(likely much earlier)

5. Its founding myth leaves tantalizing hints

And then we get something considerably stranger.

Because the oldest surviving Buyeo origin tradition does not say:

Buyeo began in Buyeo.

It says somebody came from somewhere north of it.

The Nen-Songnen World.

The oldest surviving version appears already in the first century CE in Wang Chong's Lunheng. Later versions preserve the northern homeland under slightly different transcriptions:

Takri (橐離).

Suoli (索離).

Gaoli (高離).

Gori (槀離).

Something like that.

Different Chinese writers trying to catch some foreign name in Chinese characters.

And the story goes like this.

Somewhere north of Buyeo was a kingdom.

Its king had a female servant who became pregnant.

The king wanted to kill her.

She told him that something had descended from heaven.

Something like a great egg.

Or a strange heavenly energy.

It entered her.

And she became pregnant.

She gave birth to a boy.

The king tried to get rid of him.

He threw the infant into a pigsty.

The pigs breathed warmth onto him.

He survived.

So the king put him among the horses.

The horses protected him too.

Finally the king gave up and allowed his mother to raise him.

The boy was named:

Dongmyeong (東明).

He grew up.

And became an extraordinary archer.

So extraordinary that the king became afraid of him.

And decided to kill him.

Dongmyeong ran.

South.

The king's men chased him.

Eventually he reached a river.

No bridge.

No boat.

Nowhere to go.

Dongmyeong struck the water with his bow.

Fish and turtles rose to the surface.

They formed a bridge.

Dongmyeong crossed.

The bridge collapsed behind him.

His pursuers could not follow.

Dongmyeong continued south.

And founded:

Buyeo.

Hang on.

We've heard this story before.

     Divine birth.

     Extraordinary archer.

     Jealous king.

     Escape.

     Southward flight.

     Pursuit.

     River.

     Fish and turtles.

     A new kingdom.

Except the second time the hero is called:

Jumong.

And the kingdom he establishes is:

Goguryeo.

That's not a vague resemblance.

That's essentially the same founding machine.

And that leaves us with something fascinating.

     Maybe the story records a real migration.

     Maybe it remembers an elite arriving from somewhere north.

     Maybe Goguryeo later borrowed Buyeo's most prestigious ancestral story and made it its own.

     Maybe all three are partially true.

No one knows.

But one thing seems difficult to miss:

Goguryeo did not merely claim some vague political connection to Buyeo.

It carried Buyeo's founding story south with it.

And stories are Stuff too.

They just live in people's heads.

So Goguryeo obviously has some serious: 

Buyeo = Daddy issues.

So does Baekje. 

Its royal house claims Buyeo descent.

Its kings use Buyeo (扶餘) as their royal surname.

And in 538, when King Seong moves the capital to Sabi, he adopts another name for his kingdom:

Nambuyeo (남부여; 南扶餘). 

South Buyeo.

Subtle.

The Dongmyeong tradition itself also survives in Baekje; later records explicitly make Baekje's founder line descendants of Buyeo's Dongmyeong.

And it doesn't really stop there.

Balhae deliberately reaches backward through Goguryeo. One reconstruction even reads its first center at Dongmosan as invoking Dongmyeong, while Balhae sources and titles repeatedly invoke old Goguryeo/Gyeru identity.

Centuries later, the Jurchen Jin develops its own ancestral story reaching back toward Korea through its founding ancestor Hambo.

And then the Qing goes completely nuts with it.

In the eighteenth century, the Qing-sponsored Researches on Manchu Origins explicitly tries to construct one enormous northeastern ancestral history linking:

Sushen → Yilou → Mohe → Balhae → Jurchen → Manchu

while also pulling Buyeo, Samhan, Baekje and Silla into the larger family conversation.

Apparently everybody in Northeast Asia eventually develops:

Daddy issues.

---

Unlike every other Korean state we've covered in this series,

Buyeo never held a single inch of territory on the Korean Peninsula.

So is Buyeo Korean?

The Chinese don't think so.

And there are reasons for me to agree with that assessment.

Except,

Buyeo is claimed by

     Goguryeo

     Baekje

Both their founding myths invoke Buyeo as the state from which they came from.

And Buyeo spoke Koreanic, at least according to the Chinese records.

And when they collapsed, they were absorbed into Goguryeo.

Absorbed, not conquered.

Soil (Land): No

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes

Blood (DNA): No evidence

Words (Language): No one knows

Books (Written records): Barely

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ This is a tough one.

If the Chinese claim Buyeo, I'd say Yes, Chinese.

If the Jurchen/Machu claim Buyeo, I'd say Yes, Manchu.

If not for Goguryeo, Baekje and Balhae claiming Buyeo, I'd say No. Not Korean.

But they fervently do.

And Stuff does as well.

Remember I said we'd talk about:

Bronze cauldrons (Dongbok).

So this is a Dongbok. In this case of Scythian origin. 

It's basically a portable cauldron, usually made of bronze. Big enough to cook a serious meal over an open fire, but still small enough to be carried with a mobile camp, even on horseback.

Bronze cauldrons are one of the most important artifacts in the archaeology of the steppe world. Scythians, Xiongnu, Huns, Turks. Peoples who moved a lot and often left behind relatively little. Again and again, Dongbok show up as part of that broader northern equestrian world, from Eastern Europe across Inner Asia and into our now familiar Songhua-Liao zone.

The interesting thing about Dongbok is not that they exist.

It is that they keep existing even after people settle down.

In a mobile horse-riding society, a portable bronze cauldron makes perfect sense. In a settled agricultural one, its practical advantage shrinks fast. A farming household has hearths, pottery, and better local options. If bronze itself were the important thing, you would melt it down and turn it into something more useful.

But that is not what happened.

Again and again, Dongbok were kept.

And not just kept.

Buried.

Which means that by this point they were not just cookware. They had become something worth preserving in their own right.

Look at this classic Dongbok. You'd expect this somewhere in the northern horse world. Instead, it was was found far to the south, in Gaya, inside Daeseong-dong Tomb 29.

That is already strange enough.

But then there is Shilla.

This is a pottery vessel in the shape of a mounted horseman from Geumnyeongchong in Shilla. Look behind the rider, on the horse’s rump.

That is a Dongbok.

Strange as it seems, a single bronze cauldron in a tomb can always be explained away as an imported prestige item.

But a Shilla-made image of a mounted elite carrying one is different. That means the object was not merely possessed. It had entered the visual language of elite life. Horse, rider, equipment, cauldron. A recognizable package.

And once you start looking, the pattern keeps appearing.

Buyeo. Goguryeo. Shilla. Gaya.

     Elite tomb.

     Dongbok.

     Northern-style prestige culture.

This is what makes the Dongbok so interesting.

The southern Korean Peninsula was not steppe country. It was settled agricultural country. People lived with houses, hearths, pottery, fields. They could certainly use a bronze cauldron if they had one. But there was no obvious reason for this specific northern portable form to become important enough to bury with elites, or to be represented on elite horse imagery, unless it carried a meaning beyond utility.

No historical record preserves some giant horse-rider invasion sweeping into the south.

But archaeology preserves something else.

It preserves the object.

And the object keeps telling the same story.

     These Dongbok did not come out of Jeulmun villages.

     They did not come out of Mumun farmers.

     They did not emerge naturally from the settled south.

They came from the north.

And they are all Ordos-style, commonly known as "Xiongnu-type."

     Upright handles

     Deep rounded body

     Portable form

     Frequently a base ring or skirt

Buyeo 

1st–3rd Century CE

Laoheishen and the broader Paoziyan/Buyeo archaeological tradition, Jilin. Dongbok are explicitly part of the Laoheishen assemblage.

Lelang

Late 3rd–Early 4th Century CE

Jeong-o-dong Tomb 1, Pyongyang. Actual two-handled Dongbok.

Geumgwan Gaya

Late 3rd–4th Century CE

Daeseong-dong 29, 47; Yangdong-ri 235, Gimhae. Daeseong-dong 29 is the earliest of the Korean examples in its typological sequence.

Silla

5th–Early 6th Century CE

Geumnyeongchong, Gyeongju, depiction of a Dongbok-shaped object on the horse rather than an excavated bronze Dongbok.

That's a chronological pattern.

To me this raises another Chinese labeling problem, similar to the Goguryeo + Mohe situation. But this time with Buyeo + Donghu.

If Mohe was just a Chinese label for “those guys to the east I don’t recognize,” then what if Donghu was something similar:

“those guys to the east who rode horses, and weren’t Joseon or Buyeo”

Maybe Donghu was not one people at all.

Maybe it was just another label for a bunch of people filed under "those guys".

- ה -

The Four Han Commanderies (한사군 漢四郡): 108 BCE - 314 CE

If Buyeo, Goguryeo and Balhae created a strange problem in our “Where do Koreans come from?” journey because much, or all, of their territory lay outside the modern Korean Peninsula, the Han commanderies create exactly the opposite problem.

These were founded as unquestionably foreign political institutions.

But they existed inside the Korean Peninsula.

And one of them, Lelang, remained around Pyongyang for roughly 420 years.

Longer than most kingdoms.

So what the hell do we do with it?

Is Lelang Korean?

Obviously they don't "feel" Korean in the sense that Goguryeo or Shilla "feel" Korean.

Remember:

"I am Korean."

"Yes, you are Korean."

They fail that test for me, though I'm not sure why.

(it's probably because that's how I was educated, and for some reason it stuck)

But can we tell the history of Korea, or the ancestry of the people who eventually became Koreans, while pretending that a political, economic and demographic system sitting around Pyongyang for four centuries somehow does not count?

Obviously not that either.

It's complicated.

But before we talk about the Commanderies, let's do our Duck-Test:

Soil (Land): Yes. Literally Pyongyang and Seoul.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes. They are everywhere on the peninsula.

Blood (DNA): Not yet. Small Chinese elite mixed with majority Gojoseon.

Words (Language): ??? There is no way of knowing.

Books (Written records): Yes. A few mentions here and there.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ I say No. So do most experts. But as you can see, they pass the Duck-Test with flying colors.

Example 1.

Before the Spanish arrived in 1492, the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was primarily inhabited by the Taíno people. Today, almost none survive.

So, Haiti/DR = Taino?

Example 2.

Same thing on a larger scale. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, etc. occupy Indigenous land and contain Indigenous peoples who very much still exist. But the modern states themselves were created through European colonial political institutions.

So, former colonies = Western?

Example 3.

South Africa under apartheid, then Mandela.

So, South Africa = Boer → Now Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Sotho?

Example 4.

Great Britain colonized India and held it for 190 years, until the Indians kicked them out in 1947.

So, India = Indian? British? Hindu?

Example 5.

Originally China consisted of multiple peoples and many states. They slowly became what is known as China and the Han people over thousands of years. Yet to this day, China officially recognizes over 55 ethnic minority groups, including Koreans and Manchu. They also have an issue with a tiny island called Taiwan that still considers itself the legitimate government of China.

So, China = Han? PRC?

How about Russia with over 190 ethnic minorities and 21 republics?

     Germany?

     Great Britain?

     The Netherlands?

     Italy?

     Sri Lanka?

     Kenya?

     The United States?

I told you it's complicated.

How the Commanderies were founded

The English word "Commandery" is misleading. The Chinese word 郡, is roughly a province or large administrative district.

There was nothing particularly exotic about a 郡. The Han Empire was full of them. 

By the lates Western Han there were more than eighty 郡 spread across the empire, alsongside a smaller number of semi-autonomous kingdoms called 國.

     Liaoxi was a 郡.

     Liaodong was a 郡.

     Donglai in Shandong was a 郡.

So the four 郡 created in the Korean peninsula when they conquered Gojoseon, was simply an expansion or their bureacratic infrastructure.

So from China's persepctive:

We added four new 郡, Yay 83!

From a Korean perspective:

China established four occupation zones inside our land.

From this Blog's perspective:

I'm looking at at least seven 郡 that matter to this story: the four created in the Gojoseon conquest, Daifang created later from Lelang, plus Liaodong and Liaoxi that were eaten by Goguryeo.

So how did the original four get there?

By the late second century BCE, Gojoseon was ruled by King Ugeo, grandson of Wiman.

Relations with Han had deteriorated badly.

Gojoseon sat between the Han Empire and peoples farther east and south. According to the Chinese account, states such as Jin and Zhenfan wanted direct relations with Han, and Ugeo wouldn't let them through.

In 109 BCE, Emperor Wu attacked from two directions.

General Xun Zhi (荀彘) came overland through Liaodong.

General Yang Pu (楊僕) sailed across the Bohai from Shandong with a naval force.

Wanggeom-seong continued to resist. 

And the Han armies were particularly incompetent.

And as we have seen many times before,

Gojoseon collapsed from inside.

Several senior officials decided the war couldn't be won and began defecting.

King Ugeo refused to surrender.

In the summer of 108 BCE, one of his own ministers, Sam (參), the minister of Nigye, had Ugeo killed.

Even then the city did not immediately surrender.

Another Gojoseon official, Seonggi (成己), continued resisting and attacked the Han forces.

Han finally used Ugeo's own son and the son of another surrendered Gojoseon minister to persuade the remaining population to turn against Seonggi.

Seonggi was killed.

Wanggeom-seong fell.

Gojoseon was gone.

And Han did what Han did when it conquered territory. It reorganized it.

The Shiji simply says:

朝鮮 was pacified, and four 郡 were established.

The Hanshu give us their names:

     Lelang (樂浪)

     Xuantu (玄菟)

     Zhenfan (眞番)

     Lintun (臨屯)

Han did not invent some special colonial form of government for Gojoseon.

It took a conquered political landscape and tried to plug it into the same administrative machine it used elsewhere:

郡.

Within about twenty-five years:

     Zhenfan was gone.

     Lintun was gone.

Within another few years:

     Xuantu had been pushed west.

Three of the original four commanderies had either disappeared or been radically reorganized.

Only one really stuck.

Lelang.

And somehow that one remained around Pyongyang for another four centuries.

Lelang (낙랑군 樂浪郡): 108 BCE–313 CE

Lelang was created in what is modern day Pyongyang, presumably close to where Wanggeomsung, the capital of Gojoseon was.

The surving 45 BCE household register counts 43,845 households and 285,261 people across 25 counties. By the Hanshu census of 2 CE, Lelang had 62,812 househols and 406,748 people.

It was a political-administrative region containing hundreds of thousands of people.

The majority were almost certainly descended from the people who had been there before the conquest. An early calculation puts the ratio at around 86% indigenous Gojoseon.

The Lelang headquarters at Toseong-dong, south of the Taedong, was an earth-walled city roughly 600 × 700 meters, about 31 hectares. Archaeologists found roads, drainage systems, wells, building foundations, coins, official clay sealings, roof tiles and other evidence of a functioning bureaucratic center.

From the excavation of burial tombs, it looks like different communities living next to each other for generations, marrying, imitating each other, competing for prestige, entering each other's institutions, and eventually producing something that isn't neatly either starting culture.

Using its position as a direct pipeline to the continental imperial economy, Lelang profoundly influenced the societies around it.

     Imperial lacquerware.

     Bronze mirrors.

     Coins.

     Writing.

     Official seals.

     Brick architecture.

     Roof tiles.

     Crossbows.

     Iron technology and objects.

     Administrative paperwork.

     Prestige goods.

Acting as a central node, connecting Goguryeo, Samhan and ultimately Wa/Japan.

It was useful.

Perhaps that's why it survived for so long.

Xuantu (현도군 玄菟郡): 107 BCE–404 CE

A lot of early Goguryeo history was basically:

     Attack Xuantu.

     Get attacked by Xuantu.

     Attack Xuantu.

Xuantu had originally been established right on top of the world where Goguryeo would emerge.

That turned out to be a problem.

As Goguryeo grew stronger, Xuantu kept getting pushed west: first in 75 BCE, then again around 106 CE, eventually ending up around the Fushun–Hun River region.

And somehow the name survived.

     Han.

     Xin.

     Eastern Han.

     The Gongsuns.

     Wei.

     Jin.

     Yan.

A revolving cast of states kept inheriting something called 玄菟郡, even as its location, rulers and territory changed.

Until eventually Goguryeo swallowed that too.

There is something almost poetic about it.

Xuantu began as a commandery established over the world in which Goguryeo emerged.

Five centuries later, Xuantu was inside Goguryeo.

Zhenfan (진번군 眞番郡): 108/107 BCE–82 BCE
Lintun (임둔군 臨屯郡): 108/107 BCE–82 BCE

Zhenfan and Lintun definitely existed. But they existed for such a short time, 25 years, that there isn't that much to tell about them.

Lintun died almost as soon as it was born. Parts of it folded into Lelang. It's eastern part given up, and instead run by autonomous Ye/Okjeo chiefs that ruled under nominal Han titles.

Zhenfan was the same. Folded into Lelang. 

Three centuries later under the Gongsun regime in Liaodong, they tried again:

Daifang.

Daifang (대방군 帶方郡): c. 204–314 CE

Daifang is also weird. It wasn't one of the original Han commanderies.

In fact, Han didn't create it at all.

Around 204 CE, while the Han Empire was collapsing, the Gongsun family ruling Liaodong carved the southern part of Lelang into a new 郡:

Daifang.

Same administrative vocabulary.

Different government.

Then in 313, Goguryeo ate Lelang.

One year later: 

Daifang too.

Liaodong (요동군 遼東郡): c. 300 BCE–404 CE

Liaodong was already old when Han conquered Gojoseon. 

It had been created by Yan roughly two centuries earlier.

Han inherited it.

Then everybody fought over it.

Gongsun. Wei. Jin. Xianbei. Goguryeo.

In 404, Goguryeo finally ate it.

Liaoxi (요서군 遼西郡): c. 300 BCE–6th century CE as an administrative name

Liaoxi is where things get really complicated.

Long before it became a 郡, this was one of the great ancient cultural centers of Northeast Asia.

     Xiaohexi (~6500–5700 BCE)

     Xinglongwa (~6000–5200 BCE)

     Zhaobaogou (~5200–4500 BCE)

     Hongshan (~4500–3000 BCE)

     Xiaoheyan (~3000–2200 BCE)

     Lower Xiajiadian (~2200–1600 BCE)

Then, by the early first millennium BCE:

Upper Xiajiadian / related regional cultures (~1000–700 BCE)

And in the Daling River basin:

Shiertaiyingzi (~900/800–300 BCE)

Thousands of years of villages, farming, ritual centers, fortified settlements, increasingly complex societies, bronze production and regional exchange existed here before anybody called this place Liaoxi Commandery.

And then something appears that matters enormously to our story:

the lute-shaped bronze dagger.

The Daling River basin and the broader Liaoxi Bronze Age world produced the cultural complexes most closely associated with its earliest development.

And, depending on which reconstruction you believe, somewhere inside that world may have emerged something outsiders would eventually call:

Gojoseon.

Then Yan came east.

Conquered the region.

And gave part of it a new administrative name:

Liaoxi Commandery.

The land was old.

The 郡 was new.

And everybody and their grandmother fought over it.

     Claimed they conquered it.

     Built castles there.

     Lost it.

     Died in it.

Unfortunately, this is also where Gojoseon may have been born.

---

Gojoseon (고조선; 古朝鮮): ~2333 BCE? or 800?-108 BCE

If Buyeo was a nightmare, Gojoseon is hell itself.

Trying to reconstruct Gojoseon's history requires an extraordinary amount of guesswork. 

Finding any traces that help answer our core question:

“Where do Koreans come from?”, 

is a collosoal challenge.

The written record is a mess.

A sentence here.

A name there.

Different authors writing centuries apart about something that may not even have occupied the same place throughout its history.

Then archaeology gives us pottery, tombs, bronze daggers and settlements.

But none of them say:

PROPERTY OF GOJOSEON.

So scholars do what they have to do.

They stitch together anything they can.

They make shit up.

Unfortunately, they can't even agree to their own shit.

And depending on whose shit you read, you can produce remarkably different Gojoseons.

First, the easy part.

The "Go" (古) in Gojoseon means "Old." The monk Iryeon, of Samguk Yusa fame, added it in 1281 to separate Dangun's Joseon from Wiman's Joseon. Today it also keeps it apart from the other Joseon, founded in 1392, which took the name on purpose: to claim the old kingdom's legitimacy.

So the real name is Joseon.

Probably.

We don't know what these people called themselves.

We call them Joseon because the Chinese wrote 朝鮮, Morning + Freshness, Cháoxiǎn in Mandarin.

Which was likely just Chinese characters approximating a local word nobody remembers.

"Land of Morning Calm" came much later.

There are at least seven different theories about Gojoseon, perhaps more. 

None of them pass my own standard for truth.

Each possessing unique problems, stemming from inherent issues in their approach.

But they are all interesting in their own way.

And each leaves us with one or two questions that are worth exploring.

So i'll introduce them one by one.

1. Wiman Joseon.

Conventionally c. 194/198–108 BCE.

For once, Gojoseon gets relatively straightforward.

Wiman was a refugee from Yan. When the Yan king Lu Wan rebelled against Han and fled to the Xiongnu, Wiman gathered more than a thousand followers, crossed east into Joseon, and submitted to King Jun.

Jun apparently thought this was useful.

He gave Wiman authority over the western frontier, where Wiman gathered even more refugees from Yan and Qi.

Then Wiman told Jun that Han armies were coming.

They weren't.

He marched on the capital instead, overthrew Jun, and became king himself.

Importantly, Wiman did not found a new country on empty land.

He took over Joseon.

He kept its name.

He ruled from Wanggeom/Wangxian.

And under Wiman and his descendants, Joseon became powerful enough to control neighboring populations and the routes between Han and the peoples farther east and south.

Then, in 108 BCE, Han destroyed it.

And this gives us our hardest floor.

Whatever Gojoseon ultimately turns out to have been, Wiman Joseon existed from around 194/198  to 108 BCE.

Soil (Land): Yes.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes.

Blood (DNA): Not yet. Tiny Chinese elite mixed with majority Gojoseon?

Words (Language): ??? No one knows. Chinese and whatever Gojoseon spoke, I assume.

Books (Written records): Yes. Lots of it.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ Yes.

So our window narrows again:

1500 BCE? – 194/198 BCE

Question:

When Wiman took Joseon, the king changed.

When Han destroyed Wiman Joseon, the government disappeared.

But there were still thousands upon thousands of people living there.

What happened to them?

Obviously, some kept living where they were, now with new bosses who spoke Chinese. 

But was that all?

2. Pre-Wiman Joseon.

This is the Gojoseon we reach mostly through logic.

• Wiman did not conquer an empty field.
• When he arrived sometime around 194–198 BCE, there was already a king named Jun (準) ruling something called Joseon.
• Wiman entered his service.
• Jun gave him land and authority on the western frontier.
• Then Wiman turned around, attacked him, and took his kingdom.

So whatever else we believe about Gojoseon, there was unquestionably something there before Wiman.

The question is: How far back does it go?

And here the written record gets surprisingly interesting.

The Weilüe, preserved in the Sanguozhi, says that when the state of Yan began calling its ruler King, 

Joseon basically responded:

Oh yeah? Me too.

The ruler of Joseon also adopted the title King, and apparently became angry enough at Yan's eastward expansion that he considered attacking it.

One of his ministers talked him out of it and negotiated instead.

This is generally placed in the late fourth century BCE, probably around the period when Yan formally adopted the royal title around 323 BCE.

So now we have something much harder than mythology.

Around 300 BCE, Chinese writers remember: Yan.

And next to Yan: Joseon.

With a ruler calling himself king.

     Conducting diplomacy.

     Considering war.

Then the relationship gets worse.

Yan eventually sends the general Qin Kai (秦開) east. According to the same tradition, he attacks Joseon's western territory, takes 2000 li of land, around 830 kilometers today, and pushes the boundary eastward. The same records also metion Qin Kai attacking the Donghu and taking 1000 Li from them as well.

This may be the only surviving record of an iron age army fighting with a bronze age army on the Korea Peninsula. Very cool.

     How did the battle go?

     Where exactly did the battle happen?

     What happened to all the Donghu and Gojoseon people?

Welcome back to Gojoseon hell.

But the basic event is difficult to ignore: by around the fourth–third centuries BCE, something called Joseon was large and organized enough for Yan to treat it as a significant neighboring political power.

After that, the trail becomes somewhat easier to follow.

     We get later rulers such as King Bu (否).

     Then his son Jun.

     Then refugees from Yan, Qi and Zhao pouring east during the collapse of Qin.

     Then Wiman.

Then suddenly we are back on reasonably solid historical ground.

So our window has narrowed.

Written history gets us securely into 323 BCE.

Soil (Land): Yes.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes.

Blood (DNA): Not yet. Tiny Chinese elite mixed with majority Gojoseon?

Words (Language): ??? No one knows.

Books (Written records): Yes. That one thing in the Weilüe.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ Yes.

Our new window is:

~1500 BCE - 323 BCE

Question:

1. Where was Gojoseon founded? And what happened after Qin Kai attacked?
This may sound like a silly question, but to me it's particularly perplexing. Every ounce of evidence points towards Gojoseon being founded in Laoxi. But almost all historical records points to the capital being around Pyongyang. So it seems they moved at some point. 

But why Pyongyang? Why go around the Liaodong Peninsula, navigate the Amnok/Yalu River, and the rugged mountains? Why not just walk northeast? What was blocking them?

Did Buyeo, or something else exist then?

Is this when Gojoseon lost Liadong/Liaoxi?

If King Jun gave Wiman authority over the western frontier, does that mean Gojoseon's capital, Wanggeomsung had already moved to Pyongyang?

Some competing theories around where Wanggeomsung are:

• #1 Wanggeomsung was always around Pyongyang. No archaeological evidence has been found, despite this being the orthodox view.

• #2 Wanggeomsung was in Liaodong, but later moved to Pyongyang following pressure from Yan. This theory is attractive because early textual and archaeological Gojoseon looks strongly oriented toward Liaoning.

• #3 Wanggeomsung itself was somewhere in Liaoxi
  The Shiji preserves a tradition from Ying Shao that:
  遼東險瀆縣 朝鮮王舊都
  Xiandu County in Liaodong was the former capital of the king of Joseon.
  North Korean scholar Ri Ji-rin places Wanggeomsung in Gaiping.

• #4 Wanggeomsung was around Chaoyang, around the Dailing River. This one makes the most sense archaeologically, since almost all of the sites connected to Gojoseon are located here.

• #5 Wanggeomsung was even further west, aroundthe eastern Luan River region.

Now look at the map below. I pinned each of those theories alongside Gojoseon-related archaeological sites.

Red home icons are the potential Wanggeomsung sites.

Blue stars are high confidence archaeological sites.

Yellowish stars are low confidence sites.

To me, Theory #4. Chaoyang makes the most logical sense.

Gojoseon begins somewhere new Chaoyang (red home icon farthest to the northeast).

→ Yan's Qin Kai attacks during King Zhao's reign (r. 311-279 BCE).

→ Gojoseon is pushed back "2000 li"

...

→ At some point Wanggeomsung appears near Pyongyang (red home icon farthest to the southeast).

→ Wiman escapes to Gojoseon after a failed rebellion (~c. 195 BCE).

→ Wiman usurps King Jun (~c. 194 BCE).

That makes the most sense to me.

But I still can't figure out why they didn't head northeast towards Songnen/Jilin.

2. Where did King Jun go? Why?

This one is actually recorded.

When Wiman took his kingdom, Jun gathered members of his court, escaped by sea, went south into Han territory (韓地), and called himself King of Han (韓王).

And then?

Pretty much nothing.

Where exactly did he go?

And what happened when he got there?

Interestingly, this gives us a Korean continuation lineage from Gojoseon to Samhan then all the way back up to modern Korea.

3. Archaeological Joseon.

This Gojoseon is reconstructed from things like:

     Prestige Objects (e.g., Lute-shaped Bronze Daggers vs. Slender-style Bronze Daggers)

     Tomb systems (e.g., table-top dolmens) and Burial customs

     Pottery styles (e.g., Misongri-style)

     Settlement concentration (e.g., how many people live in a settlement)

     Bronze vs. Iron Production

     Evidence of increasing hierarchy 

Tada~!

Archaeological Gojoseon.

Basically, Gojoseon defined by Stuff.

The three primary markers that archaeologists use for Gojoseon are:

     Lute-shaped Bronze Daggers

     Table-top Dolmens

     Misongri-style Pottery

Now the big question we should all have is, 

does having this Stuff = Gojoseon?

I don't know.

I have an LG OLED, a Samsung Galaxy phone, and an Asus gaming computer.

Does that indicate something about me?

I guess it says something, but what?

Let's look at these three objects first:

Liaoning-style, Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger (비파형청동검.)

This ridiculous looking, strangely beautiful thing is the Liaoning-style, Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger. Quite the mouthful. As you can probably see, it's not the most practical knife/sword/spear tip/dagger you can imagine. On average they are about 30-35 cm long, and weigh 200-300 grams.

Because of this, most historians think this was primarily ceremonial. A prestige item to signify power. And they pop up everywhere in tombs throughout the peninsula.

Its geographical distribution roughly looks like this:

Strongly present in the north, but also present throughout the peninsula, at different times of course. The green sword icon is the Slender Bronze Dagger, that emerged later, and gradually replaced the Lute-shaped Dagger in Korea. Less beautiful, but so much more practical if your goal is to stab someone.

For many experts in the field, this is THE Gojoseon Item.

In an era where bronze was extremely rare.

     Bronze mirror on the chest glinting in the sunlight.

     Deer antlers on the head, fancy earrings.

     Waving around a shiny bonze sword.

A bronze-wielding political and religious cult leader.

Leading a group of stone tool wielding people.

As to why people still used stone tools when bronze existed?

That has to do with metallurgy. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is common. Tin is extremely rare. And Korea doesn't have a viable source of tin. So all bronze, or tin, had to be imported from its closest source, Liaoxi or Inner Mongolia. And if Gojoseon lost access to Liaoxi, obviously bronze becomes extremely rare and precious.

Also, a stone tipped arrow kills as well as a bronze arrow. Why waste bronze?

Table-top Dolmen (탁자형 고인돌)

For some unknown reason, these bronze-age leader type guys really liked being buried under huge boulders, and quite inconveniently for the poor guys who had to build these things, these Boulder-Tombs were located high up on mountain tops. 

I know, I discovered one near my mom's place.

Some of these cap stones weighed 30-50 tons (smaller ones between 6-15 tons). So creating a dolmen tomb is not a one family job. It required the cooperation of a lot of people. That means power and coordination. And that means elites.

If someone said:

"Dad died, let's carry this 50 ton piece of rock up that mountain."

My response would have been:

"Fuck you. You carry that rock."

But apparently that wasn't an option for the people who lived in Korea during this era.

There are more than 40,000 dolmens discovered on the Korean Peninsula, the highest concentration in the world, 40% of all dolmens, although not all of them are Table-top Dolmens.

The interesting thing about these dolmens is that they generally tend to occur with Lute-shaped Daggers, as the map below shows (but this doesn't actually prove anything as we'll find out later).

Under these dolmens is another story. Some are stone-cists, others are wooden structures, and some are stone-lined. Secondary Gojoseon markers.

Misongri-style Pottery

And finally Misongri-style Pottery. Distinct egg-like body with a flared mouth, and functional side handles. Quite beautiful. Very distinct.

But what makes it special is that it looks so different from other forms of pottery. So archaeologist often use that as a marker for Gojoseon.

Individually, the appearance of one of these artifacts at an archaeological dig may mean nothing. But if all three appear together, it shows a noticeable pattern. And that pattern can be tracked across geography and time.

I worked with GPT to map each of these items on a spreadsheet, then cut them by geography and time (when they appeared / disappeared). To see if the orthodox history view accurately depicts Gojoseon.

First some tables:

Don’t worry about the individual numbers. Just watch where each marker appears, where it disappears, and when (Bipa is the bronze sword).

And then all three put together:

At first glance it seems like we have the Gojoseon pattern. 

1200-400 BCE. 

Case closed. 

Archaeologists are hella brilliant.

But no.

If you look at it closer, everything starts breaking down.

Geographically, maybe.

But as soon as you apply time, everything goes to shit.

The Package isn't a Package

The first problem is the tombs.

The stone tomb traditions are already there before the Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger really gets going.

     In Southern Liaodong, large stone tombs appear very early.

     Similar stone-cist and dolmen traditions develop across Liaodong and northwestern Korea.

     Then Misongri-style Pottery begins appearing across parts of that world.

     And only afterward does the Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger become widespread.

So instead of:

Dolmen + Misongri + Lute Dagger = Gojoseon!

what it actually looks more like is:

Dolmen tombs

↓

Dolment tombs + new pottery traditions

↓

Dolmen tombs + different pottery traditions + Lute Dagger

The three things archaeologists later group together as the "Gojoseon package" do not appear together.

They overlapped later.

For a while.

And then they didn't.

Misongri Pottery is just weird

Misongri pottery also doesn't behave like one simple cultural marker.

• In Liaodong, it appears heavily in tombs.
• Around the Yalu and Cheongchon Rivers, it appears in both settlements and burials.
• By the time you get to the Daedong River around Pyongyang, it becomes much more of an ordinary household pottery tradition.

Same general style of pot.

Different use.

Different local culture.

Different social meaning.

And then it gets weirder. The Pyongyang region already had its own very distinctive pottery tradition, Top-shaped Pottery (팽이형토기 / 각형토기).

That tradition doesn't disappear when Misongri shows up.

They interact.

Which means we are not looking at some empty place suddenly becoming Gojoseon.

     There were already people there.

     They already had pottery.

     They already had tombs.

     They already had settlements.

     Then new Stuff entered their world.

Then the stupid dagger shows up

The Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger spreads much farther than either the northern pottery tradition or the northern tomb system.

Way farther.

     Into Hwanghae.

     Across the Han River.

     Into Chungcheong.

     Down to Yeosu and Goheung.

     All the way into the southeast.

But the rest of the supposed Gojoseon package does not follow it.

     Misongri pottery fades.

     Table-top dolmens become less dominant and change into local forms.

     Local pottery traditions continue.

     Local tomb traditions continue.

Yet the dagger keeps going.

So whatever the Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger represents, it cannot simply represent one people carrying one culture southward.

The people in Yeosu burying one in a southern-style dolmen were not suddenly living like people in Liaodong.

They took the sword.

They did not take everything else.

That starts looking less like a migrating "culture" and more like a prestige network.

Powerful people like cool shit.

Apparently this was very cool shit.

And this keeps happening

I’m not going to drag you through every artifact I tracked, but the same pattern kept repeating.

Things move south.

But they do not move south together.

     Bronze casting technology moves.

     Mirrors move.

     Different arrowheads move.

     Pottery moves.

     Later, Slender Bronze Daggers move.

     Eventually iron moves.

But each one has a different geographic footprint.

     Some travel far.

     Some barely travel at all.

     Some arrive and get copied locally.

     Some seem to change function entirely.

     And some just stop.

At first I thought those stopping points might tell us where one people ended and another began.

Then I looked at a map.

Chariots hate Korea

One example is horse equipment.

Before roughly the 3rd century BCE, this is mostly the age of the chariot, not mass cavalry.

And chariots are fantastic.

If you have somewhere to drive them.

Liaoxi? Great.

Open plains. Perfect.

Korea? 

Have you seen Korea?

     Mountains.

     Valleys.

     More mountains.

     A river.

     Another mountain.

     Then another mountain behind that one.

Driving a war chariot through Korea would be roughly equivalent to driving a Lamborghini in Manhattan.

Very impressive.

Congratulations.

Where exactly are you planning to drive it?

So when chariot equipment spreads across northern China and Liaoning but largely fails to penetrate deep into Korea, that doesn't necessarily tell us anything profound about ethnicity or political borders.

It may just tell us:

Chariots suck in mountains.

Which is why geography has to come before archaeology.

Otherwise we risk inventing an ancient cultural boundary to explain something that a topographic map explains in ten seconds.

The same road, different stuff

The most consistent pattern that I observed was the transmission corridor:

Liaodong → Amnok/Yalu River → Northwest Korea → Pyongyang → sometimes further south

That would be really interesting except for one problem.

That is basically the only practical road in and out of Korea.

The Changbai and Taebaek Mountain Ranges practically make every other route stupid.

What happens to the Stuff while it travels down that same road?

     Some things cross easily.

     Some stop.

     Some change.

     Some get absorbed into completely different local cultures.

     Some disappear and are replaced by something new.

The road remains the same.

The Stuff doesn't.

So what exactly is Archaeological Gojoseon?

The three classic archaeological markers of Gojoseon do overlap.

There really is a period when Lute-shaped Bronze Daggers, certain stone tomb traditions, and Misongri-style Pottery occupy much of the same northern world.

So archaeologists are not imagining the pattern.

The pattern exists.

But it is temporary.

     The tombs begin earlier.

     The pottery has its own history.

     The dagger arrives later and travels much farther.

     Then the whole thing begins breaking apart again.

     New pottery appears.

     New dagger styles appear.

     Mirrors shift south.

     Northern military technologies develop differently.

     Local Korean traditions absorb some things and ignore others.

     Eventually iron arrives from the west.

So I don't think the archaeology is showing us one neat culture called:

Gojoseon.

It looks more like a huge interaction zone whose societies were constantly borrowing from each other, fighting each other, marrying each other, trading with each other, copying each other, and occasionally absorbing each other.

Somewhere inside that mess was a political entity that people eventually called:

Joseon.

Which unfortunately brings us right back to the original problem.

Which part?

Question:

No questions here.

But here are all the different charts I made:

4. North Korean Joseon

In 1993, North Korea announced that a tomb near Pyongyang contained 86 human bone fragments belonging to a man and a woman.

They identified them as Dangun, the mythical founder of Gojoseon, and his wife.

Using ESR dating, North Korean researchers dated the male remains to 5,011 ±267 years before 1993. From this, North Korean scholarship pushed Gojoseon's beginnings back toward the early third millennium BCE and placed its center firmly around Pyongyang.

Then Kim Il-sung declared that Dangun had been scientifically proven to be a real historical person and ordered the tomb rebuilt.

So in 1994 they constructed the enormous Dangun Mausoleum that stands there today.

     They have bones.

     They have a date.

     They have a gigantic tomb.

It must be true.

Question:

None. Kim Il-sung said so.

Ridiculous as it seems, I do want to add a footnote to the North Korean Dangun story.

For decades, Japanese colonial historiography had told Koreans that their ancient history was derivative, that their state development came late, that parts of southern Korea had been ruled by ancient Japan, and that Korea's past should be understood through frameworks produced by the colonial state. Then Korea is divided, North Korea becomes diplomatically isolated, much of the international scholarship it encounters is written through Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, Soviet, or Western institutions, and claims coming from Pyongyang are greeted with suspicion before anybody even examines them.

If I thought everyone else possessed the authority to decide whether my ancestors existed, I would be strongly tempted to say:

Fine. You want material evidence? I'll give you material evidence.

Also, immediately rejecting the North Korean claim is a little sloppy.

If Qin Kai really did attack and destroy the capital in the north, and Gojoseon had to move south to Pyongyang, what would be the one thing they would move?

I think the first thing on the list would be the grave of the founder, the quasi-religious, mythical figure that gave Gojoseon rulers their legitimacy.

So finding Dangun's remains in Pyongyang is not strange to me. Not finding it would.

5. Gija Joseon

I have a lot of difficulty wrapping my head around this one.

Not because there are no records. There are actually quite a few.

Whether they're true is another question entirely.

Gija, or Jizi (箕子) in Chinese, appears in genuinely ancient Chinese tradition as a member of the Shang royal family and one of the virtuous men who opposed the disastrous final Shang king, Zhou.

     The Analects knows him.

     The Book of Documents knows him.

     But neither of those early traditions says anything about him ruling Korea.

He's just Gija.

A wise dude from Shang.

Then the story grows.

By the time of Sima Qian's Shiji, written around the first century BCE, we suddenly get this:

After overthrowing Shang, King Wu of Zhou supposedly enfeoffed Gija in Joseon.

Then the Hanshu adds more.

Gija didn't merely go to Joseon. He civilized it.

According to the Hanshu, he taught the people:

     Ritual and righteousness.

     Agriculture.

     Sericulture.

     Weaving.

     And laws.

Supposedly there were Eight Prohibitions, although only a few survive in the text: murder was repaid with death, injury with grain, and thieves could become slaves unless they bought themselves free.

Then the author gushes about the results.

     People supposedly stopped stealing.

     Nobody needed to lock their doors.

     Women were virtuous.

     Apparently Gija had transformed these eastern barbarians into civilized people.

And then the story grows again.

The third-century Weilüe, preserved inside the Sanguozhi, refers to the rulers of Joseon as descendants of Gija.

So now we don't merely have:

Gija went to Joseon.

We have:

Gija ruled Joseon 

→ his descendants ruled Joseon 

→ eventually we arrive at King Jun 

→ Wiman takes their kingdom.

Congratulations.

We now have Gija Joseon.

There is just one enormous problem.

The closer we get to Gija's supposed lifetime, the less anyone seems to know about him going to Joseon.

     The earliest traditions remember the man.

     The later traditions connect him to Joseon.

     Still later traditions turn him into its civilizer and ancestor of its kings.

That doesn't automatically make the story false.

But it should make anyone extremely suspicious.

And archaeology has never produced the obvious footprint you would expect from a Shang aristocrat arriving with enough people and cultural baggage to establish a new dynasty in Northeast Asia.

So historically?

I wouldn't bet the house on Gija Joseon.

But that's not actually the interesting part.

Because more than a thousand years later, Koreans themselves fell in love with the story.

And this is where my brain starts hurting.

During the Goryeo Dynasty (918 - 1392 CE), Gija gradually became incorporated into Korean historical memory. By 1102, the Goryeo court was explicitly arguing that Korea's civilization and ritual tradition had begun with Gija. The state searched for his tomb in Pyongyang, established a shrine, and began sacrificing to him.

By the time Samguk Yusa was written (~1281 CE), Dangun and Gija had effectively been stitched together into one history.

     Dangun establishes Joseon.

     He rules for an absurdly long time.

     Then King Wu of Zhou gives Joseon to Gija

     Dangun politely moves aside and eventually becomes a mountain god.

That's one hell of a succession plan.

But once Joseon becomes a thoroughly Neo-Confucian state, Gija becomes much more important.

He isn't merely some ancient foreign king.

He becomes proof of something.

We are civilized.

     Confucian ritual.

     Moral government.

     Writing.

     Proper social relationships.

     Agriculture.

     Law (법; 法 and 형; 刑).

     Li (예; 禮).

The whole package.

In the old Chinese 華夷: Hwa versus Yi worldview, Korea sat in an awkward place.

China was the center of civilization Hwa 華.

Everyone outside it was, to varying degrees, Yi 夷.

Yi 夷 = Barbarians.

Including Koreans.

So Gija offered an extraordinary escape hatch.

Yes, perhaps our ancestors had once been barbarians.

     But Gija came here.

     He brought civilization.

     And we've been civilized ever since.

Basically:

“We're barbarians, sure. But we're the civilized barbarians.”

Not those buck-naked, bow-shooting people you keep talking about.

And this wasn't some obscure theory.

Gija became a state-sponsored historical ancestor.

• His supposed tomb in Pyongyang was maintained.
• His shrine received official sacrifices.
• Yi I, one of the greatest Confucian thinkers in Korean history, wrote the Gijasilgi, The True Record of Gija.
• Confucian scholars collected his supposed laws, teachings and history.
• The National Museum of Korea still has a Joseon-period Gijaji, an entire compilation of records and commentary devoted to him.

At first glance this seems insane to me.

Imagine constructing your national identity around:

“Fortunately, a foreign guy came here and taught us how not to be savages.”

Stockholm syndrome much?

Except that's not quite what they were doing.

Because in the Confucian worldview, Hwa and Yi could be cultural categories, not simply bloodlines.

• Civilization could be learned.
• A barbarian who adopted proper civilization could become culturally Hwa.
• And somebody born in the Central Plains who abandoned proper civilization could become barbarous.

That creates a remarkable intellectual trick.

Gija's foreign origin does not diminish Korea.

It legitimizes Korea.

He gives Korea direct succession to the same universal civilization China claims.

Goryeo and Joseon scholars could therefore say, in effect:

• China did not merely influence us recently.
• One of the great sages of antiquity civilized us at the beginning of our recorded history.
• We have belonged to this civilization for three thousand years.

And then history performs one final contortion.

The Ming falls.

The Manchu Qing takes China.

Joseon intellectuals, who regard the Manchus themselves as barbarians, suddenly face a fascinating problem.

If civilization is defined by culture rather than geography or blood, then occupying Beijing doesn't automatically make you the guardian of civilization.

Which means:

China can become barbarian.

And Korea can remain civilized.

The logic that originally placed Joseon on the edge of the Chinese world could now be turned around.

By the late Joseon period, the idea of Sojunghwa, “Little China” could become not simply:

“We're a lesser version of China.”

But:

“We preserved the civilization that China itself has lost.”

Scholarship on this ideology explicitly connects Gija worship with this transformation: Gija marked Korea's ancient conversion from Yi to Hwa, while after the Ming-Qing transition some Joseon thinkers increasingly presented their own country as the legitimate preserver of that civilization.

And now I find Gija Joseon absolutely fascinating.

Not necessarily because Gija ever set foot there.

But because of what Koreans eventually needed him to mean.

Dangun says:

We began here.

Gija says:

We belong to civilization.

And somehow, for centuries, Koreans managed to believe both at the same time.

Question:

Stockholm syndrome much?

Or is something much more interesting happening?

If my daughter can type faster on her iPhone than Steve Jobs ever could, does she now own Apple?

6. Mythic Dangun Joseon

Let me first introduce the myth to you and then let's proceed from there.

---

///

Long ago, Hwanin, the Lord of Heaven, had a son named Hwanung. Hwanung wanted to leave heaven and live among human beings, so Hwanin looked down upon the earth and chose Mount Taebaek as a suitable place for him to descend. He gave his son three heavenly seals and sent him down to benefit humanity.

Hwanung descended beneath a sacred tree with 3,000 followers. With him came the masters of wind, rain, and clouds. There he established Sinsi, the City of God, and began governing the human world. He oversaw some 360 affairs of humanity, including grain, life, disease, punishment, good and evil, and everything else necessary for human society.

Nearby, a bear and a tiger lived together in a cave. They came to Hwanung and asked him to make them human. Hwanung gave them mugwort and garlic and told them to eat only those foods and remain out of the sunlight for one hundred days. If they could endure it, they would become human.

The tiger could not.

The bear did.

After twenty-one days, the bear became a woman named Ungnyeo (웅녀). But she had no husband and no child, so she prayed beneath the sacred tree for a child. Hwanung took human form and joined with her, and she gave birth to a son named Dangun Wanggeom.

Dangun then established a kingdom called Joseon.

The story places Dangun in the age of the legendary Chinese emperor Yao (2333 BCE). 

///

---

It's a founding myth.

The Bible is a founding myth.

Romulus and Remus is a founding myth.

The Mexica migration from Aztlan and founding of Tenochtitlan is a founding myth.

My goal isn't to use any of this to propose whether Dangun was real, 

or use it to prove Gojoseon was founded in 2333 BCE.

Whether Romulus was real doesn't affect whether Rome existed.

Whether Abraham was real doesn't affect whether the Jewish people are real.

Whether Aztlan is real doesn't affect whether the Aztecs were real.

What is real is this:

This is a story about Identity.

It ties millions of "Koreans" together as Us.

It differentiates Us from Not-Us.

Handed down from father to son, 

mother to daughter.

There is a choice going on here.

     The choice to preserve the story.

     The choice to retell that story.

     The choice to make it a part of a collective story called Korean.

And what Koreans have decided to say about what their collective founding story is what is of interest to me.

Because inside this myth lies some form of truth that has resonated inside this small peninsula for centuries.

Perhaps since 2333 BCE.

---

Most founding myths are surprisingly formulaic.

A divine beginning.

A struggle.

A victory.

↓

Therefore legitimacy.

But the Dangun myth is not that.

1. The lack of violence is remarkable.

Violence is everywhere in founding myths.

Remus mocks his brother's half-built walls by jumping over them. Romulus kills him and warns:

"So perish whoever else shall leap over my walls!"

<Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1.7>

The Bible is considerably worse:

"Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

<1 Samuel 15:3>

The Mexica founding tradition is drenched in blood too. Huitzilopochtli is born fully armed, kills his sister Coyolxauhqui, cuts off her head, and sends her dismembered body tumbling down the mountain. He then pursues her four hundred brothers until almost all of them are dead.

Later, in the Mexica migration story, Huitzilopochtli defeats his nephew Copil, decapitates him and removes his heart. The heart is thrown into Lake Texcoco. From it grows the cactus that will mark the future site of Tenochtitlan.

<Florentine Codex, Book 3; Crónica Mexicayotl>

Then there is the Dangun myth.

Hwanung doesn't conquer the people living below the mountain. There is no enemy king to defeat, no brother to murder, no population to exterminate, no blood sacrifice establishing possession of the land.

2. It spends an inordinate amount of time on the Bear side-story, when it doesn't need it.

Son of Heaven descends and founds a nation. 

Boom! Legitimacy.

Instead it goes through this convoluted story about a bear and a tiger living in a cave eating garlic and mugwort. And the conclusion is quite funny. The omnivore is the one that comes out on top.

3. Civilization is the primary justification for everything.

Masters of wind, rains, and clouds.

Grain, disease, punishment, moral codes, and all things necessary for a human society to function.

And an ending that basically says:

"Yo, China, we're as civilized as you are AND we started when you started."

4. Most myths have an 'epic struggle arc', this one has an 'epic patience arc'.

The only thing in the story that has any semblance of conflict is the bear and tiger diet competition. And even then it doesn't take 100 days as promised, it ends in 21.

5. The founding values / mission statement of Gojoseon is particularly inspirational

 弘益人間

홍익인간

Hongik Ingan.

To broadly benefit human world.

I don't know enough about the founding purpose for other civilizations, but this one's extraordinarily specific and modern, even to our modern standards Most myths talk about:

     God gave you this land.

     God gave you the right to rule.

     You have the responsibility of saving the universe.

But,

"Heaven sends the founder down because this is a place where he can benefit the human world."

No, you have the right to be assholes.

That's pretty unique.

So what can we infer from this story?

At the surface level:

1. Bear = Tribe X, Tiger = Tribe Y, Son of Heaven = Immigrant
2. Garlic and Mugwort points to an agricultural foundation story
3. Legitimacy = Civilization

But step one deeper and you get:

1. The founders arrive. The story remembers movement into an already inhabited human world.
2. The locals matter. Joseon's founder cannot exist without the local maternal ancestor.
3. Joining requires change. The bear wants to become part of Hwanung's human order and submits to a rule to do so.
4. Not everyone joins. The tiger walks away. Nothing requires everyone living in the same place to become part of the new Us.
5. The resulting polity is legitimate because it combines both worlds.
   Heaven + Earth, Newcomer + Local, Order + Incorporation = Dangun.

When does Korean Us start?

When different people agree to become one.

Then there is a wonderful modern parallel.

I'm sure you remember when we covered Balhae, one of the most frustrating things about them is the lack of historical material. Almost everything we know about them are through the eyes of others: Chinese and Japanese sources.

So in 2004 when news of a discovery of a Balhae royal tomb reached the world, it was big news. The Chinese government rushed to excavate it and in 2009 they released a preliminary report.

• The tomb was from Empress Hyoui, queen consort of Emporer Mun (문왕), the 3rd ruler of Balhae
• Some cool stuff was discovered in the tomb
• There was an epitaph, but nothing about what the epitaph said

And then silence. No one was allowed inside. Not a single peep.

Until 2025. As the Chinese government was pushing to have the site registered with UNESCO as a global heritage site, they released a full report, complete with commentary.

• Her name was Ul (울씨, 鬱氏)
• She was born in 726, became Empress in 755, and passed away in 775
• They used an Era Name (연호; 年號) separate from China
• They used words like Empire, Emperor, and Empress to describe themselves.

No wonder the Chinese government was so concerned about releasing this information without an appropriate cover story. It destroyed their claim about Balhae being a provincial government of China.

But that's China doing China.

The thing that struck me was the name Ul (울씨, 鬱氏).

That name isn't a Korean name.

It's not a Chinese name either.

Experts think it's a Mohe name.

So, 

Balhae = A minority Goguryeo elite ruling over a majority Mohe population" 

claim suddenly becomes bullshit. 

Empress Hyoui is the mother of many emperors to come. 

A minority elite ruling a majority subordinate group 

doesn't proudly state that their mother is from the subordinate group.

It makes you think.

Perhaps Ye, Maek, Goguryeo, Mohe...is just an Other trying to undermine an Us.

Anyhoot.

I just thought the Bear-Tiger story had an interesting parallel to this one.

Question:

None for now.

7. Hwandangogi Joseon

Hwandangogi presents itself as a compilation of four older books, supposedly written by five authors over roughly a thousand years. It is a bound volume of 

• First Book of Samseonggi(Three Sacred Dynasties) written by Ahn Ham-ro, 
• Second Book of Samseonggi(Three Sacred Dyansties) written by Won Dong-joong, 
• Dangun Segi(Centuries of Danguns), written by Yi Am, 
• Buk Buyeogi (Records of Northern Buyeo) written by Beom Jang, 
• and Taebaek Ilsa (Secret History of the Taebaek) written by Yi Maek.

It's main contents are:

• Samseonggi, a two-volume book which describes an ancient kingdom called Hwan-guk 桓國 that lasted for 3301 years, and Hwanung's 1565-year rule of Baedalguk 倍達國.
• Dangun Segi (단군세기; 檀君世紀), a chronicle of Gojoseon through 47 generations of Dangun rulers.
• Bukbuyeogi, a book about the six kings of Bukbuyeo (North Buyeo).
• Taebaek Ilsa, a book about the histories of Hwan-guk, Baedalguk, Samjoseon, Goguryeo, Balhae, and Goryeo; also includes the text of Cheonbu-gyeong.

Some of its more "creative" claims:

• It claims that Hwan-guk spanned 50,000 li, approximately 20,000 kilometers, from north to south, and 20,000 li from east to west. For context, the entire circumference of the Earth is roughly 40,000 kilometers.
• It claims that the Sumerians are Koreans.
• Each ruler lived on average of 471 years.

Common critiques:

1. The document contains modern phrases and concepts like, gender equality (男女平權) and patriarchy (父權)
2. There are no historical records that support the existence of Samseonggi's two alleged authors: Am Ham-ro and Won Dong-jung.
3. When calculated with modern measures, the alleged territory of Hwan-guk spans the North Pole to the South Pole.
4. The rulers of Baedalguk are said to have loved for an average of 120-150 years.
5. Hwan-guk is said to have had intricate bureaucratic systems during the Stone Age.

People have been writing impossible origin stories forever.

     Men live for hundreds of years.

     Seas split.

     Gods impregnate women.

     Entire civilizations descend from chosen ancestors.

Read the Old Testament.

Read the Book of Mormon.

Read Dangun.

Regardless of when it was written, or whether its claims are true,

People need to write stories about Us.

And judging by the enormous interest Hwandangogi continues to attract in Korea, there seems to be a very large audience waiting for those stories.

Question:

Why do people have a need to create stories about Us?

and finally, my own theory on Joseon.

8. Heraclitus' Joseon

What the hell is a State?

Is there a point in time where there is Not-State and then in the next moment there is a State?

Was Egypt a Not-State at one point, then Tada~! State?

We humans, and especially those in academia like to think of history like a series of categories and definitions frozen at a point in time.

X, Y, Z = State.

X and Y only = Not-State.

But humans don't work that way. We're too busy living our lives to give a fuck about how some dude in an academic conference defines what a State means.

And that's what I mean by Heraclitus' Joseon.

     Gojoseon didn't magically appear because a Chinese scribe happened to write it in a book.

     Gojoseon didn't magically get founded because it appears in some myth.

     Gojoseon didn't magically appear because someone found a Lute-shaped Bronze Dagger in a tomb.

And sure as fuck,

Gojoseon didn't magically appear because it checked off 57 items on a checklist.

It depends on what we define as a State,

and how logical, common-sensical, and reasonable that definition is.

Then you take a leap of faith.

Stick to your definition.

And be prepared to be questioned.

And that's what I'm going to do.

First the two most important orthodox definitions of what a State is:

1. International law: the Montevideo criteria. 

Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention is the standard legal definition. 

A state has:

     a permanent population, 

     a defined territory, 

     a government, 

     and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. 

It descends from Georg Jellinek's older German "three-element" theory (territory, people, sovereign power), with the fourth criterion added for external independence.

2. Sociology and political science: Weber

Max Weber's definition in Politics as a Vocation (1919) is the most cited in the social sciences: 

A state is: 

     "a human community 

     that successfully claims a monopoly 

     on the legitimate use of physical force 

     within a given territory."

The key words are "legitimate" and "successfully claims." A state doesn't have to be the only one using violence. It has to be the one whose violence is accepted as rightful.

Both definitions are fine with me. Let's use them.

This is the Pingmaebawi dolmen at the Hwasun Dolmen Site in South Korea

It measures roughly 7.3 meters (24 ft) long, 5 meters (16 ft) wide, and 4 meters (13 ft) high.

The capstone alone weighs over 200 metric tons.

Think about what that means.

This thing had to be quarried, shaped, moved, raised, positioned, and supported without engines, cranes, trucks, or steel cable.

Not by one family.

Not by one guy and his drinking buddies.

Experts estimate that it took over 2000 men to build this grotesque celebration to a dead man.

Now let that sink in.

2000 men.

For a dead guy.

     Someone has to quarry it.

     Someone has to shape and polish it.

     Someone has to transport it.

     Someone has to build the supporting structure.

     Someone has to feed everybody doing that instead of farming.

     Someone has to tell them where to be and when.

And most importantly:

They actually showed up.

That is Power, with a capital P.

If a village is 15 households, perhaps 75 people, 25–30 working-age men, even 500 workers means you're already coordinating labor from something like twenty villages before you count craftsmen, provisioning, transport, supervisors, and people keeping everyone else's farms functioning.

2000 workers means that you are pulling from 80 villages.

Assuming you are primarily farming field millet, and supplementing that with foraging and hunting, at a minimum you would need a territory of 12 - 80 km².

80 villages = 1,000 km² - 6,300 km².

And I'm not even counting the fact that there is probably reasonable distance between each village.

     1000 km² is larger than Singapore.

     6,300 km² is about the size of Delaware.

Of course, you can't pull every available man to build a tomb.

     Somebody still has to farm.

     Somebody still has to hunt.

     Somebody still has to feed the children, and take care of the sick and elderly.

     Somebody still has to make tools, guard the village, move supplies, and keep everybody alive while      two thousand men are dragging a mountain across a mountain.

So the real network has to be larger.

     That is projecting power over territory.

     That is organization.

     That is a polity negotiating with other polities.

     And obviously this all requires a permanent population.

Now if one dead guy can bring 2000 guys together,

imagine what a living guy can do when they decide to attack someone?

If that same authority can say:

“We are under attack. Bring your weapons. Meet here.”

and two thousand men show up,

that is not just violence.

That is the legitimate organization of force within a territory.

     Population.

     Territory.

     Government.

     Relations with neighboring polities.

     The organized use of force.

Call it whatever you want.

I'm calling it a State.

The people living in that State may, or may not, call themselves Joseon.

Chinese scribes living across the ocean may, or may not, call it Joseon.

But it's a State.

To make the connection to Gojoseon clearer, perhaps the Gaizhou Shipengshan (石棚山) dolmen might be better. This one is smaller at 60 tons, deep in Gojoseon territory, in Liaodong, and it's worked and polished stone.

     600 men.

     20 - 24 villages.

     250 - 1600 km² of land to feed them.

This time, up a fucking mountain.

Now multiply.

There are 40,000 dolmens on the Korean Peninsula alone.

These aren't isolated monuments built by one freakishly ambitious chief.

This is a social institution that meets all the qualifications of a State.

It's the same State that was:

     being recorded by a Chinese scribe in 4C BCE.

     attacking Yan in 314-312 BCE.

     collapsing to a Han invasion in 108 BCE.

Gojoseon didn't magically appear.

That's all I'm saying.

And now the Duck-Test for Gojoseon:

Soil (Land): Yes.

Stuff (Artifacts): Yes.

Blood (DNA): No evidence found.

Words (Language): Have no idea.

Books (Written records): Yes.

Are they Korean ('Us')?

→ Yes.

Our time window?

1500 BCE

Our window has closed.

Whoever had the power to convince thousands of people to move a boulder up a mountain and place it on top of his dead dad is the father of all Koreans.

- ה -

The Others that made Koreans, Korean.

I always knew that I would have to write a section on the people who shared the same Soil as the Koreans.

     As neighbors.

     As allies.

     As subjects.

     As rulers.

     As friends.

     As enemies.

Sometimes Us.

Somethimes Not-Us.

I wanted to talk about them not because I thought they were in some way Korean, but because without interactions with them, there could be no Korean, in the way we think of "Korean" today.

They are the "Them" that is required to define "Us".

They are the "Us" that we forgot and became "Them."

In that same vein, I wrote a short section on the Han 漢 Chinese. Mostly to describe how the interactions with different Chinese Dynasties shaped Korea. 

But even then I found out very quickly how messy Han 漢 Us was. 

North / Northeastern Dynasties:

304–329 Han-Zhao / Former Zhao (한조·전조; 漢趙·前趙)

Xiongnu (흉노; 匈奴)

North → Northwest: Shanxi → Chang’an/Shaanxi

319–351 Later Zhao (후조; 後趙) 

Jie (갈; 羯)

North → Central Plains: Shanxi/Hebei → Henan/Shaanxi/Shandong

337–370 Former Yan (전연; 前燕)

Murong Xianbei (모용선비; 慕容鮮卑)

Northeast → North: Liaoxi/Liaoning → Hebei

351–394 Former Qin (전진; 前秦)

Di (저; 氐)

Northwest → North: Shaanxi/Chang’an; eventually unified northern China

384–409 Later Yan (후연; 後燕)

Murong Xianbei (모용선비; 慕容鮮卑)

Northeast / North: Hebei–Liaoning

384–394 Western Yan (서연; 西燕)

Murong Xianbei (모용선비; 慕容鮮卑)

North: Shanxi; briefly Chang’an

384–417 Later Qin (후진; 後秦)

Qiang (강; 羌)

Northwest: Shaanxi–Gansu, centered on Chang’an

386–534/535 Northern Wei (북위; 北魏)

Tuoba Xianbei (탁발선비; 拓跋鮮卑)

North: Shanxi → entire North China; later capital Luoyang

398–410 Southern Yan (남연; 南燕)

Murong Xianbei (모용선비; 慕容鮮卑)

East: Shandong

407–436 Northern Yan (북연; 北燕)

Mixed / not cleanly Xianbei

Northeast: Liaoxi, capital Longcheng/Chaoyang

581–618 Sui (수; 隋)

Northern Zhou / northwest military aristocracy, heavily Xianbei-shaped

Northwest: Guanzhong–Chang’an → unified China

618–907 Tang (당; 唐)

Same Northern Dynasties aristocratic world; Han-identified Li house with extensive Xianbei connections

Northwest: Chang’an/Guanzhong → all China

916–1125 Liao (요; 遼)

Khitan (거란; 契丹)

Northeast / North: Xilamulun–eastern Inner Mongolia/Liaoxi → Manchuria, Mongolia, Beijing region

1038–1227 Western Xia (서하; 西夏)

Tangut (탕구트·당항; 党項/黨項)

Northwest: Ordos–Ningxia–Gansu

1115–1234 Jin (금; 金)

Jurchen (여진; 女眞/女真)

Northeast → North: Manchuria → North China

1271–1368 Yuan (원; 元)

Mongol (몽골; 蒙古)

North → all China: Mongolian Plateau → Dadu/Beijing → entire China

1636/1644–1912 Qing (청; 淸/清)

Manchu (만주; 滿洲/满洲)

Northeast → all China: Manchuria/Shenyang → Beijing → entire China

And these are the northern Dynasties.

If I go west, or south, it gets messier.

West / Northwestern Dynasties:

284–670 Tuyuhun (토욕혼; 吐谷渾)

Xianbei-related Tuyuhun (선비계 토욕혼; 鮮卑系 吐谷渾)

West / Northwest: Qinghai Lake → Qilian Mountains / upper Yellow River

385–400, 409–431 Western Qin (서진; 西秦)

Qifu Xianbei (걸복선비; 乞伏鮮卑)

Northwest: eastern Qinghai → western Gansu

386–403 Later Liang (후량; 後涼)

Di (저; 氐)

Northwest: Hexi Corridor / Gansu

397–414 Southern Liang (남량; 南涼)

Tufa Xianbei (독발선비; 禿髮鮮卑)

Northwest: Qinghai → Gansu / Hexi Corridor

397–439 Northern Liang (북량; 北涼)

Lushui Hu (노수호; 盧水胡), ethnically mixed and possibly including Xiongnu-related elements

Northwest: Hexi Corridor / Gansu

407–431 Hu Xia / Xia (호하·하; 胡夏·夏)

Xiongnu Tiefu/Helian (흉노 철불부·혁련씨; 匈奴 鐵弗部·赫連氏)

Northwest / North: Ordos → northern Shaanxi

Southwestern Dynasties:

c. 4th century BCE–109 BCE Dian (전국; 滇國)

Dian peoples (전인; 滇人), indigenous southwestern population

Southwest: Yunnan, centered around Lake Dian

c. 3rd century BCE–27 BCE Yelang (야랑; 夜郎)

Indigenous southwestern peoples; precise ethnolinguistic identity uncertain

Southwest: Guizhou → parts of Yunnan / Guangxi

304–347 Cheng-Han (성한; 成漢)

Ba-Di / Cong-related population (파저; 巴氐)

Southwest: Sichuan Basin, centered on Chengdu

738–902 Nanzhao (남조; 南詔)

Indigenous Yunnan ruling population; Tang sources distinguish groups such as Bai Man and Wu Man (백만·오만; 白蠻·烏蠻), but mapping these neatly onto modern Bai/Yi is unsafe

Southwest: Dali/Yunnan → expanded into Sichuan, Burma and northern Southeast Asia

937–1253 Dali Kingdom (대리국; 大理國)

Bai-centered, multiethnic population (백족계; 白族系)

Southwest: Yunnan, centered on Dali

Southern Dynasties:

306–110 BCE Minyue (민월; 閩越)

Minyue / Yue (민월·월; 閩越·越)

South: Fujian

204–111 BCE Nanyue (남월; 南越)

Predominantly Yue population (월; 越), but founded by Zhao Tuo (조타; 趙佗), a former Qin commander from Hebei

South: Guangdong → Guangxi → northern Vietnam

191–138 BCE Eastern Ou / Dong'ou (동구; 東甌)

Yue (월; 越)

South / Southeast: southern Zhejiang

Dynasties that were actually founded by the Han 漢 people:

202 BCE–220 CE Han (한; 漢)

Liu Bang and the Liu house

Huaxia/Chinese population from which the later Han identity developed

Central/North China → empire

→ From which the actual Han 漢 definition comes from.

220–266 Cao Wei (조위; 曹魏)

Chinese/Han ruling house (한인계; 漢人系)

North China

266–420 Jin (진; 晉)

Sima ruling house (사마씨; 司馬氏), Chinese/Han

North China → after 317 primarily southern China

420–479 Liu Song (유송; 劉宋)

Chinese/Han ruling house

South: Jiankang/Nanjing and southern China

479–502 Southern Qi (남제; 南齊)

Chinese/Han ruling house

South: Jiankang/Nanjing

502–557 Liang (양; 梁)

Chinese/Han ruling house

South: Jiankang/Nanjing

557–589 Chen (진; 陳)

Chinese/Han ruling house

South: Jiankang/Nanjing

960–1279 Song (송; 宋)

Chinese/Han ruling house

North initially → then South after 1127

1368–1644 Ming (명; 明)

Chinese/Han ruling house

South initially: Nanjing → eventually all China, capital later Beijing

Ignoring the short-lived Dynasties, that only leaves us with four:

Han (한; 漢), Jin (진; 晉), Song (송; 宋), and Ming (명; 明)

If we think of Chinese history from the semi-mythical Xia Dynasty; ~ 2070 BCE to today, 4,100 years give or take a few, that's only 28.5% of the time. The rest are all non-Han 漢. 

Chinese history is mostly a history of non-Han 漢 Chinese ruling China, 

with occasional Han 漢 Dynasties ruling in between.

And for some weird reason, the Korean dynasties to the northeast, never once thought of conquering China. Even though this was where some of the longest ruling "Chinese" dynasties came from.

At some point, you have to ask yourself who exactly are the Han 漢 people?

And then there is the other word sitting right beside it:

中國.

Middle State.

Middle of what?

But I digress. Returning to our neighbors, I originally thought I'd perhaps write about five hundred-words, perhaps a thousand for the Mohe / Jurchen / Manchu because they seem to be so intertwined with Koreans.

But then I started researching.

Boy was I in for a surprise.

If I thought that Chinese scribes were wrong about Korea, their immediate institutionalized, formal neighbor, their understanding, and quite frankly their outright bias towards these other people was frankly quite disgusting. Let alone widely inaacruate.

So the Others section is probably going to be a little longer, and deep, and challenging to orthodox norms. But hey, fuck it, fuck them, fuck all them racist dicks.

---

An issue with labeling

Chinese does not work like English.

If I meet a guy named Bob, I write:

B-O-B.

Those letters don't mean anything.

They're just sounds.

Chinese characters don't work that way.

Every character already carries baggage.

     A sound.

     A meaning.

     Usually several meanings.

     A history.

So when Chinese writers encountered some foreign person, tribe, country or thing they had never heard of before, they had a problem.

They needed Chinese characters that sounded close enough.

Now lets turn the clock backward two thousand years and see how this exact same mechanism becomes dangerous.

Somebody is trying to describe some unfamiliar people living beyond the frontier.

And now we encounter:

     Ye

     Maek

     Yemaek

These words are all over early Chinese history books on Korean history.

In fact, if you're trying to find the people who eventually produced Buyeo and Goguryeo, these are some of the earliest labels we have for them.

And to this day:

we don't actually know what the hell they meant.

Ye appears as 濊.

Maek appears as 貊.

And 貊 contains the animal radical 豸 and could itself refer to a wild beast.

Except then the historical usage starts doing this:

     Those guys are Ye.

     Those guys are Maek.

     Those guys are Yemaek.

     Actually these Maek appear to be Goguryeo.

     Those Ye seem connected to Buyeo.

     Dongye is obviously Ye.

     Except sometimes people we thought were Ye get described with Maek.

     And sometimes everybody gets bundled back together as Yemaek.

Two thousand years later we stare at the characters and construct elaborate theories about:

THE YEMAEK PEOPLE.

Put Yemaek on a map.

Give it a color.

Draw a border around it.

Write “Yemaek language.”

Now it looks like we know what we're talking about.

Maybe we do.

     Maybe Ye and Maek really did describe meaningful identities.

     Maybe they described geography.

     Maybe language.

     Maybe subsistence.

     Maybe political allegiance.

     Maybe one was somebody else's name for the other.

     Maybe the meaning changed over five hundred years.

The characters cannot answer that question for us.

Every writing system mangles foreign words.

But Chinese characters add another blade.

Because even when you're using a character just for the sound, the character still means something.

Unlike:

them.

“Them” is vague.

“Them” admits that you don't know who these people are.

A Chinese character can make ignorance look precise.

It gives the thing a name.

And names have teeth.

Which finally brings us to:

靺鞨.

Malgal.

Mohe.

And now we should be extremely suspicious.

Because once again we are looking at characters chosen by outsiders to describe people living across an enormous stretch of northeast Asia.

Both characters contain the leather radical (革).

鞨 can even refer to leather footwear.

So 靺鞨 (Mohe) read iterally becomes:

those leather-shoe guys.

I can imagine a Chinese guy looking at Bob and noticing his thick leather shoes, perfect for the cold harsh winters of the Taiga forest.

But most likely it's not that simple.

The characters were almost certainly trying to reproduce a foreign sound.

Another name for the same people. 

Earlier writers apparently heard something related and wrote:

勿吉 (Woo-Jee). 

Literally meaning, "Do not" + "Lucky"

     Different characters.

     Different meanings.

     Presumably some attempt at the same, or a related, sound.

And suddenly the important question is no longer:

What does 靺鞨 (Mohe) mean, beside "leather shoe guy"?

The important question is:

What sound were they trying to write down?

And then an even more important question:

Who exactly were they talking about?

     Because Chinese histories eventually spread this label over an enormous human landscape.

     Later historians copied these labels and added commentary.

     Academics today spend their entire careers researching the genetic origins of these labels.

     Governments attach meaning to these labels and fund these researchers.

     These labels are recorded as fact in text books.

Imagine an entire academic framework built around the "n-word" for Africans, "chink" for Asians, "camel jockey" for Arabs, and "cracker" for White people. This sounds like a joke, but this is the orthodox, accepted academic labels used today.

We do know they didn't call themselves, the "Leather-Shoe People."

Why would you?

But the word survived.

And once the word survives long enough, this happens:

     Mohe territory.

     Mohe tribes.

     Mohe language.

     Mohe people.

Color them green on the map.

Problem solved.

Except we may have just done to thousands of real people exactly this.

So I'm not going to begin by telling you who the Mohe were.

Because Mohe makes no fucking sense to me.

Mohe isn't the answer.

Mohe is the problem.

---

The different Chinese labels used for Northeastern People

As we know, the first time northeastern people enter the Chinese records, it's as Dongyi (동이; 東夷).

Dong 東 means East.

Yi 夷 means Barbarian.

If you break Yi 夷 down, it's a combination of two words.

大 means large.

and 弓 means bow.

So, in the Chinese imagination:

"Barbarians with Big Bows from the East."

That sounded to Chinese ears around 1200-1046 BCE something like:

"Dong-Yi"

This is such a broad-ass label that it is almost useless as an ethnic description.

We obviously have no idea how many different peoples, languages, tribes, clans and political communities lived across the northeast three thousand years ago.

But just to give the geography some scale:

Today, the three Chinese provinces collectively called Dongbei (东北); Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, contain about 94 million people. And that's not including Koreans, Mongolians, and people who live in the Russian northeast.

So Dongyi is not the name of a people.

It's a direction: 

"Them. Not Us. To the East."

Think Christopher Columbus and "Indian".

In the 11th-8th centrury a new word pops up: Sushen (숙신; 肅慎).

Su 肅 means solemn.

Shen 慎 means catious.

The Sushen become a trope for the Chinese court to say that the Emperor's mandate was so universally recognized that even the most distant, untamed barbarians at the edge of the earth submitted to his authority.

Then Maek 貊 appears around 9th-8th century BCE.

Maek 貊 further breaks down into,

豸 means Beast.

and 百 means a Hundred.

"A Hundred Beasts"

Later on this becomes connected to the people of Goguryeo, alongside another word Ye 貊.

In the 7th century we have Shanrong (산융; 山戎); Mountai + Barbarian, 

and Guzhu (고죽; 孤竹); Solitary + Bamboo.

In 7th-4th century BCE we get another Korean one, Joseon (조선; 朝鮮); Morning + Bright.

Then,

Donghu (東胡); East + Barbarian (specifically denoting horseback nomads)

Wuhuan (烏桓 / 烏丸); Black + Pillar, and Xianbei (선비; 鮮卑); Fresh + Despicable

the two heirs of the Donghu.

Buyeo (夫餘); Husband + Surplus

Zenfan (진번; 眞番); True + Barbarian, and Lintun (임둔; 臨屯); Overlook + Camp

Okjeo (옥저; 沃沮); Fertile + Marsh

Goguryeo (고구려; 高句驪 / 高句麗); High + Hook + Beautiful or Black horse

Yilou (읍루; 挹婁); To draw water + Lucky

Wuji (물길; 勿吉); Do not + Lucky

Kumo Xi (고막해; 庫莫奚); Armory + Dark, and Khitan (거란; 契丹); To carve + Red

Shiwei (실위; 失韋 / 室韋); Room + Tanned leather

Doumolou (두막루; 豆莫婁); Bean + None + Hollow

the direct remnants of Northern Buyeo that were ultimately incorporated into Balhae.

and finally in the 5th-6th centtury we get

Mohe (말갈; 靺鞨); Leather shoe

Then interestingly during the Tang period they start splitting up the Mohe into individual tribes.

Heishui (흑수; 黑水); Black + Water, referring to the Amur River.

Baishan (백산; 白山); White + Mountain, literally in the heartland of goguryeo.

Sumo (속말; 粟末); Millet + Dust, near the Songhua River basin around Jilin. Cofounders of Balhae.

Funiye (불열; 拂涅); Brush + Black mud. near the Peony River and Primorsky Krai.

Tieli (철리; 鐵利); Iron + Profit, lower reaches of the Amur, north of Funie and east of Heishui.

In 698 CE Balhae (발해; 渤海); Swelling + Sea

In 903 CE we get Jurchen (여진; 女真); Woman + Real

From a ridiculously useless, broad categorical label Dongyi (동이; 東夷), they slowly get a little more concrete as different people become more known. Until in 1635, when Hong Taiji, the founder of the Qing (청; 清) Dynasty, officially bans the word Jurchen (여진; 女真) and decreed all his people would henceforth be known as the Manchu (만주; 滿洲); Full + Continent.

The one consistent thing about the naming? 

They retain the racist undertones until the Manchu / Qing conquers China.

So this is where the confusion begins.

But where it gets seriously stupid is what historians, archaeologists, anthropologists do next.

They formalize these names into ethnographic groups.

     Ye becomes an ethic group.

     Maek becomes an ethnic group.

Until a Goguryeo pops up and suddenly, no one really knows what to do with the supposed Ye and Maek people. They then contort themselves into the labels. Force-fitting these labels onto States, Stuff, Historical records.

It's a label looking for proof.

Not proof requiring a proper label.

And it doesn't stop there.

They start connecting arrows between these labels.

     Manchu comes from Jurchen, 

     Jurchen from Mohe, 

     Mohe from Wuji, 

     Wuji from Yilou, 

     Yilou from Sushen.

Sushen → Yilou → Wuji → Mohe → Jurchen → Manchu.

As if this is one peaceful evolution of an ethnic group from one to another.

But apply a little bit of logic and reason to this, and things immediately break down.

Let's use the Mohe tribes as an example, as described in Tang documents.

On a map the seven Mohe tribes look like this:

     North to South, that's a distance of 540 kilometers.

     West to East, 470 kilometers.

     A total landmass of around 253,000 km².

     Approximately the size of The United Kingdom (242, 495 km²).

Next, let's look at environment these people / tribes lived in:

The Sumo 粟末 lived in the Jilin / upper Songhua River region. Broad river valley, cold winters, fertile basin. They also happened to live right in the Buyeo heartland, the exact same place as the capital of Buyeo. They lived inside Buyeo, right next to their capital, for over 600 years, if not longer.

The Boduo 伯咄 lived in the Wuchang, Lalin River basin. Huge open agricultural plain broken by rivers and low wooded uplands. Modern rice cultivation exaggerates the openness, but the underlying basin is obvious. Like the Sumo and the Anchegu they lived deep in Buyeo territory for as long as the Sumo.

The Anchegu 安車骨 live in the Acheng, eastern Harbin region. Forested hills opening onto broad agricultural valleys and eventually the Songnen Plain. This is transitional country, not deep taiga. But like the Sumo and the Bodou, deep in Buyeo territory.

The Funie 拂涅 live in the Ning'an, Mudan-Jingpo River basin. Mountains, dense forest, big lakes and river valleys. Much more enclosed than Sumo/Boduo, but still excellent settlement corridors. Similar to the Baishan, they lived inside Goguryeo for 700 years.

The Haoshi 號室 live in the Khanka, Ussuri River zone. Huge lake, marshes, wetlands, low forest. Very strongly a fishing/wetland environment. The eastern most reaches of the Songhua-Liao World, arguably outside it. Today, not even in China, in Russia.

The Baishan 白山 live in the Changbai mountains. Steep volcanic mountains and forested valleys. But critically, this is right beside Goguryeo's Yalu/Changbai heartland, not some distant northeastern wilderness. 40 kilometers from the Goguryeo capital, they were one of the first places to be incorporated into Goguryeo. And they stayed this way for 700 years.

The Heishui 黑水 live in the Lower Songhua, Amur River area. Enormous rivers, islands, marshland and floodplain. This finally looks like the world you'd expect from descriptions emphasizing fishing, boats, hunting and river travel. They were always at the far reaches of the Songhua-Liao World.

And finally, the Tieli 鐵利 live in the Yilan, middle-lower Songhua regions of Heilongjiang. Broad Songhua River country, large floodplains, farmland and open valley floors, wooded hills nearby, and hge navigable rivers. Famous for their iron, they were probably incorporated into Balhae around 740 CE.

Now look at the map, the photos and descriptions I wrote, and their supposed territories near Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Balhae, and tell me that they were one people, and maintained their complete independence, language, and cultural identity over a thousand years.

And look at the names.

     Heishu: River name.

     Baishan: Mountain name.

     Sumo: River name.

     Anchegu: River name.

These are place names.

"Those guys who live next to the River."

"Those guys who live next to the Mountain."

Bodou, Funie, Haoshi, and Tieli seem to be honest phonetic transcriptions...but who knows, these also could be place names.

"Those guys who live near *unknown place*."

Keep a straight face and tell me these are one ethnic group.

If someone proposes that the Heshui and the Haoshi are a different ethnic group, I'll buy that. No problem. But there is no chance in hell that I would agree that the other so-called tribes are one people. Some form a clan or tribal identity, perhaps. But individual ethnic groups, fuck no. Even claims that they spoke Tungusic? Fuck that shit.

And then there are the western people.

Known in Chinese history with labels like Donghu (동호; 東胡), Wuhuan (오환; 烏桓), Xianbei (선비; 鮮卑), Yuwen (우문; 宇文) / Murong (모용; 慕容) / Tuoba (탁발; 拓跋), Khitan (거란; 契丹), Kumo Xi (고막해; 奚), Xiongnu (흉노; 匈奴), Göktürks (돌궐; 突厥).

Chinese scribes and historians do exactly the same thing with them. This time to the people to the north and northwest.

Unfortunately for the Korean story, it's not that simple. If the people to the east and northeast shape the Bueyo, Goguryeo, and Balhae story, so do the people to the west of them.

They share the same soil.

They mix in the wonderful, chaotic mixing bowl that is the Songhua-Liao World.

And this time they are doing it to steppe horse-people. People who by definition are pastoralist nomads who move with their flocks from one pasture to another.

Again, most of the early labels are place names.

"Those guys next to the mountain."

No River names for horse-people obviously.

The difference is that later on the labels actually turn into tribal names. Still fucking racist as shit (dog, slave, crow etc.), but they seem to be phonetic representational names of actual labels these people called themselves. The only exceptions are the different Xianbei tribes. Those names are quite flattering. Makes sense since the Murong founded the various Yan Dynasties, the Tuoba the Northern Wei, and Yuwen the Northern Zhou. 

Survival 101. 

You don't call your new master a racial slur.

But everything afterwards is basically the same shit.

     Labels looking for evidence.

     Contorting them so that they fit into one continuous timeline.

     Applying pressure on those who dare to question these sacred labels that appear in Chinese books.

     Sweeping evidence under the rug.

     Making shit up when the facts simply don't play with those precious labels.

Entire peoples, cultures, languages, all lumped up in a indistinct blob.

     Fuck logic.

     Fuck people.

     Fuck geography.

     Fuck physics.

     Fuck common sense.

Horse-people simply don't act that way.

Thankfully Chinggis Khan left us a record.

And he conquered China to make sure the scribes didn't contort it.

In the 1340s, the Han Chinese literati of the Yuan Dynasty were still trying to play their old historiographical games. They argued that the ethnically Han Song Dynasty was the only legitimate timeline, and that the Khitans (Liao Dynasty) and Jurchens (Jin Dynasty) were illegitimate "barbarian" usurpers who should be shoved into the foreign appendix of the official records.

The Mongol Chancellor Toqto'a put a hard stop to it. He forced the imperial scribes to compile the History of Liao, the History of Jin, and the History of Song simultaneously. By imperial decree, the Mongols shattered the scribes' sacred, linear "single mandate" timeline. They forced the Han literati to swallow their pride and formally accept the concept of co-existing, legitimate dynasties, regardless of their ethnic origins.   

The Mongols knew exactly how the scribes weaponized history to control the narrative of the periphery. By conquering the center, they forced the scribes to finally record the world as it actually operated: messy, multi-polar, and dictated by the people on the horses, not the people holding the brushes.

---

What Chinggis Khan tells us about people and tribal politics

This is where The Secret History of the Mongols becomes incredibly useful.

Because for once, instead of Chinese scribes standing on the edge of the steppe naming the people they see, we get something much closer to the people of the steppe describing themselves.

And what they describe is not a world filled with neat little ethnic groups.

It is a fucking mess.

A very understandable fucking mess.

     There is a person.

     That person belongs to a family.

     The family belongs to a clan.

     The clan belongs to a tribe, or some larger collection of related clans.

     And those tribes form alliances.

The first three are remarkably durable.

     Person.

     Family.

     Clan.

You don't wake up one morning and decide you have a different father.

Your extended family doesn't disappear because a Khan loses a battle.

Your clan doesn't suddenly cease existing because somebody three valleys over becomes more powerful.

Tribes are a little more fluid.

     They can split.

     They can merge.

     A powerful clan can swallow weaker ones.

     A defeated group can attach itself to another group.

But even then, the actual people are still there.

It is the final layer that changes constantly.

The alliance.

And that is exactly what The Secret History of the Mongols describes.

Before Chinggis Khan there wasn't one giant Mongol people peacefully waiting around to be unified.

There were 

     Mongols.

     Tatars.

     Kereyit.

     Naiman.

     Merkit.

     Qonggirat.

     Jalayir.

     And a shitload of smaller clans, houses, chiefs, warlords and local followings.

Even those big names are misleading.

Christopher Atwood points out that categories like Mongol, Tatar and Merkit were themselves shifting coalitions of smaller ruling houses. Contemporary Jin records often ignored those giant labels entirely and instead recorded smaller groups like the Qonggirat, Jalayir, Salji'ut and Qatagin. The giant categories that later historians turned into ethnic groups were partly the political coalitions that happened to exist during Temüjin's lifetime.

Read that again.

Shifting coalitions.

Not races.

Not immutable peoples.

Coalitions.

And The Secret History lets us watch those coalitions move around.

     Temüjin and Jamukha are anda, sworn political brothers.

     Then they are enemies.

     Temüjin allies himself with Ong Khan of the Kereyit.

     The Kereyit become essential allies.

     Then that alliance collapses.

     Now the Kereyit are enemies.

     Temüjin destroys them.

     But the Kereyit people don't disappear.

     Their leadership package disappears.

     Their Khan loses.

     Their political organization is broken apart.

     The humans are still standing there.

     They get redistributed among the victors.

     Then the same thing happens to the Naiman.

     And the Tatars.

     And the Merkit.

     People surrender.

     People defect.

     People betray their commanders.

     People bring their families with them.

     Clans change sides.

     Marriage alliances shift.

     Yesterday's enemy becomes tomorrow's subordinate.

     Yesterday's ally becomes tomorrow's corpse.

The people remain.

The alliance changes.

This is the part that I think historians continuously mess up when looking backward at the steppe.

Imagine twenty-six tribes.

Call them:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.

At one point the dominant alliance is:

A + B + C + D + F.

A's ruling family is on top.

China deals with them.

China needs a name for them.

They label that political package:

Xiongnu.

Then things go badly.

A's Khan dies.

B revolts.

C stabs A in the back.

F decides the grass really is greener on the other side and marries into X.

Ten years later the dominant package is:

C + H + M + X + Y.

X's ruling family is now on top.

China encounters this new political configuration.

Let's call them:

Xianbei.

What changed?

     Not the grass.

     Not the horses.

     Not the families.

     Not necessarily the clans.

     Probably not most of the tribes.

     Certainly not the entire population.

The leadership package changed.

We can actually watch Chinggis Khan do this.

He doesn't exterminate everybody on the Mongolian Plateau and replace them with some previously existing biological population called "Mongols."

He wins.

Then he reorganizes everybody.

In 1206, after defeating the competing political powers around him, Chinggis takes the people now under his control and organizes them into tens, hundreds, thousands and ten-thousands, with commanders appointed over them. The old competing centers of loyalty are broken apart and inserted into a new structure under him.

That is the birth of the Great Mongol State.

Not the birth of the humans.

The humans were already there.

What Chinggis creates is the new political Us.

     A former Kereyit can now serve beside a former Tatar.

     A Jalayir can command people whose fathers fought his father.

     A Qonggirat can marry into the ruling family.

     A Naiman can serve the people who destroyed the Naiman political order.

Within a generation their children are growing up inside the same political structure.

And the name of the victorious political structure is:

Mongol.

This is not me applying some modern theory to them.

This is basically what their own history describes happening.

Modern scholarship on The Secret History describes Temüjin's world as one of competing aristocratic households and shifting political coalitions, followed by the destruction of rival centers of loyalty and their incorporation into the new Mongol state.

That changes the way we should look at every earlier Chinese steppe label.

When a Chinese book says:

Donghu.

Then:

Wuhuan.

Then:

Xianbei.

Then: 

Murong, Yuwen, Tuoba.

Then:

Khitan.

Why the hell should we automatically assume that China has just documented the appearance of a brand-new ethnic people every time the name changes?

Maybe sometimes they did.

But The Secret History gives us another mechanism sitting right in front of us.

     Same people.

     Same families.

     Same clans.

     Mostly the same tribes.

     Different alliance.

     Different ruling house.

     Different Khan.

And therefore:

different name in somebody else's book.

This also explains something that otherwise becomes strangely difficult to understand.

These supposed peoples are constantly fighting each other.

     Donghu fight Xiongnu.

     Xiongnu fight Xianbei.

     Xianbei fight other Xianbei.

     Murong fight Tuoba.

     Yuwen fight Murong.

     Khitan fight Xi.

     Göktürks fight Khitan.

     Mongols fight Tatars.

     Mongols fight Kereyit.

     Mongols fight Naiman.

And historians keep trying to turn every name into a distinct ethnicity.

Why?

The Mongols themselves show us what this looks like from inside.

It is tribal politics.

Your closest cultural relatives are not automatically your friends.

Sometimes they are exactly the people you fight most viciously, because they are competing for the same pastures, the same alliances, the same followers and the same fucking throne.

The Kereyit didn't need to be ethnically alien to Temüjin for him to destroy their state.

Jamukha didn't need to belong to another race to fight Temüjin.

The Tatars didn't need to be some completely separate biological population.

They were competing political communities inside the same steppe world.

And when Temüjin finally wins, enormous numbers of those supposedly separate "peoples" simply become part of the thing historians afterward call:

The Mongols.

Nobody replaced the population.

The Khan changed.

And this is what makes the Chinese labels so dangerous when we read them backward.

The Chinese court generally wasn't conducting an ethnographic census of the steppe.

It needed to know:

     Who is in charge?

     Who are they allied with?

     Who do we send gifts to?

     Who do we bribe?

     Who is raiding the frontier?

     Who just killed the guy we bribed last year?

When the answer changed, the label could change.

A historian centuries later then puts those labels into a nice straight line:

People A → People B → People C → People D.

And suddenly changing political alliances have become changing ethnicities.

The Secret History of the Mongols gives us the benefit of seeing the machinery underneath the label.

And underneath it is something incredibly ordinary.

     People.

     Families.

     Clans.

     Tribes.

     Alliances.

The first few endure.

The last one changes all the fucking time.

---

So who were these people Chinese sources labeled as Mohe?

They were people who lived in various places in the Songhua-Liao world.

Too backwards, too far, too weak, too low, too insignificant for their own label.

Farming, hunting, fishing, marrying, having children, fighting, stealing, dying, burying their dead.

In whatever environment best suited for that activity.

     They probably lived in villages of around 15 households.

     They probably remembered they were part of a clan.

     They probably knew that their clan was part of a larger tribe.

They had a sense of Us, and a sense of Not-Us.

But Us and Not-Us changed depending on the situation.

Someone from village A steals my sheep, Not-Us.

Someone attacks my cousin who lives in village A, Us.

All bound by

     Kinship.

     Marriage.

     Stories.

     Sometimes language and traditions.

     Obligations.

     Responsibilities.

And it's this complicated network of relationships and obligations that underpins everything this world is built around. Leaders are those who understand this dynamic, know how to navigate it, use it to coalesce these people in a single direction.

It's the same dynamic that exists in every society today. Just a little bit stronger then. 

Because your very own survival depended on who showed up when the shit hit the fan.

The Buyeo Ga (가; 加)

Through which they ruled the Sachuldo (사출도; 四出道 - The Four Directions) surrounding the capital:

     Ma-ga (마가; 馬加): The Horse Lord

     U-ga (우가; 牛加): The Cow Lord

     Jeo-ga (저가; 猪加): The Pig Lord

     Gu-ga (구가; 狗加): The Dog Lord

The Goguryeo Na (나; 那)

That became the original powerful clans that ruled a vast empire:

     Gyeru-bu (계루부; 桂婁部): The royal clan.

     Sono-bu (소노부; 消奴部): The former ruling clan.

     Jeolno-bu (절노부; 絕奴部): The clan that traditionally provided the queens.

     Sunno-bu (순노부; 順奴部)

     Gwanno-bu (관노부; 灌奴部)

The Goguryeo institutionalized Bu (부; 部)

Where the Na were reorganized into formal institutions.

     Northern Bu

     Southern Bu

     Eastern Bu

     Western Bu

     Central Bu

All these things are the visible layer built on top of this complex web of people, families, clans, and tribes. 

     To be called upon when needed.

     To be left alone when not.

     And taxed. Always taxed.

So the Mohe?

If you lived in the territory of Buyeo, that is just the highest order Us that a Chinese guy called Buyeo.

If you lived in the territory of Goguryeo, that is the highest order Us for you.

Unless you lived far enough away that a Buyeo or Goguryeo Us really didn't matter to you. 

Then you probably had another Us that you had obligations to.

When they called you came.

And when you needed them, you hoped they would come.

So in that sense, I believe that most of the people Chinese scribes called Mohe were Buyeo, Gogoryeo, and Balhae. But they were also Bob, of the family of Bob, within the clan of Bob, affiliated with the tribe of Bob, under the obligations of Buyeo, Goguryo, or Balhae.

Until someone changed the political landscape of those at the very top.

Then you became Liao, Jin, Qing, and eventually Chinese.

My only lingering question.

Why, or when did they stop speaking Korean?

- ה -

The Horse Steppe People

I used the Secret History of the Mongols to point to a basic human truth:

Us spirals up but gets weaker the higher it gets.

And if this applies to the Mohe, then it applies even more to the Steppe-People.

Those that the Chinese scribes have called:

Donghu (동호; 東胡), 

Xiongnu (흉노; 匈奴), 

Wuhuan (오환; 烏桓), 

Xianbei (선비; 鮮卑), 

     Yuwen (우문; 宇文),

     Murong (모용; 慕容)

     Tuoba (탁발; 拓跋), 

Kumo Xi (고막해; 奚), 

Khitan (거란; 契丹), 

Rouran (유연; 柔然)

Göktürks (돌궐; 突厥).

Mongol (몽골; 蒙古)

And the countless other Steppe-People whose names are lost to us.

The map below is our best approximation of where each of these steppe people started. It's not an indication of the many empires and dynasties they built, nor any representation of the territories they claimed at their greatest extent.

The first thing that you'll immediately notice is that the scale is drastically different.

The steppe world is massive. And this is just the eastern side. 

The side that matters to the story of the Koreans.

To the west of where the Göktürks presumably started lie the Yuezhi, Sia/Saka/Scythians, Wusun, Dayuan, Kangju, Sogdians, Bactrians. Obviously the steppe goes further into Russia and Europe.

But none of this changes what I talked about when we discussed the Mohe:

     People.

     Families.

     Clans.

     Tribes.

     Alliances.

Tied together by:

     Kinship.

     Marriage.

     Stories.

     Sometimes language and traditions.

     Obligations.

     Responsibilities.

And the only thing visible in Books are the Alliance Packages.

So, I won't bother you with the same spiel I gave you for the Mohe.

Some of these people, at some point, were fully accepted, functioning members of Gojoseon, Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Balhae. And therefore they were Korean, and whatever other Us they identified with.

Being any of these higher level Us's had very limited affect on the Us that mattered to an individual on an everyday basis, until it did.

I'll give you a very weird example.

When the Mongols finally conquered Goryeo, Kublai Khan sent his daughter, Princess Jeguk, to marry Goryeo's King Chungnyeol in 1274. She was escorted by her own private military retinue of high-ranking Mongol and Central Asian commanders.

Chungnyeol takes a liking to one of these commanders and wants to appoint him to office, so he's asked to take a new name. He literally asks the Goryeo general In Gong-su if he can borrow his surname, becomes In Hu (인후; 印侯), enters Goryeo officialdom, rises through the military hierarchy, and eventually reaches extremely high government office.

He is the founding ancestor of the Yeonan In clan (연안 인씨) in Korea. 164 people survive to this day.

And it wasn't just him. In 1277, Chungnyeol formally gave several of the princess’s foreign retainers Goryeo-style names and offices:

     Quradai → In Hu 印侯

     Sengge → Jang Sun-ryong 張舜龍

     Čaqudai → Cha Sin 車信

     Siktur → No Yeong 盧英

     and another became Jeong Gong 鄭公.

     In Hu was Mongol.

     Jang Sun-ryong was Huihui/Central Asian.

     Cha Sin was from Goguryeo stock.

     No Yeong was Hexi.

Being any of these higher-level Us's had very limited effect on the Us that mattered to an individual on an everyday basis.

This is just one small weird case.

The Donghu, Wuhuan, Xianbei, Khitan, Kumo Xi, Xiongnu, and to a lesser degree, the Göktürks lived right next to Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Balhae for hundreds of years.

     As neighbors.

     As traders.

     As husband.

     As wife.

     As ally.

     As enemy.

They mixed.

Because that's what humans do.

So like the "Mohe" I can't imagine a universe where a Steppe-person was never a Korean.

Of course like the "Mohe", becoming Korean does not negate a person still being:

     Him or herself,

     A dad,

     A member of a clan,

     A member of a tribe,

     A State, if a State actually existed.

And it sure as hell didn't negate:

     Kin,

     Obligations,

     Responsibilities,

     Memories,

     Stories.

I can be Korean, American, Catholic, Male, Liberal, LGBTQ+ ally, Gen X at the same time. Nothing I identify as Us negates any other Us, until it does. Because I'm a normal human, unlike what historians and Chinese scribes think we are.

So whether these Steppe-People were Korean is not the point. 

     Some were.

     Some weren't.

     And some were, then weren't, then were again.

My area of interest is a little more specific.

What the hell happened to the Donghu (동호; 東胡)?

Remember when we were talking about a Yan general named Qin Kai attacking Joseon and taking 2000 li? In a different record it says Qin Kai attacked the Donghu.

Apparently Qin Kai was a hostage who lived with them finally gaining their trust. And with this trust he returns to Yan, and armed with intimate knowledge about them and a powerful army, he attacks them, driving them back 1000 li.

But that wasn't the end.

In the third century BCE, the Donghu were still powerful, the dominant power in the eastern steppe world. When the upstart Xiongnu were emerging, they applied pressure on them, and their new chieftain Modu.

Give me your horse they said.

Modu says sure.

Give me your woman they said.

Modu says OK.

Give me that empty land between us they said.

Apparently this crossed the line for Modu.

He launches a surprise attack, kills the Donghu chief, and the Donghu are shattered.

But what happened to them?

Some are obviously incorporated into the Xiongnu and disappear from the records.

Some survive farther north and east under the labels Wuhuan and Xianbei. Then, after Han armies shattered the Northern Xiongnu in 89–91 CE, the Xianbei moved into their former territory and huge numbers of former Xiongnu simply began calling themselves Xianbei.

Some have to have been pushed east into where Buyeo was forming.

And some have to have been pushed across the Liao into Gojoseon territory. Perhaps moving further south into the Korean Peninsula.

I'm saying this for two reasons.

First, this is common sense. That's what humans do. If someone invades you, you don't have a lot of choices.

     You fight and hope to win.

     You submit and hope to survive.

     You run away and continue living.

Second, Stuff east of the Liao suddenly changes. A lot of horse-related Stuff begin to appear.

     In Buyeo.

     In Gojoseon.

     Even in the extreme south of Korea.

Not at once. It takes time. But they inevitably appear in Soil that should have nothing to do with horse culture. And they appear in elite burial sites.

For a settled, agricultural society, Koreans have a strong connection to horse culture. It's in our founding myths. It's in our Stories. And it's impossible to ignore.

     Some of these stories come from Buyeo. 

     Horses in Goguryeo, Baekje, and Balhae make sense. 

     But how did Buyeo get a horse story? Especially at a time when it was forming.

I suspect that when the Donghu collapsed, some of them most likely got incorporated into Buyeo and Gojoseon.

And this isn't the only time.

     Shilla kings claim Xiongnu lineage.

     Gaya kings claim an unknown horse people lineage.

The royal cemetery at Daeseong-dong contains an extraordinary northern package: bronze cauldrons, horse-related equipment, northern-style military material, and other objects tied to the continental northeast.

The same horse equipment eventually show up in Japan as well. In Daisenryō Kofun of all places. After Geumgwan Gaya is crushed by Goguryeo in 400 CE.

And the horse people continuously invade Korean States.

The Xianbei in the 4th century.

The Khitans in the 10th and 11th century.

The Mongols in the 13th century.

The Manchus in the 17th century.

And I'm not including all the countless raids or the border skirmishes.

It also goes the other way.

Goguryeo constantly invaded the steppes.

Balhae projected power into the steppes.

It's impossible to separate the steppes from Korea.

It's impossible to separate Korea from the steppes.

I'll leave the steppe people section behind with a little story.

One of the strangest cultural reversals of the Yuan period came from a Goryeo woman named Gi (기씨; 奇氏).

She entered the Yuan palace as a woman from Goryeo, rose through the imperial court, gave birth to the crown prince, and eventually became Empress Gi, wife of the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür. Yuan histories explicitly identify her as 高麗人, a Goryeo person.

And around the same period, something called 고려양 (高麗樣), literally “Goryeo style,” became fashionable in Yuan society.

     Goryeo clothing.

     Goryeo food.

     Goryeo objects.

     Goryeo court tastes.

A Yuan palace poem even says:

宮衣新尚高麗樣

Palace clothing now newly favors the Goryeo style.

It describes women inside the palace borrowing a Goryeo-style garment from one another because it had been worn before the emperor.

Korean historical sources describe 고려양 as spreading through the Yuan court particularly through the large number of Goryeo women, attendants, servants, and courtiers living there. Goryeo-style clothing, food, utensils, music, dumplings, cakes, and even particular colors became fashionable among Yuan elites.

Empress Gi was not single-handedly responsible for creating 고려양.

But she became its most spectacular symbol.

A woman sent from subordinate Goryeo ended up sitting at the center of the Mongol imperial court while Mongol elites were wearing Goryeo fashion.

Which is a nice reminder that political power and cultural influence don't always travel in the same direction.

---

Cousins to the south, on the Islands

I've debated whether I should do a dedicated section on Japan in this series. It's not like I haven't talked about them. They appear constantly in Korean history, and are connected to some of the biggest questions I've bumped into throughout the entire journey.

     Why did Japonic disappeared from the Korean Peninsula?

     Why are Korean and Japanese languages considered language isolates?

     Why did the ○ guys all move to Japan?

     Why does O1b2-M176 appear in significant portions only in Korea and Japan?

     Why can't we find D1a2a-M55 in meaningful amounts in Korea?

     Why do our mothers look alike?

     Why are there Kofun-type tombs in southern Baekje?

     Why does early Japanese Yayoi, Kofun, and Asuka look exactly like what you'd expect in Korea?

     Why did the Japanese help Gaya attack Silla?

     Why did the Japanese attempt to revive Baekje, several times?

Why did the Japanese spend so much effort distorting Korean history during the 1910 - 1945 occupation?

The Japanese colonial government affiliated Chōsen-shi Henshūkai (조선사편수회; the Society for the Compilation of Korean History), apparently confiscated and then destroyed over 200,000 Korean history books. Why?

     Why did they prohibit the Korean language in schools, government, and every official institution?
     Why did they force Koreans to Japanize their names?
     Why is "Japanize" even a verb?
     Why did they prohibit private education?
     Why did they remove Gojoseon and Dangun from Korean history?
     Why did they claim Baekje and Gaya were conquered by the ancient Japanese?
     Why did they build their colonial administration building in a place that blocked the entrance to 

     Gyeongbok Palace?
     Why did they build a toilet above the place the Joseon king slept in the High school I went to?
     Why did they kill so many Koreans?,

     Why did they enslave such a huge number of our mothers to become sex slaves?

And why am I still arguing with orthodoxy, and GPT/Claude/Gemini whose training data seems to be built on this orthodoxy, fighting for every word in this blog series?

     China vs Korea = China

     Japan vs Korea = Japan

     Korea vs Korea = whatever makes Koreans sound worse

     Pro-Korean Chinese scholarship = false

     Pro-Korean Japanese scholarship = false

     Why did Naruhito lean over and whisper, "You know, we're related" and give me a wink?

     Why are my wife's family still living in Japan, and why do they still live there?

     Why did her cousin give up Judo because he was Zainichi Korean?

     Why do more Koreans visit Japan than they do Jeju Island?

     Why does Korean pop culture resonate so deeply among the Japanese, in a way that is     

     fundamentally different from any other Hallyu-influenced culture?

     Why can you buy kimchi at a 7-11 in Tokyo, and sushi at a 7-11 in Seoul?

Despite vehement denials on both sides of the strait, why are we so similar?

     Why do I feel like I'm at home when I visit Japan?

     Do Japanese people feel the same when they're in Korea?

Why do we hate each other so much?

Or do we?

Why?

So I'll give you two extremely contentious topics: 

Is the Japanese Imperial family Korean?

Instead of synthesizing it into my own thoughts, I'll give you both sides. You'll immediately understand why Japan is such a sensitive subject for Koreans, and Korea is a sensitive subject for the Japanese.

1. The Japanese Imperial family is Korean.

Let's see how far we can push that answer.

Not:

“The Japanese Imperial Family once had a Korean grandmother.”

That's easy. We already know that.

I'm asking something much more offensive.

What if the Japanese Imperial Family itself came from Korea?

Not once.

Perhaps several times.

The founding myth

Let's start where the Japanese themselves start.

With the gods.

In the Kojiki, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu and ancestor of the Japanese imperial line, descends from heaven onto:

Kushifuru Peak.

When he arrives, he looks around and remarks that this is a good place because the land:

faces Karakuni.

韓国.

Korea.

The divine ancestor of the Japanese emperors descends onto a mountain whose name has long been compared with Gujibong / Gujihuru, the sacred peak in the founding story of Gaya, where Kim Suro also descends from heaven.

     Same general structure.

     Heavenly ancestor.

     Sacred mountain.

     Founder appears.

     New ruling line begins.

The divine ancestor of the Japanese emperors lands on a Japanese mountain, and his very first recorded observation is that he has a great view of 韓國, Korea.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

Strange?

Absolutely.

Let's keep going.

The chronicles' own Korean ancestors

Empress Jingū is the mother of Emperor Ōjin.

The Kojiki traces her ancestry back to Ame-no-Hiboko, a prince who came to Japan from Silla.

So before we even reach anything remotely resembling secure Japanese history, one of the women standing directly inside the imperial genealogy already comes with a Silla origin story.

Then there is Susanoo.

Brother of Amaterasu.

One Nihon Shoki variant has Susanoo descend from heaven not into Japan, but to Soshimori in Silla.

He doesn't like it there.

So he builds a boat and crosses the sea to Izumo.

Again:

Silla

↓

sea

↓

Japan.

The sacred world from which the Japanese imperial order eventually emerges somehow keeps having Korea inside it.

     Ninigi's descent faces Karakuni.

     Jingū descends from a Silla prince.

     Susanoo passes through Silla before reaching Japan.

The texts supposedly designed to establish an indigenous divine Japanese ruling order keep looking west.

The imperial family's own records

Now we can leave mythology.

The Shoku Nihongi, an official Japanese imperial chronicle completed in 797, states that Takano no Niigasa, mother of Emperor Kanmu, descended from King Muryeong of Baekje, through Muryeong's son Prince Junda.

     This is not a Korean claim.

     This is the Japanese imperial court writing down its own genealogy.

     And Kanmu apparently believed it.

In 790 he referred to the Kudara no Konikishi, the descendants of the exiled Baekje royal house living in Japan, as:

朕之外戚

“Our maternal kin.”

Not metaphorical cousins.

Maternal relatives.

And in 2001 Emperor Akihito publicly acknowledged the same ancestry, saying he felt a certain kinship with Korea because Kanmu's mother was recorded as a descendant of King Muryeong.

So the easy part isn't really debatable.

The modern Japanese imperial family has recorded Baekje royal ancestry.

The only question is how much deeper it goes.

“Baekje Great Mourning”

Before Kanmu, the Baekje connection is already all over the Japanese court.

Emperor Jomei, who ruled from 629 to 641, built:

Kudara Palace.

Nearby he built:

Kudara Great Temple.

Kudara is the Japanese word for:

Baekje.

Then Jomei dies.

And the Nihon Shoki records his funeral observance as:

百済大殯

The Baekje Great Mourning.

     Palace.

     Great temple.

     Royal funeral.

     Baekje.

A dynasty does not repeatedly plaster the name of some irrelevant foreign kingdom across its royal geography and funerary ritual because somebody once bought a nice vase there.

Whatever Baekje was to Yamato, it was extraordinarily close.

Baekje princes living in Japan

And that closeness was personal.

Baekje princes lived at the Yamato court.

They didn't simply visit as ambassadors.

They lived there.

     Prince Gonji.

     Prince Jeonji.

     Prince Pung.

Members of the Baekje royal house spent significant portions of their lives inside Japan.

     When Baekje collapsed in 660, Buyeo Pung was in Yamato.

     The Japanese sent him back across the sea to become king of a restored Baekje.

     Then Yamato committed itself militarily to restoring the kingdom.

Not once.

Repeated expeditions.

     Ships.

     Weapons.

     Soldiers.

Eventually a massive combined restoration effort culminating at the Battle of Baekgang in 663.

     Hundreds of ships.

     Tens of thousands of men.

     Disaster.

     Yamato lost.

     Baekje stayed dead.

States can certainly fight for allies.

But this was an extraordinary amount of blood and treasure to spend restoring somebody else's dead kingdom.

Unless Baekje wasn't entirely somebody else's problem.

Unless these courts were family.

Muryeong was born in Japan

King Muryeong himself makes the boundary difficult.

According to the Nihon Shoki, in 461 the Baekje prince Gonji crossed to Wa.

During the journey, his consort gave birth on Kakara Island in Tsukushi.

Which is directly on the lane connecting Korea to Kyushu.

The baby was called:

Shima.

That child becomes:

King Muryeong of Baekje.

A Baekje king born in Japan.

Gonji then spends years around the Kawachi region.

Today Asukabe Shrine in Habikino, right in the heart of the great Kofun royal landscape, still preserves a tradition connecting it with Gonji.

So already the modern categories are starting to become useless.

Was Muryeong Korean?

Obviously, by our Duck Test.

Was he Japanese?

He was born in Japan.

His father lived there.

His family was deeply embedded in the Yamato court.

Then he became king of Baekje.

Pick a neat national box.

Good luck.

The anchor emperor and the Baekje mirror

The Suda Hachiman Shrine mirror.

Its inscription contains a cyclical date, 癸未年.

One major reading places that date in 503 CE.

It contains the name:

斯麻

Sama / Shima.

King Muryeong's own excavated tomb epitaph, discovered in 1971, gives his personal name as:

斯麻王

King Sama.

503 falls directly inside Muryeong's reign.

The mirror also names a recipient:

男弟王

The “younger-brother king.”

A major interpretation identifies him with Ōdo / Ohodo, the future Emperor Keitai.

If that reading is right, then before Keitai even becomes emperor, King Muryeong of Baekje is involved in sending an inscribed prestige mirror to him with wishes for long life.

And Muryeong's own burial makes the relationship stranger.

His coffin was made from koyamaki, Japanese umbrella pine.

A tree native to Japan.

So the Baekje royal tomb in Gongju contains Japanese royal-grade timber while an inscribed mirror in Japan may record Muryeong communicating with the future Japanese emperor.

These aren't two sealed courts exchanging occasional diplomatic Christmas cards.

They're inside each other's elite world.

The first big crack: Emperor Ōjin

Now we get dangerous.

The official Japanese genealogy is supposed to be unbroken.

It isn't nearly that clean.

One of the great discontinuities comes with:

Emperor Ōjin.

Ōjin appears at almost exactly the moment Japan undergoes a dramatic transformation.

     Horse equipment.

     Continental weapons.

     New armor.

     New tomb forms.

     New technologies.

     New immigrants.

     New political organization.

     New relationships with Gaya and Baekje.

The political center also shifts toward Kawachi, the same general region where huge numbers of immigrants from the Korean Peninsula become visible.

Japanese historians themselves developed theories of an Ōjin or Kawachi dynasty, separate from the earlier Yamato rulers.

In other words:

Ōjin may not simply be another bead on an eternal imperial necklace.

He may represent a new ruling house.

And Ōjin's personal name is:

Homuda / Pômunda.

Alexander Vovin pointed out that the name is difficult to explain internally in Japanese and proposed a Korean etymology.

He went further.

Because Ōjin supposedly received this name at birth, Vovin raised the possibility that Ōjin and his mother Jingū were themselves Korean speakers.

Now combine that with what we've already seen.

• Jingū's genealogy reaches back to Silla.
• Ōjin carries a possibly Korean personal name.
• His period coincides with enormous Korean-peninsula immigration and the sudden appearance of horse-riding military culture.
• His dynasty is centered in Kawachi, one of the great centers of Korean immigrant settlement.
• And some Japanese historians already think he represents a dynastic break.

At what point are we allowed to ask the obvious question?

What if Ōjin wasn't the descendant of an indigenous Japanese dynasty receiving Koreans?

What if Ōjin was one of the Koreans?

The conquest-dynasty school

Japanese archaeologist Egami Namio eventually asked something very close to that.

His famous Horse-Rider Conquest Theory argued that mounted continental warriors came through the Korean Peninsula, entered Kyushu, moved east, conquered the Kinai, and established a new ruling dynasty.

The theory became controversial precisely because it made the supposedly eternal indigenous Japanese imperial dynasty the product of conquest from outside Japan.

Egami connected the transformation particularly with the Ōjin period.

Then Gari Ledyard pushed the reconstruction farther.

Ledyard argued that a Buyeo-derived ruling group, displaced southward through the Korean Peninsula, ultimately crossed into Japan and established the Ōjin dynasty.

Read that again.

Buyeo.

The same Buyeo world we've spent half this series chasing.

Buyeo

↓

Baekje

↓

Japan

↓

Ōjin.

Then Hong Wontack, an economist at Seoul National University, took the model about as far as it can go.

His argument:

Yamato Japan was founded by a Baekje royal expedition around the late fourth century.

In this reading, Ōjin isn't a Japanese king heavily influenced by Baekje.

Ōjin's dynasty is a Baekje branch dynasty.

The later Nihon Shoki takes a foreign royal foundation and rewrites it backward into an eternal indigenous genealogy.

Probable?

Maybe.

Gonji's house

Then Japanese scholars Ishiwatari Shin'ichirō and later Hayashi Junji push another version.

Remember Gonji?

Baekje prince.

Father or close royal relative of Muryeong depending on the source tradition.

     Moves into Japan.

     Lives in Kawachi.

     Associated with Habikino.

     Exactly where the enormous royal Kofun appear.

Their argument goes much farther:

The Kawachi dynasty traditionally attributed to Ōjin was actually Gonji's royal house.

If so, the Suda mirror suddenly reads very differently.

It isn't:

Baekje king → Japanese emperor.

It's:

one branch of the Baekje royal family → another branch of the Baekje royal family.

That is no longer a Korean grandmother.

That's a patrilineal dynasty claim.

The second big crack: Emperor Keitai

Then the imperial genealogy breaks again.

Emperor Keitai.

The previous royal line effectively ends.

Keitai appears from outside the traditional Yamato political center.

The chronicles desperately connect him back to Ōjin through a remote genealogy.

Then he becomes emperor.

And despite supposedly inheriting the throne, it takes him years before he can even establish himself inside Yamato proper.

That is weird.

Japanese historian Mizuno Yū built his famous Three Dynasties Theory around exactly these discontinuities.

     Sujin dynasty.

     Ōjin dynasty.

     Keitai dynasty.

Not one unbroken ruling line.

Several.

Stitched together afterward.

And Keitai matters especially because, unlike the murky early emperors, the dynasty from Keitai forward leads toward the historically documented Imperial House.

So if Keitai isn't part of the old line, the obvious question returns.

Who the hell was he?

A peer-reviewed Korean study by Hosaka Yuji and Han Seong-rye takes the fringe answer all the way:

Keitai originated from Gaya.

Not:

Keitai had Gaya friends.

Not:

Keitai's grandmother came from Gaya.

Keitai himself was a Gaya royal.

Combine that with the dynastic-discontinuity model and you get a beautifully offensive proposition:

The dynasty ancestral to the modern Japanese Imperial House was founded by a man from Gaya.

And sitting right beside him in time is King Muryeong of Baekje.

Born in Japan.

Possibly corresponding with him through the Suda mirror.

Closely connected to the same Kawachi world.

Again:

How many coincidences do we want?

The Shinsen Shōjiroku

Now look at the aristocracy surrounding these kings.

In 815 the Japanese court compiled the Shinsen Shōjiroku, an official genealogy of 1,182 elite clans in the capital region.

It classified:

     335 as imperial-derived.

     404 as divine-derived.

     326 as foreign-derived.

Of those foreign clans:

     163 claimed Chinese ancestry.

     104 claimed Baekje ancestry.

     41 claimed Goguryeo ancestry.

     9 claimed Silla ancestry.

     9 claimed Gaya ancestry.

So nearly thirty percent of the registered capital-region aristocracy openly classified itself as foreign-derived, and a huge portion of those foreign families explicitly traced themselves to the Korean Peninsula.

Baekje alone dominates the peninsular category.

And these are only the families the ninth-century court classified that way.

This wasn't an isolated Korean blacksmith living behind the palace.

These were aristocratic clans inside the governing machinery of the Japanese state.

A short addition to this claim:

I spent time further investigating the Shinsen Shōjiroku. It turns out that of the 163 clans who claimed Chinese ancestry, 77 of them are of Baekje ancestry. The remaining 86 claims are some remarkable bullshit: Cao Cao, Emporer Yang of Sui etc. Similarly within the so called "Imperial" and "Divine" clans so much bullshit.

The Soga

Then there are the Soga.

For much of the sixth and seventh centuries, the Asuka period, the Soga were the most powerful aristocratic family in Japan.

     They married daughters into the imperial family.

     Made emperors.

     Removed enemies.

     Controlled succession.

     Championed Buddhism.

     Effectively dominated the court.

Their power didn't come from military force.

It came from managing foreign affairs.

They acted as the primary patrons and administrators for Torajin, immigrants from the Korean Peninsula. This gave the Soga exclusive control over advanced continental knowledge, including financial administration, engineering, and the Chinese writing system.

And there has long been a serious proposal connecting the Soga ancestor Soga no Machi with the Baekje official:

Mok Manchi (木滿致).

Someone recorded in Korean records as well.

Japanese historian Kadowaki Teiji pursued that identification.

Alexander Vovin approached the question from a completely different direction and also proposed a Korean origin for the Soga name.

So one of the most powerful families ever to dominate the Japanese throne may itself have originated in the Korean Peninsula.

Which means even if the emperor wasn't Korean enough for you yet, the people marrying into the imperial family and deciding who got to become emperor may have been.

The Seven-Branched Sword

Then there is the Seven-Branched Sword.

It still sits at Isonokami Shrine, one of the great ancient armories associated with the Yamato rulers.

Its inscription says the extraordinary sword was made by the Baekje crown prince for the King of Wa.

Again:

One of the oldest surviving inscribed prestige objects 

connected with the Japanese royal world is a gift from Baekje.

Kim Seok-hyung and others read the language of the inscription hierarchically:

Baekje above.

Wa below.

In their interpretation, this isn't a humble Korean kingdom sending tribute to a mighty ancient Japanese emperor.

It's the other way around.

Baekje is giving royal regalia to a subordinate ruler.

Which brings us to one of the most wonderfully offensive Korean theories ever invented.

The inversion of Imna

During the colonial period, Japanese historians promoted versions of the Imna Nihonfu theory:

Ancient Japan had ruled territory in southern Korea.

Japanese sovereignty over Korea wasn't really conquest.

It was restoration.

Then in 1963 North Korean historian Kim Seok-hyung looked at the same material and said, essentially:

You've got it backwards.

His bunkoku-ron, branch-state theory, argued that Samhan and later Korean polities had established branch states inside Japan.

     Kibi.

     Izumo.

     Kawachi.

     Tsukushi.

So when the Nihon Shoki seems to describe strange tributary relationships involving “Korean” places and Wa, Kim argued that later Japanese compilers had geographically transposed political relationships.

Japan didn't have colonies in Korea.

Korean states had colonies in Japan.

Then Choi Jae-seok at Korea University pushed the argument even farther, arguing across several books that early Yamato Wa itself existed within a political order dominated by Baekje.

Now we're well outside orthodoxy.

Good.

That's where we're looking.

Korean gods inside the palace

Then there are the gods.

When the imperial capital moved to Heian-kyō, the Imperial Household Ministry compound contained the Sono and Kara shrines.

韓.

Kara.

Korea.

The Engishiki records regular state rites to these deities.

Court tradition held that these gods remained to protect the emperor.

So inside the administrative complex responsible for maintaining the emperor's own household were gods carrying an explicitly Korean association.

Once again:

     Baekje palaces.

     Baekje temples.

     Baekje royal relatives.

     Korean immigrant aristocrats.

     Korean gods.

How much Korea can you put inside an imperial court before Korea stops being “outside influence”?

Language

Now add language.

Japanese is Japonic.

Where did Japonic come from?

We just spent an entire section of this series looking at the strongest surviving clue:

the Korean Peninsula.

Christopher Beckwith, Alexander Vovin, John Whitman, and others have argued in different ways for Japonic languages once being spoken across substantial parts of the peninsula.

The old place names preserved in the Samguk sagi contain forms compared with Japonic words and numerals.

Japonic disappears from Korea.

Japonic appears in Japan.

People from Korea migrate to Japan in enormous numbers.

This is not particularly complicated.

The language spoken by the people who eventually built Japan appears to have come through Korea.

Then Vovin turns around and finds possible Korean material inside the names of the early Japanese ruling world itself:

Ōjin / Homuda.

Soga.

Even Izanagi and Izanami.

So not only did Japonic probably travel from Korea into Japan.

Some of the rulers who established the early Japonic state may themselves preserve Korean linguistic fingerprints.

The graves we aren't allowed to open

And conveniently, the biggest potential witnesses can't talk.

The Imperial Household Agency controls the enormous keyhole tombs attributed to the ancient emperors.

Including the tomb attributed to:

Ōjin.

And the tomb attributed to:

Nintoku.

Full archaeological excavation is prohibited.

So the men sitting exactly at the center of the argument remain inside enormous sealed tombs.

     Maybe they're exactly who the chronicles say they are.

     Maybe they're not.

     Maybe grave goods would show overwhelming indigenous continuity.

     Maybe they'd scream Baekje or Gaya.

     Maybe DNA would solve half the argument in an afternoon.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could open the fucking things?

Put it all together

So let's stop looking at each piece separately.

• Ninigi descends onto Kushifuru facing Korea.
• Jingū's genealogy reaches Silla.
• Susanoo travels through Silla.
• Japonic probably comes from the Korean Peninsula.
• Ōjin has a possibly Korean name.
• Ōjin appears exactly when Korean horse culture, technology, immigrants and political influence explode across Japan.
• Japanese historians themselves have proposed a new Ōjin dynasty.
• Egami proposes continental horse-rider conquest.
• Ledyard proposes a Buyeo-derived ruling group.
• Hong Wontack proposes a Baekje royal conquest.
• Gonji of Baekje lives in Kawachi.
• Muryeong is born in Japan.
• Ishiwatari and Hayashi propose Gonji's house as the Kawachi dynasty.
• Muryeong may be named on the Suda mirror with the future Keitai.
• Keitai appears during another enormous genealogical discontinuity.
• Mizuno says Keitai begins another dynasty.
• Hosaka and Han say Keitai himself came from Gaya.
• Baekje and Yamato royal families intermarry.
• Baekje princes live in Japan.
• The Yamato state sends enormous armies trying to restore Baekje.
• The court builds a Baekje Palace.
• A Baekje Great Temple.
• A Baekje Great Mourning.
• Hundreds of elite Japanese clans openly claim continental ancestry, including huge numbers from Baekje and Goguryeo.
• The Soga may be Baekje-derived.
• A Baekje crown prince sends the Wa king the Seven-Branched Sword.
• Korean-associated gods sit inside the Imperial Household Ministry.
• And eventually the Shoku Nihongi simply gives up pretending and tells us outright:
• Emperor Kanmu's mother descends from King Muryeong of Baekje.
• Kanmu himself calls the Baekje royal descendants: our kin.
• Centuries later Emperor Akihito acknowledges it publicly.

If all you had were Kanmu's mother, I'd call that Korean ancestry entering an otherwise Japanese dynasty.

But that's not all we have.

The Korean connection repeatedly appears exactly where the Japanese imperial genealogy becomes unstable.

Ōjin.

Keitai.

The moments where new dynasties may actually have been created.

So here is the strongest version of the argument:

Perhaps Koreans did not merely marry into the Japanese Imperial Family.

Perhaps the early Japanese imperial state itself was created by successive waves of peninsula-derived aristocrats who crossed the Korea Strait, intermarried with existing Japanese elites, brought armies, horses, technologies, gods, stories and languages, and eventually became:

Japanese.

     Maybe Ōjin was one of them.

     Maybe Keitai was another.

     Maybe the Yamato dynasty was not conquered once by Koreans.

     Maybe it was repeatedly rebuilt by them.

And then, centuries later, Japanese historians took that messy peninsula–archipelago ruling world and drew one beautiful, uninterrupted line backward to the gods.

Japanese Imperial Family: Korean?

Hell yes.

2. The Japanese Imperial family is not Korean.

Yes, Koreans migrated to Japan.

Yes, Baekje was extraordinarily important to Yamato.

Yes, Korean aristocrats married into the Japanese elite.

Yes, Emperor Kanmu had Baekje royal ancestry.

None of that proves that the Japanese Imperial Family came from Korea.

It proves that ancient Japan was exactly what archaeology says it was:

A native island society that absorbed enormous numbers of continental immigrants and became stronger because of them.

Let's dismantle the Korean case.

The founding myth doesn't say Ninigi came from Korea

Ninigi descends from heaven onto Kushifuru.

He does not descend from Korea.

And when the Kojiki says the location “faces Karakuni,” that's exactly what it says:

faces.

Not:

“came from.”

Not:

“our ancestors live there.”

Not:

“Ninigi crossed the sea from Korea.”

If anything, the wording distinguishes the place where Ninigi lands from the foreign land it faces.

Japan is here.

Karakuni (Korea) is over there.

And comparing Kushifuru with Gaya's Gujibong because the stories both involve heavenly descent proves almost nothing.

• Heavenly founders are everywhere.
• Kings throughout Eurasia descend from heaven, gods, suns, dragons, wolves and bears.
• Parallel myth does not establish genealogy.
• Nor does phonetic resemblance between two mountain names establish a common word.

The Kojiki itself uses the Karakuni passage to establish Ninigi's possession of the Japanese land he has just received. One scholarly reading treats the speech as part of the Kojiki's ideological construction of legitimate imperial sovereignty, not a confession of Korean origin.

So:

Kushifuru faces Korea.

Interesting.

It is still in Japan.

Ame-no-Hiboko actually proves the opposite

Yes. The Kojiki gives Empress Jingū a maternal ancestor named Ame-no-Hiboko, a prince from Silla.

Great.

Now read what the story does with him.

     He is explicitly an immigrant.

     An outsider.

     Someone who comes from Silla into Japan.

     His descendants gradually marry into Japanese ruling society.

A study of the Ame-no-Hiboko traditions describes precisely this movement:

Silla outsider

→ excluded from the political center

→ descendants incorporated into the Japanese ruling group through marriage.

The texts construct Silla as outside the kingdom and then explain how foreign blood can become part of the inside.

That's not evidence that the Japanese monarchy came from Silla.

It's evidence that Japanese mythology knew perfectly well how to distinguish:

immigrant ancestry

from:

the Japanese ruling house.

Empress Jingū can have a Silla ancestor without the imperial family becoming Silla.

Your grandmother doesn't determine the nationality of the dynasty.

Susanoo isn't the ancestor of the emperors

Then there's Susanoo.

One Nihon Shoki variant puts him at Soshimori in Silla before he goes to Izumo.

Fine.

But Susanoo is not the founder of the imperial lineage.

Amaterasu is.

Susanoo is her brother.

The imperial descent proceeds through Amaterasu's line to Ninigi and eventually Jimmu.

Susanoo belongs to the same divine mythological world, but he is not sitting at the head of the imperial family tree.

The Silla episode therefore demonstrates something much less spectacular:

Japanese mythology incorporated memories, stories and religious material involving the Korean Peninsula.

Of course it did.

Japan and Korea had been interacting for centuries before the Nihon Shoki was written.

A Korean connection inside Japanese mythology does not turn every god in that mythology into a Korean immigrant. Scholarship on the Susanoo cycle itself treats these peninsula connections primarily as questions of mythology, religious exchange and cultural memory.

Kanmu proves ancestry.

That's all.

This is the easiest one.

Takano no Niigasa, mother of Emperor Kanmu, was recorded as descending from the Baekje royal house.

Accepted.

Kanmu himself regarded Baekje-descended clans as maternal relatives.

Accepted.

Modern scholarship calls Kanmu a maternal descendant of the Baekje royal family.

Accepted.

None of that says the Japanese imperial dynasty was founded by Baekje.

Kanmu's father was:

Emperor Kōnin.

Kōnin was already a member of the Japanese imperial lineage.

Niigasa married into it.

This is literally evidence of Baekje ancestry entering the Japanese Imperial Family.

That's not remotely the same claim as:

The Japanese Imperial Family came from Baekje.

European royal houses married foreign princesses constantly.

     French blood enters England.

     German blood enters Britain.

     Spanish blood enters France.

     Danish blood enters Russia.

Nobody concludes that every dynasty changes nationality whenever a foreign woman gives birth to the next king.

And the distinction is especially obvious here because Niigasa lived hundreds of years after the Yamato monarchy already existed.

Kanmu tells you something about Kanmu.

     He tells you almost nothing about Ōjin.

     He tells you nothing about Sujin.

     He tells you nothing about the founding of Yamato.

“Baekje Great Mourning” proves Baekje influence.

Again:

So what?

     Jomei had a Kudara Palace.

     A Kudara Great Temple.

     His funeral involved something called the Baekje Great Mourning.

That is fascinating evidence for enormous Baekje cultural prestige and a powerful Baekje immigrant presence around the court.

But Yamato imported things constantly.

• Buddhism came overwhelmingly through the Korean Peninsula.
• Writing came through continental scholars.
• Temple architecture came through immigrant craftsmen.
• Metalworking.
• Medicine.
• Calendrical knowledge.
• Confucian learning.
• Government techniques.

Why wouldn't royal ritual also be imported?

If a European king builds an Italian palace, worships in a Roman church, employs Italian architects and adopts a Roman funeral rite, he doesn't suddenly become Italian.

Cultural prestige is not genealogy.

Baekje may have taught Yamato how to conduct an impressive royal funeral.

That doesn't tell us where Jomei's father came from.

Baekje princes living in Japan actually show two separate courts

Baekje princes lived at Yamato.

Correct.

And then Yamato sent Buyeo Pung back to Baekje to restore the Baekje monarchy.

Think about what that means.

If Yamato and Baekje were simply branches of one Baekje royal dynasty, why does Pung have to cross the sea to become king of Baekje?

     Because they are different states.

     Different thrones.

     Different political communities.

     Pung is useful precisely because he is a Baekje prince living abroad.

The same applies to Gonji.

A foreign prince residing at another court is hardly unusual.

     Hostages.

     Diplomatic residents.

     Royal marriages.

     Exiles.

     Refugees.

     Political insurance.

All occur constantly in ancient interstate politics.

Their presence inside Yamato proves intimacy between the courts.

It does not prove identity.

Baekgang was strategy, not a family reunion

“Why would Japan send tens of thousands of men to restore Baekje unless they were family?”

Because states sometimes fight enormous wars for allies.

Baekje was Yamato's primary partner on the peninsula.

It supplied technology, literate specialists and diplomatic access.

It was a counterweight to Silla.

Then Silla allied with the enormous Tang Empire and destroyed it.

From Yamato's perspective, that meant a hostile Silla-Tang system could suddenly dominate the opposite side of the Korea Strait.

Restoring Baekje was therefore a major strategic objective even if not one Yamato king shared one drop of Baekje royal blood.

Baekje and Yamato were extraordinarily close.

No dispute.

Close allies are still allies.

Muryeong being born in Japan proves nothing about Yamato ancestry

King Muryeong may have been born on an island belonging to Wa during Gonji's journey.

Wonderful.

That makes Muryeong:

a Baekje prince born abroad.

It doesn't make Yamato Baekje.

A child born while his royal father is residing overseas can return home and rule his ancestral kingdom.

That is exactly what supposedly happens.

And notice the direction:

Muryeong doesn't become emperor of Japan.

He becomes:

King of Baekje.

The sources themselves distinguish his dynasty from Yamato's.

The Suda mirror may not involve Keitai at all

The entire Muryeong–Keitai mirror argument depends on several contested readings being right simultaneously.

     The year has to be 503.

     斯麻 has to be Muryeong.

     男弟王 has to be the future Keitai.

     The palace has to fit.

     The relationship implied by the inscription has to mean what the theory requires.

But even Korean scholarship doesn't agree.

A 2023 Korean study reread the inscription and concluded that the mirror was not addressed to Keitai at all.

It identifies Sama as Muryeong, yes.

But it identifies 男弟王 as King Dongseong of Baekje, Muryeong's younger brother or royal relative, and dates the mirror to 479.

Under that reading, the supposedly spectacular Muryeong-to-Keitai object isn't a Yamato object proving royal kinship.

It's essentially a Baekje dynastic object.

So the mirror cannot carry the weight being placed on it.

Japanese coffin wood in Muryeong's tomb cuts both ways

Muryeong's coffin was made from Japanese umbrella pine.

Yes.

Which proves:

Baekje imported elite timber from Japan.

Excellent evidence for trade and royal exchange.

But if imported material establishes political descent, then half the royal families of Eurasia belong to wherever their luxury goods came from.

     Chinese silk in Rome doesn't make Roman emperors Chinese.

     Roman glass in Silla doesn't make Silla kings Roman.

     Japanese timber in a Baekje coffin tells us the two courts exchanged valuable materials.

That's all the wood says.

Ōjin doesn't require a Korean conquest

This is where the Korean argument tries to turn cultural change into population replacement.

Ōjin's period sees:

• horses,
• horse equipment,
• continental armor,
• new weapons,
• new technologies,
• new immigrants.

All true.

But archaeology does not show a clean conquest horizon.

Early Kofun culture itself develops directly out of Late Yayoi society. Archaeologists identify substantial continuity in elite burial practice, ritual, grave goods and social organization from Yayoi into early Kofun.

And the famous horse-rider problem is especially damaging.

Egami's theory required invading mounted warriors to arrive and create a new state around the beginning of the fifth century.

But Japanese archaeologists pointed out that horse-riding practice spreads gradually.

Horse equipment first has to be imported from the peninsula.

Local Japanese production develops later.

The archaeological chronology doesn't show a mounted army arriving fully formed and conquering Yamato.

A review in the Japanese Journal of Archaeology notes that the majority of Japanese archaeologists rejected Egami's theory and that horse-riding spread during the fifth century rather than appearing as one conquest package.

So the simpler reconstruction is:

Yamato elites see useful Korean military technology.

     They import horses.

     Import trainers.

     Import equipment.

     Hire immigrant specialists.

     Learn.

     Breed horses.

     Build their own equipment.

     Use it themselves.

That is technological adoption.

Not conquest.

The Kofun themselves scream continuity

The biggest problem with the “Korean conquerors founded Yamato” model is sitting all over Japan in enormous piles of dirt.

Keyhole tombs.

• The distinctive zenpō-kōen-fun elite burial system develops inside the Japanese archipelago.
• It spreads through regional alliances centered increasingly on the Kinai.
• Fourth-century paramount burials are already concentrated around the Nara/Osaka central court before the supposed fifth-century Korean takeover.
• Then the fifth-century Kawachi kings continue building gigantic versions of the same basic monument.

If a foreign conquest replaced the ruling elite, where is the burial-system rupture?

Why does the invading dynasty keep building the most characteristically Japanese elite monuments imaginable?

Why does the political landscape continue through the same broad Kinai system?

The archaeological story looks much more like:

local state formation + massive continental immigration

than:

foreign army replaces local rulers.

Even scholars emphasizing Korean immigration reject conquest

This isn't merely Japanese nationalist resistance.

A 2022 archaeological synthesis by Song-nai Rhee, C. Melvin Aikens and Gina Barnes is about the enormous contribution of Korean-peninsula immigrants to ancient Japan.

They aren't denying Korean influence.

Their entire book is about it.

     Rice agriculture from Korea.

     Bronze and iron technology from Korea.

     Skilled immigrant communities from Korea.

     Administrative and cultural knowledge from Korea.

And what do they call their final interpretive chapter?

“Collaboration Not Conquest.”

They explicitly discuss Egami, Mizuno and Ledyard's invasion models while reconstructing Japanese state development through interaction between immigrants and existing island populations.

That's a much harder argument to dismiss as Japanese denial.

You can accept practically every Korean contribution imaginable and still reject a Korean conquest dynasty.

Ōjin's name doesn't make Ōjin Korean

Alexander Vovin proposes a Korean etymology for Homuda.

Interesting.

But historical etymology is not a DNA test.

     Names cross languages constantly.

     Foreign prestige names get borrowed.

     People acquire names derived from neighboring languages.

     Royal houses especially absorb foreign terminology.

Even if Vovin's etymology is correct, it establishes that the name may contain Korean linguistic material.

It does not establish:

     Ōjin was born in Korea.

     Ōjin's father was Korean.

     Ōjin invaded Japan.

     Ōjin belonged to Baekje.

     Ōjin belonged to Gaya.

     Ōjin founded a Korean colony.

All of those are additional steps.

A Korean name can exist in Japan for exactly the same reason Korean swords, horses, craftsmen and gods exist there:

contact.

Gonji living in Kawachi doesn't make Kawachi his kingdom

Then comes Gonji.

Yes, a Baekje prince lived in the Kawachi region.

He lived inside a territory already governed by Yamato.

That does not prove his family was the Yamato royal family.

It proves Yamato could accommodate a powerful foreign prince.

The Ishiwatari/Hayashi reconstruction takes:

Baekje prince in Kawachi

and turns it into:

Baekje prince secretly owns Kawachi.

That's the part that needs proof.

Residence isn't sovereignty.

A Saudi prince living in London doesn't make Buckingham Palace Saudi.

Keitai doesn't require a foreign replacement dynasty either

Keitai is strange.

No argument there.

He comes from outside the immediate Yamato center and claims remote descent from Ōjin.

But strange succession isn't evidence of Korean origin.

A detailed reconstruction of the succession problem notes that by 507 the nearer male descendants of the preceding line had died or been eliminated.

That left remote collateral descendants of Ōjin as plausible candidates.

Keitai could therefore have been selected precisely because he possessed enough royal descent and enough independent political power to solve a succession crisis.

More importantly, the government doesn't collapse when he arrives.

The same major aristocratic power brokers remain in office before and after Keitai's accession.

     Ōtomo no Kanamura.

     Mononobe no Arakahi.

     The political machinery continues.

The study's conclusion is blunt:

there was no drastic change in the political body surrounding the accession.

That does not look like a Gaya prince arriving with Baekje military backing and seizing Japan.

It looks like:

a succession crisis inside the existing Yamato political system.

The Gaya-Keitai theory is a theory because there is no direct evidence

There is no inscription saying:

“I, Keitai, prince of Gaya, have conquered Yamato.”

     No Gaya genealogy naming him.

     No Korean chronicle saying a Gaya prince crossed to Japan and became its king.

     No conquest destruction layer.

     No foreign garrison system.

     No archaeological horizon where Gaya material culture replaces Japanese elite culture.

The Gaya-origin theory reconstructs Keitai by combining anomalies.

Interesting anomalies.

But still anomalies.

The historical evidence directly identifies him as a ruler whose power base was in the Japanese provinces of Omi and Echizen and whose traditional genealogy connected him to Ōjin. Modern scholarship continues to study precisely how that collateral relationship functioned.

You don't need Gaya to explain him.

The Shinsen Shōjiroku actually distinguishes immigrants from the imperial house

Now the famous immigrant clan registry.

Yes.

Hundreds of elite clans claimed foreign ancestry.

     Baekje.

     Goguryeo.

     Silla.

     Gaya.

     China.

But stop and look at what the register is doing.

It classifies them as foreign-origin clans.

They are not secretly erased.

The court knows who the immigrant houses are.

     It labels them.

     Tracks them.

     Ranks them.

     And incorporates them into Japanese aristocratic society.

That actually creates a problem for the “everybody at the top was secretly Korean” theory.

If the dynasty itself descended from the same immigrant houses, why preserve such a strong conceptual distinction between:

imperial descent,

divine descent,

and foreign descent?

The register's existence makes perfect sense under this model:

native ruling system absorbs prestigious foreign families.

It becomes awkward under:

foreign ruling system pretends everyone except itself is foreign.

And most registered aristocratic clans weren't classified as foreign at all.

The immigrant component was huge.

It was not the whole elite.

The Soga weren't the emperors

Suppose Soga no Machi really was Mok Manchi.

Give the Korean argument the whole thing.

The Soga were Baekje-derived.

Fine.

They still weren't the Imperial House.

     They were an aristocratic clan.

     A spectacularly powerful one.

     They married into the dynasty.

     Controlled emperors.

     Helped choose successors.

     Sometimes behaved like they owned the state.

     And then the imperial court destroyed them.

That story actually reinforces the distinction between:

the Soga

and:

the dynasty they were trying to dominate.

A foreign-derived aristocratic clan exercising enormous influence over an indigenous monarchy is historically ordinary.

It doesn't turn the monarchy into the clan.

The Seven-Branched Sword says alliance, not ancestry

The Seven-Branched Sword is Baekje-made.

Of course.

Nobody needs to dispute that.

It was given to a Wa ruler.

Again:

wonderful evidence for Baekje-Wa relations.

But the inscription's hierarchy is disputed.

One Korean scholarly interpretation specifically argues that 侯王 is not evidence that Wa was a subordinate vassal, but part of an auspicious formulation expressing good wishes. Under that reading the sword is a sophisticated diplomatic gift intended to strengthen the alliance and encourage Wa military support.

Another recent study concludes that Wa's military activity against Silla occurred at Baekje's request as military support, while also rejecting the old Japanese colonial claim that Yamato ruled southern Korea.

That produces a perfectly coherent relationship:

     Baekje has advanced ironworking and continental culture.

     Wa has military power useful to Baekje.

     Baekje sends prestige gifts.

     Wa sends troops.

     Alliance.

Nobody has to own anybody.

And none of it makes the Wa king a Baekje prince.

Kim Seok-hyung's inversion was created to invert colonial historiography

The branch-state theory is clever.

Imperial Japan says:

Japan colonized Korea.

Kim Seok-hyung says:

No, Korea colonized Japan.

Beautiful reversal.

But reversing a bad theory doesn't automatically produce a good one.

A modern historiographical study of Kim's bunkoku-ron traces its development partly to the political and academic environment of North Korea and specifically to the need to destroy the colonial “southern Korea management” model.

It notes that the theory once had significant influence in Korean scholarship but later lost academic vitality because of empirical problems.

That's the critical point.

It solved an ideological problem magnificently.

It never produced enough archaeology to demonstrate that Kibi, Izumo, Kawachi and Tsukushi were literal colonial branch states governed by Samhan or Three Kingdoms rulers.

The theory can invert Imna.

It cannot prove the Japanese emperors were Korean.

Choi Jae-seok pushes inversion farther, not evidence farther

Saying Baekje administered Yamato is even more dramatic.

     But where is the administrative apparatus?

     Where are the Baekje officials governing Japanese provinces?

     Where are the tax documents?

     Baekje garrisons?

     Baekje royal inscriptions asserting sovereignty over the archipelago?

     Baekje administrative seals?

     Why do Chinese records deal separately with the rulers of Wa?

     Why do Baekje sources treat Wa as a military ally whose troops must be requested rather than 

     as an internal province?

The theory can reinterpret ambiguous passages of the Nihon Shoki.

It doesn't create the missing administrative footprint.

Korean gods inside the palace prove successful incorporation

Kara-associated gods inside the Imperial Household Ministry?

Fantastic.

Ancient states adopt foreign gods all the time.

     Romans worship Isis.

     Greeks adopt foreign cults.

     Chinese Buddhism comes from India through Central Asia.

     Korean kings worship imported Buddhist deities.

Nobody concludes the Chinese emperor became Indian because Buddhist monks prayed inside the capital.

If anything, putting Korean gods inside the Japanese palace demonstrates how successful Yamato was at doing what successful states always do:

stealing useful gods.

Once adopted, the gods become part of the Japanese ritual system.

That's assimilation.

Not surrender.

Japonic coming through Korea doesn't make the Japanese emperors Korean

This is perhaps the biggest category mistake.

     Suppose Peninsular Japonic is completely correct.

     Suppose Japonic-speaking farmers moved from Korea to northern Kyushu during Yayoi.

     Suppose they eventually contributed enormously to the ancestry of later Japanese people.

All plausible.

But that migration begins many centuries before Ōjin.

By the Kofun period, their descendants have been living in the Japanese archipelago for generations upon generations.

     Their language has developed there.

     Their society has developed there.

     They've mixed extensively with Jōmon-descended populations.

     They've created Yayoi communities and then Kofun states.

At what point do immigrants stop being immigrants?

This entire blog has spent hundreds of pages answering that question.

If a population leaves Korea around 900 BCE and its descendants establish a Japanese polity a thousand years later, calling that polity Korean because some ancestors once lived in Korea destroys your own Duck Test.

They say:

We are Wa.

Their neighbors say:

Yes, you are Wa.

They maintain that identity.

They're Wa.

The irony is that using prehistoric peninsular ancestry to declare the Japanese Imperial House Korean uses exactly the blood-and-soil logic this entire series has been attacking.

The graves aren't evidence because they're closed

Yes. The Imperial Household Agency restricts excavation of imperial tombs.

Annoying.

But inaccessible evidence is not positive evidence for your theory.

You cannot say:

“They won't let us open Ōjin's tomb, therefore Ōjin is Korean.”

Maybe excavation would find:

     Korean armor.

     Maybe Japanese mirrors.

     Maybe a mixed assemblage.

     Maybe the tomb isn't Ōjin's at all.

     Maybe there isn't viable DNA.

Until it's excavated:

we don't know.

The sealed tomb can be a frustration.

It cannot be evidence of Korean origin.

And the archaeology already gives us the simpler story

This is where the anti-Korean case becomes strongest.

You don't have to deny anything interesting.

Japan received enormous population flows from the Korean Peninsula.

Absolutely.

Rice agriculture probably came with migrants from Korea.

Yes.

Bronze and iron technology came through Korea.

Yes.

Horse culture came through Korea.

Yes.

Baekje craftsmen helped build the Japanese state.

Yes.

Korean monks, scribes, engineers, smiths and aristocrats became indispensable.

Yes.

Korean families entered the Japanese aristocracy.

Yes.

Baekje and Yamato royals intermarried.

Very likely.

Kanmu had Baekje royal ancestry.

Absolutely.

And none of it requires a Korean dynasty.

Because the archaeology gives us a long island sequence:

Jōmon

↓

Yayoi

↓

Early Kofun

↓

Middle Kofun

↓

Yamato state.

     Not isolated.

     Not pure.

     Not remotely.

     But continuous.

A study of Kofun skeletal populations likewise finds coexistence and intensive hybridization between indigenous Japanese populations and northern Asian immigrants rather than a simple replacement population.

That's exactly what archaeology should look like if local rulers kept absorbing newcomers.

Which brings us back to the simplest explanation.

Put it all together

• Korean migrants transform Japan. That doesn't make Japan Korea.
• A Silla prince enters Jingū's maternal genealogy. He is explicitly remembered as an immigrant.
• Baekje princes live at Yamato. Because Yamato is a different court.
• Muryeong is born in Japan. Then goes home and becomes King of Baekje. Because Baekje is a different kingdom.
• Baekje sends swords, mirrors, craftsmen and monks. Yamato sends troops. Because they're allies.
• Korean immigrants settle in Kawachi. Because Kawachi is an enormous political and economic center capable of attracting immigrants.
• Ōjin's reign sees horses and continental technology. Because Yamato wants horses and continental technology.
• Keitai comes from a collateral provincial line. The same aristocratic government continues functioning around him. No Gaya conquest required.
• The Soga may be Baekje-derived. They marry into and dominate a dynasty that remains distinct enough eventually to destroy them.
• The Shinsen Shōjiroku lists hundreds of Korean and Chinese immigrant clans because Yamato spent centuries absorbing foreign elites while continuing to distinguish those immigrant lineages from the imperial house.
• The Seven-Branched Sword proves diplomatic intimacy.
• The Suda mirror doesn't even securely involve Keitai.
• Korean gods enter the palace because successful religions and successful states absorb gods.
• Japonic may once have been spoken in Korea because the ancestors of Japanese people migrated through Korea long before Japan existed.
• And Kanmu has Baekje ancestry because by the eighth century the Japanese ruling class had been intermarrying with immigrant families for centuries. Of course he did. The surprising result would be if he didn't.

The Korean-origin argument takes every trace of contact and pushes it in the same direction:

     influence becomes immigration.

     immigration becomes elite immigration.

     elite immigration becomes intermarriage.

     intermarriage becomes dynastic replacement.

     dynastic replacement becomes Korean conquest.

Korean conquest becomes:

the Japanese Imperial Family is Korean.

But each arrow requires another piece of evidence.

And those pieces aren't there.

The much simpler story is:

     The Japanese state formed in Japan.

     Its ruling system emerged from local Yayoi and Kofun political development.

     It absorbed staggering amounts of Korean population, technology, religion, aristocracy and culture.

     Some Korean immigrants became among the most powerful people in Japan.

     Some married emperors.

     Some produced emperors.

     Eventually Korean ancestry became part of the Imperial Family itself.

But the people doing the absorbing continued to reproduce a separate political identity.

Wa.

Yamato.

Japan.

"I am Japanese."

"Yes, you are Japanese."

+ whatever they needed to keep saying it.

By the exact rules we've been using throughout this entire series:

Japanese Imperial Family: Korean?

No.

The origin of the imperial family is one topic about Japan. It's a big one, but it's only one.

Next topic:

Before 6C CE, Wa was not a single, unified polity

Here's the next, and it goes at Japanese identity just as directly. Last time we questioned where the imperial family came from. This time we question its claim to an unbroken line running back to the descent of the gods.

It all comes down to one thing.

Iron.

You may be surprised to learn that Japan had ironworkers long before it could produce its own raw iron.

They could forge iron into tools, armor and weapons.

What they couldn't do was make the iron itself.

For that, they depended on Korea.

Iron isn't like pottery, silk, mirrors or other prestige goods. Those things can make you richer, more impressive, more connected.

Iron determines whether you can compete.

     You need iron for the tools that till your paddies and fields.

     You need it for armor, arrowheads, swords, daggers and spear tips.

Japan didn't have bronze to fall back on either. 

Without a dependable supply of imported metal, you have a serious problem.

A steady supply of iron wasn't just an advantage. It was a matter of survival.

And getting it directly from China was not a realistic alternative.

For most of this period, Japan did not possess a dependable maritime system capable of simply bypassing Korea and maintaining routine traffic with China. Even centuries later, Japanese missions attempting the crossing could end catastrophically.

• 653. Second ship wrecked/foundered on the outward voyage near Takeshima in Satsuma.
• 659. First ship was blown/drifted onto an island in the southern seas. Many members were killed there; chief envoy Sakaibe no Iwashiki was among the dead.
• 733–739. Four-ship mission fragmented catastrophically on return. One got home in 734; another in 736; the fourth disappeared; Heguri no Hironari did not get back until 739
• 742. The Chinese monk Ganjin tried five times to reach Japan. One attempt blew him all the way to Hainan. He lost his eyesight during these years, and finally reached Japan on his sixth attempt in 753.
• 753. Ship carrying Fujiwara no Kiyokawa and Abe no Nakamaro was blown enormously off course and ended up in Annam/Vietnam. Nakamaro never returned to Japan.
• 761. Mission cancelled because the ships were damaged before departure.
• 762. Another attempt cancelled because they couldn't get favorable winds.
• 777–778. This is the monster: all four ships were wrecked/scattered on the return voyage. Chief figures including Ono no Iwane and Tang envoy Zhao Baoying died. One surviving group of 41 people washed ashore at Nagashima and was rescued.
• 804. Four ships leave. Ship 3 wrecks at Hirado. Ship 4 disappears from the record. Ships 1 and 2 reach China.
• 838, Ennin left Japan with an official embassy. He eventually came home aboard a Sillan merchant ship, operating within the enormous Korean maritime world associated with Jang Bogo.

So the underlying problem lasted a very long time.

Wa depended on Korean iron for its survival.

That dependence wouldn't be particularly interesting if Wa were already a single state.

If Yamato completely dominated the archipelago, then Yamato could secure the iron and distribute it through its political system.

But what if Yamato wasn't the only power?

What if there were several?

Then the equation changes completely.

Having iron meant power.

Not having it meant you were someone else's bitch.

If several Wa polities were competing with one another, securing iron had to be among their most important strategic concerns.

     Get your own supply.

     Protect it.

     Build relationships with whoever controls it.

     And, if possible, make sure your enemies don't get theirs.

     That means trade.

     Marriage.

     Kinship.

     Alliances.

     Obligations.

     Ports.

     Ships.

And deep relationships with the states across the Korea Strait that possessed the two things Wa needed:

1. Iron.
2. The ability to get it across the water.

Those states included Gaya, southern Mahan, Baekje and eventually even Silla.

And suddenly something we've already encountered starts looking much more important.

There wasn't one Korean partner dealing with one Japanese state.

There were several pipelines.

     Gaya ↔ Northern Kyushu

     Southern Mahan ↔ Kibi

     Baekje ↔ Yamato

     Silla ↔ ?

Those relationships weren't merely cultural.

They were strategic.

What did China see?

Fortunately, we don't have to guess whether Wa was politically divided.

The Chinese tell us.

And they're remarkably explicit.

Their earliest descriptions don't present one Japan ruled by one emperor.

They describe Wa as containing more than one hundred countries.

     Not villages.

     Not provinces.

     國.

     Countries.

By the third century, Chinese envoys and interpreters were dealing with around thirty of them.

     Tsushima was a country.

     Iki was a country.

     Ito was a country.

     Na was a country.

     Matsuro was a country.

Some had their own hereditary kings.

Then Wa fell into prolonged fighting.

The states attacked one another and, according to the Chinese account, there was no ruler for years.

Eventually they jointly selected a woman.

Himiko.

That's a strange way for an unbroken hereditary monarchy to work.

The Chinese account doesn't say the emperor died and his legitimate descendant inherited the throne.

     It says the states fought.

     Nobody could settle it.

     Then they chose Himiko.

     Even afterward, she didn't rule everyone.

The Chinese explicitly describe the boundary of her territory and then tell us that beyond it lay another country:

     Kunu.

     Kunu had its own male king.

     It did not belong to Himiko.

     And the two were fighting.

So around the middle of the third century, the Chinese picture looks something like this:

Then Himiko dies.

     A man is placed on the throne.

     The other states refuse to accept him.

     They start killing each other again.

Eventually another woman, Iyo or Toyo, is installed and things settle down.

Whatever political system this was, it wasn't a stable centralized monarchy stretching backward into divine antiquity.

It looks much more like a collection of states developing an increasingly powerful hegemonic center.

And by the fifth century, something has clearly changed.

The Five Kings of Wa are making much larger claims.

King Bu tells the Chinese court that his ancestors had campaigned east and west and conquered scores of countries.

Forget whether every number in his boast is true.

The verb is what matters.

Conquered.

His own political story isn't:

We have ruled this country continuously since the gods.

It's:

My ancestors went around conquering people.

China's records therefore give us a process:

100+ countries

↓

war between them

↓

coalition around Himiko

↓

countries inside and outside her authority

↓

more war over succession

↓

expanding Wa kings claiming conquest

That doesn't look like an eternal Japanese state.

It looks like state formation.

Then look at the Stuff.

The archaeology tells much the same story.

Before Yamato dominates the archipelago, there are several enormous regional centers of power.

     Northern Kyushu.

     Kibi.

     Izumo.

     Kinai/Yamato.

They weren't equal.

Their relative power changed.

They traded with one another, fought, married, copied things, and increasingly participated in the same elite culture.

But they existed.

And some were fucking enormous.

Take Kibi, centered around modern Okayama and the eastern Seto Inland Sea.

In the first half of the fifth century, somebody there built Tsukuriyama Kofun.

It is the fourth-largest keyhole tomb in Japan.

You don't build one of the largest monuments in the entire archipelago because you're some irrelevant provincial official sitting around waiting for instructions from Nara.

     You need land.

     Food.

     Labor.

     Organization.

And enough political authority to convince an enormous number of people to spend an enormous amount of time piling dirt over your dead body.

That doesn't prove Kibi was completely independent.

It proves something simpler.

Kibi had power.

A lot of it.

Northern Kyushu had its own ancient centers and sat directly across from Korea.

Izumo had another distinctive concentration of wealth, ritual and elite power on the Sea of Japan.

Then there was the Kinai and Yamato.

The archaeological map doesn't begin:

Yamato

↓

Japan

It begins with several centers of power.

But what about the keyhole tombs?

Around the third century, keyhole-shaped kofun begin spreading across the archipelago.

Eventually enormous numbers of regional elites are building them.

That absolutely tells us something important was happening.

A shared political culture was developing.

But we've spent this entire series learning one very basic lesson:

     Stuff isn't people.

     Pottery doesn't prove ethnicity.

     A sword doesn't prove ethnicity.

     A house doesn't prove ethnicity.

     And a tomb doesn't prove centralized government.

Regional rulers adopting the same elite burial system tells us they were participating in an increasingly interconnected political world.

It doesn't tell us that the ruler in Yamato appointed them.

In fact, some of those supposedly regional rulers were building tombs comparable to those of the most powerful rulers in the archipelago.

Kibi's ruler wasn't quietly whispering:

I am an insignificant servant of Yamato.

His tomb was screaming:

I'M A BIG FUCKING DEAL TOO.

And strangely enough, that's almost exactly the world the Chinese described.

     Kings.

     Lots of them.

     Some under Himiko.

     Some outside her authority.

     One actively fighting her.

A hierarchy of rulers does not require a single state.

We understand this perfectly well when looking at Korea.

Gaya shared burial traditions, technology and trading networks.

That doesn't mean there was one centralized Gaya state.

Mahan contained dozens of countries sharing related material culture.

That doesn't make them provinces.

There is no reason to apply a different standard to Wa simply because we know which polity eventually won.

Follow the iron

Now put the two pieces together.

The regional powers weren't merely competing inside the archipelago.

They were looking across the Korea Strait.

And they weren't all looking at the same place.

Again:

     Gaya ↔ Northern Kyushu

     Southern Mahan ↔ Kibi

     Baekje ↔ Yamato

     Silla ↔ Izumo?

Now add the thing they couldn't produce themselves.

Iron.

Suddenly those relationships matter enormously.

Northern Kyushu doesn't need Yamato to introduce it to Gaya.

Gaya is sitting across the fucking water.

Kibi sits on the Seto Inland Sea system.

Yamato reaches the sea through Kawachi and Osaka Bay.

Different regional powers possess different connections to the outside world.

So here's the question:

If Yamato already ruled Wa, why didn't Yamato control the iron?

Who could arm themselves without asking Yamato?

Who could get agricultural tools without Yamato?

Who maintained independent relationships with the people supplying the most strategically important material in the archipelago?

That's a much more interesting measure of political autonomy than whether everybody buried their rulers under similarly shaped piles of dirt.

And now something even stranger happens.

What's happening in Korea starts explaining what's happening in Japan.

Watch both sides of the strait

For centuries, the political map on both sides of the Korea Strait was fragmented.

Multiple Korean states dealt with multiple Wa states.

Then those networks begin disappearing.

     Gaya collapses.

     Northern Kyushu wanes.

     Southern Mahan is absorbed into Baekje.

     Kibi disappears into Yamato.

Then:

     Baekje loses the Han River.

     And by this point Wa is developing the ability to produce its own iron.

Look at that again:

That is a remarkable pattern.

It doesn't mean one side mechanically caused everything happening on the other.

But it makes treating Korean and Japanese political consolidation as two completely separate national stories increasingly difficult.

The old system had been:

Many peninsula states ↔ many Wa states

Then it became:

Fewer peninsula states ↔ fewer Wa powers

And eventually:

Silla ↔ Japan

The political world on both sides of the water was consolidating.

Baekje falls

And this is where Yamato's relationship with Baekje becomes particularly revealing.

When Baekje collapses, Wa doesn't behave like some distant country that just lost a useful trading partner.

     It gets involved.

     Deeply.

     A prince is involved.

     Troops are sent.

     An enormous military effort is made to restore Baekje.

     And Wa loses.

     Badly.

That makes considerably more sense if Baekje isn't merely a friendly foreign state.

It is Yamato's great surviving partner in the old cross-strait system.

     Its royal families are intertwined.

     People move between them.

     Technology moves between them.

     Political support moves between them.

And for centuries, Baekje has been Yamato's anchor on the peninsula.

When Baekje disappears, Yamato's world changes with it.

So what does Wa do?

     It looks for another way into the continental system.

     It reaches toward Balhae.

     Eventually it works things out with Silla.

And centuries later, despite possessing its own state, its own iron and a much more sophisticated maritime culture, Japan is still relying heavily on Korean shipping networks.

Enter Jang Bogo.

By the ninth century, the political names have changed almost completely.

     Gaya is gone.

     Mahan is gone.

     Baekje is gone.

     Wa has become Japan.

     Silla controls most of the peninsula.

And yet Japanese travelers trying to reach China are still using Sillan ships, Sillan sailors, Sillan communities and the commercial system associated with Jang Bogo.

The iron dependency was disappearing.

The geographical dependency wasn't.

Japan still sat at the end of the network.

Korea still sat between Japan and the continent.

Nobody gets to repeal the map.

50 miles away by boat. At least 3000 years as neighbors, if not more. A common ancestor that all but disappeared in the Korean Peninsula, but remained on the Japanese Archipelago. A language that was spoken then lost in Korea, but is now the dominant language in Japan. A people that traces its civilizational heritage to Korea.

Two major invasions.

Countless raids.

An occupation that lasted 35 years.

And like the "Mohe" and the "Donghu", the Japanese and Koreans are:

Not one. 

Not quite two.

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