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podcast transcript
For thousands of years, Korea has stood at the crossroads of East Asia, shaped by but never defined by its powerful neighbors.
It was home to ancient kingdoms, Buddhist temples, Confucian scholars, devastating invasions, colonization, war, division, and one of the most striking economic and cultural changes in modern history.
Despite everything, they live in the independent but divided 21st century.
Learn more about Korea’s history in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In this episode, we will summarize the history of the Korean Peninsula at a high level. Although many of the topics covered may require dedicated episodes in the future, this discussion focuses on the pivotal historical events that created Korea.
Korea is one of the great civilizations of East Asia. However, its history differed from that of its neighbors and was often ruled by them.
At the heart of Korea’s origin story is a basic myth preserved by early chroniclers through a series of tales known as Dangun.
According to a 13th-century manuscript believed to have been compiled by a monk from an early oral tradition, Hwanung, the son of Heaven, came down to earth to live closer to people. According to legend, bears and tigers prayed to him to become human.
Hwanung gave them a test: if they avoided sunlight for 100 days and ate only garlic and mugwort, he would turn them into humans. The tiger gave up, but the bear persevered and transformed into a woman named Ungnyeo. She married Hwanung, and their son Dangun founded the kingdom of Asadal near the modern city of Pyongyang.
There are many Paleolithic sites throughout the Korean Peninsula, and some studies suggest that humans have inhabited these sites for over 20,000 years.
Urban integration in the region began more than 7,000 years ago with the formation of Neolithic rice-growing communities along Korea’s river systems. Archaeologists trace the development of these communities through unique artifacts, including bronze daggers, massive stone tombs, and impressive pottery.
The history of the region becomes clearer in Chinese records dating back to 1000 BC, during the Zhou Dynasty, when the Korean peninsula was first referred to as Joseon. Our knowledge of Korean history comes primarily from Chinese sources due to limited literary development in the region until the development of Korean writing in the 15th century.
The early inhabitants of the Korean peninsula relied on oral traditions, but adopted Chinese characters about 2,000 years ago through Gojoseon or through exchanges between Gojoseon and the Han Dynasty.
During chaotic times in Chinese history, such as the Warring States Period, Chinese farmers often immigrated to Korea in large numbers. After the Han Dynasty conquered Gojoseon, China began state-led colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
The establishment of an imperial bureaucracy with Confucianism and the civil service examination system was introduced to the Korean Peninsula. The often decentralized Korean kingdoms began to rapidly consolidate into larger states governed according to the centralizing principles of Imperial China.
Korea’s Three Kingdoms period, unlike China’s Three Kingdoms period, refers to the period from 57 BC to the mid-7th century. During this period, three rival kingdoms, Goguryeo (Goguryeo), Baekje, and Silla (Silla), controlled most of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria.
Among this group, Silla emerged as a key power on the Korean Peninsula thanks to its military alliance with China’s Tang Dynasty. The Silla-Tang alliance enabled Silla to unify Korea under Silla rule.
This partnership helped them establish control over the Korean Peninsula, but they immediately ran into difficulties when the Tang Dynasty attempted to colonize Korea, and in the late 7th century, Silla took up arms to drive them out.
Silla gradually moved away from certain core Chinese values, including Confucian meritocracy. In the 6th century, Silla leaders adopted a lineage-based social organization called golpumje (骨系系).
Golpum created a strict caste system that divided people into royalty, nobles, and commoners. At the highest level, only those with royal blood were eligible to join the royal family and leadership ranks, angering those who had previously been recognized for their merits.
This system did not just outline political leadership. It also defined Korea’s social mores. Your bone ranking determines your clothing, career, housing, marriage options and wealth.
The Samguk Sagi, a 7th-century Korean source, explained how this system restricted the lower classes of Korean society and why many of them emigrated to China. “In Silla, bone quality is the key, and if you are not a noble person, no matter how talented you are, you cannot reach a high position. I want to go west to China, equip myself with scarce resources and merit, open the way to glory and glory, wear official uniform and sword, and serve the Emperor closely.”
When the rival Goryeo dynasty took control of the Korean peninsula in the 10th century, it systematically dismantled the hereditary caste system and replaced it with a meritocratic Confucian Chinese civil service system. The islands flourished until the Mongol invasions reached the Korean peninsula in the 13th century.
The Korean army fought valiantly against the Mongolian army, but was unable to resist. The Mongols destroyed the Goryeo Dynasty in Korea and eventually sent the ruling class into exile.
The Mongol occupation brought about widespread destruction in Korea. Through large-scale cultural destruction activities, they destroyed indigenous treasures such as the Hwangnyongsa Pagoda, burned Korean literature, and dismantled the basic structures of national governance and heritage.
The death toll is unknown, but historians estimate the number to be nearly 1 million.
Kublai Khan, the leader of the Chinese Mongols, made the Korean Peninsula a vassal state of the Great Khanate. This subordinate agreement demanded unquestioning obedience and obligated the Korean leadership to reside at the Mongol court.
The Mongols needed a large naval fleet to achieve the next stage of their expansion: the invasion of Japan. To achieve this, the Mongols systematically removed trees from the Korean landscape. They cut down Korea’s forests and even sacrificed young trees to supply them to the Mongolian navy, causing a wave of ecological destruction.
It took Korea centuries to recover from this disaster.
The revival of the Korean nation was overthrown by Korea’s most famous dynasty, the Joseon Dynasty. The Joseon Dynasty ruled Korea after the departure of the Mongols and ruled the Korean Peninsula until the early 20th century. Joseon oversaw a golden age in which Seoul began to emerge as a major administrative center.
Seoul became a symbol of the revival of Chinese-style civil service bureaucracy and later became a center of learning. Outsiders knew little about Seoul. This is because after the Mongol occupation, Joseon adopted a very strict form of isolation. Korea came to be called the Hermit Kingdom.
Unlike its Asian neighbors, Joseon rejected all European intervention and limited its interactions to trade agreements with Japan and diplomatic exchanges with the Qing Dynasty.
Despite this isolation, Joseon enjoyed a technological boom. Joseon took full advantage of the legacy of movable type printing, first developed in Korea centuries before the Gutenberg printing press.
Joseon took full advantage of this foundation by developing a new alphabet called Hangul. Scholars praised this writing system for its simplicity and ease of use. The Korean language, which contains only 28 phonetic symbols that capture the complexity of Korean speech, has been widely taught in schools and has led to an explosion of literacy across the Korean peninsula.
Expanding literacy brought about equality of opportunity in state-sponsored bureaucratic examinations. This expansion of learning did not end with the Confucian exam. It continued at the Korea Science Center.
The dynasty’s most famous ruler, King Sejong the Great, founded the Hall of Hyunjik, a royal research institute that generates innovations to improve the lives of Koreans.
Like the House of Wisdom during the Abbasid Caliphate, this institute also achieved great achievements, including inventing advanced rain gauges, water clocks, and sundials, and developing innovative agricultural manuals suited to the Korean soil.
After a devastating conflict with Japan in the 16th century, the Joseon Dynasty ushered in a remarkable era of stability.
Known as the ‘200 Years of Peace’, this period of isolationism lasted from the early 1600s to the mid-19th century, during which Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate and the Korean state maintained peaceful diplomatic relations.
This peace and stability gradually came to an end in the late 19th century, when industrialized and imperialistic Japan expanded its regional hegemony and Korea signed the first unequal treaty in 1876.
This opened the door for European and Western powers to follow, and the country’s isolation rapidly collapsed. In 1910, the independence of the Korean Peninsula collapsed due to Japan’s rapid expansion.
Korea’s experience under Japanese military rule was a dark and painful chapter. Koreans call this first decade the Dark Ages because this period was so painful. Koreans suffered from forced labor, sexual abuse, and conscription.
Observers, including British journalist Fred McKenzie, who covered the trauma of the Japanese occupation firsthand, have documented these abuses extensively. The freely used forms of torture include: — Stripping schoolgirls and young women, beating them, kicking them, whipping them, making them angry…. Burning men, women and children by searing their bodies with hot iron… Tying a man by the thumbs and beating him with bamboo and iron rods until he lost consciousness…
Japan’s rule of Korea was a campaign of resource extraction. They never thought about the human rights of the Korean people. Nonetheless, Japan eventually built modern infrastructure throughout Korea. Japan built an extensive railway network, telegraph lines, modern ports, hydroelectric dams, and heavy industrial chemical plants.
Japan had no intention of developing Korea. It was just pursuing its own interests. Nonetheless, the process put Korea on a path to modernization after World War II.
Japan’s defeat in World War II opened the door to division of Korea, with communist North Korea allying with the Soviet Union and China, and South Korea allying with the United States.
These challenges ultimately emerged in the Korean War, which I covered in a previous episode. Technically the war never ended. There is only a ceasefire that has lasted for over 70 years.
North and South Korea have developed into very different countries. North Korea has continued the tradition of being a hermit state, isolating itself and its people from the world.
After the Korean War, Korea experienced one of the most dramatic changes in modern history. It was devastated, impoverished and politically unstable by the war.
After decades of turmoil, South Korea has emerged as not only one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but also one of the most culturally powerful, with K-pop and Korean films and television consumed globally.
Korea’s story is not over. South Korea currently has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. This means that no matter what happens, there will be tremendous social upheaval ahead.
Despite centuries of invasion and control by neighboring countries, today the Korean Peninsula, although divided, is independent.
