Free A History of Korea by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang Page A

preserve of the military, rebellious, even uncivilized underbelly of the country. This perspective constituted a very real prejudice in the ensuing Chosn dynasty, when the northern regions, considered a backwater, suffered social and political discrimination, and Pyongyang fell further from civilizational centrality.
    Little wonder, then, that in the early nineteenth century, another uprising, the Hong Kyngnae Rebellion of 1811–12, erupted withremarkable resemblances to the Myoch’ng episode: a charismatic malcontent from Pyongyang, preaching the north’s geomantic superiority, fought to break away from the capital-based power structure. This, too, was eventually suppressed, and not until the circumstances of the mid-twentieth century brought to center-stage yet another magnetic military leader from Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung, did finally the northern part of the country succeed in recovering its long-lost glory, but at the cost of a nation divided permanently.

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    The Mongol Overlord Period
    CHRONOLOGY
1231
First Mongol invasion of Korea
1261
Assassination of the Last Ch’oe dictator, end of military rule in Kory
1270
Final capitulation of Korycourt to Mongol siege, beginning of Mongol overlord period
1274
First of two joint Mongol-Korean invasion attempts of Japan
1320s
Lady Ki’s travel to Yuan Dynasty China as a “tribute woman”
1333
Lady Ki named an imperial concubine
1339
Birth of Lady Ki’s son, the future crown prince and emperor of the Yuan dynasty
1340
Marriage of Lady Ki to the Mongol emperor as secondary imperial consort
1356
Purge of Empress Ki’s family members in the Korycourt by King Kongmin
1365
Empress Ki’s ascent as primary consort
1368
Ming dynasty’s conquest of China
    THE MARRIAGE OF LADY KI TO THE YUAN EMPEROR, 1340
    Kaegyng, the capital of the Korydynasty, was abuzz with news from China in the summer of 1340. Seven decades had passed since the Korean kingdom had succumbed to a long siege by invading Mongol forces, and in the intervening period Korea had become suffused with all things Mongol—its culture, politics, and even its monarch bore the stamp of Mongol dominance. Now Koreans received word of an event that showed that Korea, in turn, could wield influence over the stupendously powerful Mongol empire based in China, the Yuan dynasty. Lady Ki, a Korean and favored concubine of the Yuan emperor, had in the previous year given birth to the likely crown prince, and was now beingcrowned formally as an imperial consort through her marriage to the Yuan emperor. This turn of events could hardly have been anticipated two decades earlier, when she was sent as a captive prize of submission to the Mongol rulers. Indeed she and hundreds of other “tribute women” sent to Mongol-controlled China had embodied the Mongols’ comprehensive control over the kingdom of Kory, a period in Korean history normally viewed with utter shame.
    The period of Mongol dominion over Korea, however, resists easy judgment. Empress Ki’s story, in fact, represents a microcosm of Kory’s complex relationship to the Mongol empire—an experience of tragedy and horror, to be sure, but also of reform, opportunity, and valuable exposure to the outside world. This period also highlighted important features of Koryas a civilization and its place in Korean history, especially for practices and customs regarding women. In these and other ways, the Mongol era constituted a seminal turning point in Korean history: on the one hand, it directly led to the fall of the Korydynasty, but in the larger scope of national history it represented a time when Korea was integrated into the world order to a degree not seen again until the twentieth century.
    THE MONGOL CONQUEST
    The first Mongol invasion, in 1231, led by the son of the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, came six decades after the 1170 institution of military rule in Korythat had turned the Korean monarch into a mere puppet.