print | close

KOREA in EAST ASIAN and WORLD HISTORY
A Guide for Teachers

by Charles K. Armstrong
Associate Professor of Korean History, Columbia University

I. KOREA IN ITS PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

II. TRADITIONAL KOREA

III. COLONIALISM, LIBERATION, AND CIVIL WAR (1910–1953)

IV. CONTEMPORARY KOREA (1953–)

TIMELINE || MAPS

I. KOREA IN ITS PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

Physical Setting

  • Korea's position as a peninsula on the eastern edge of Northeast Asia has determined much of its social, political, and cultural history.
  • Civilization on the Korean peninsula has developed in close interaction with neighboring China and other cultures on the Northeast Asian mainland, and with Japan.
  • Topography and climate have also been important influences on Korea's historical development. The Korean peninsula is very mountainous, especially in the north. Less than 20 percent of the land is suitable for cultivation.
  • The Korean climate is continental, similar to the northeastern United States, but with the precipitation patterns of monsoon Asia. Winters are cold and dry, summers hot and humid with heavy rainfall.
  • As in Japan and much of China, the staple food in Korea has traditionally been rice, cultivated in wet paddy fields. Labor-intensive wet-rice agriculture, combined with this difficult topography and climate, meant that most of the Korean population was concentrated into relatively small areas and into tight-knit village communities. Social cohesion in traditional Korea was reinforced by norms of behavior strongly influenced by Confucianism from China.

Cultural Influences

  • From the political unification of the Korean peninsula in the seventh century C.E. until the twentieth century, Korea was a centralized monarchy, ruled by a king, and until at least the fourteenth century Korea also had a powerful hereditary aristocracy. Unlike the warrior class in Japan, the military in Korea lost its elevated social status after the fourteenth century.
  • There are few ethnic minorities in Korea.
  • The Korean language is part of the Uralic family of languages, along with Japanese and Mongolian. It is quite different from the Chinese language, which is a member of the Sinitic family of languages. There are relatively minor differences in dialect found in Korea, and the language today is quite uniform. (See further discussion of the Korean spoken and written language below.)
  • The political, linguistic, and ethnic unity of the Korean peninsula over a long period of time has created a strong sense of national identity and distinctiveness among the Korean people.
  • Korea shares a long land border with China to the north, a much shorter border with Russia to the northeast, and across a narrow strait to the southeast are the islands of Japan.
  • Through much of its history Korea has been greatly influenced by Chinese civilization, borrowing the written language, arts, religions, and models of government administration from China, and, in the process, transforming these borrowed traditions into distinctly Korean forms.
  • Korea has in turn exerted a strong cultural influence on Japan.
  • Although Koreans have adopted Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism from China, native folk religion or shamanism, which involves communicating with the spirits of nature and the dead, has been and remains popular among many ordinary people in Korea. Since the early twentieth century Christianity has also been widely practiced.
  • Korea had very little influence from the West until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Korea was colonized not by Western imperialist powers in the late 1800s and early 1900s but by Japan, an Asian imperialist power. Japan fought China for dominance in Korea in 1894-95 and annexed Korea in 1910. Japanese colonialism ended in 1945 at the end of World War II. (See further discussion of Korean history below.)
  • Since World War II the United States has been a major political and cultural influence in South Korea.

Strategic Position and National Division

  • In modern times Korea has been the object of strategic rivalry among competing regional powers, including China, Russia, and Japan.
  • After a thirty-five year period of Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945, Korea was separated into American and Soviet zones of occupation at the end of World War II. Attempts to create a unified government over the whole Korean peninsula failed, and in 1948 these occupation zones became, respectively, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
  • The two Korean states fought a brutal war with each other between 1950 and 1953, but the war ended without a decisive victory for either side and with the country still divided. Despite the end of the cold war and tentative moves toward North-South reconciliation, Korea remains divided into two mutually hostile states, existing in a tense condition of armed truce.

II. TRADITIONAL KOREA

Independence and Identity

  • Prior to Japanese annexation in 1910, Korea experienced over 1,000 years of almost uninterrupted political independence and unity, with the exception of indirect rule by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and a period of civil war in the early tenth century.
  • Like Japan, Vietnam, and a number of other states in Asia, successive Korean dynasties acknowledged China as the center of civilization and paid symbolic tribute to the Chinese emperor on a regular basis. But in practice Korea was independent of China and developed its own distinct culture and political systems, based in part on Chinese models.
  • A number of important characteristics of traditional Korea remained well into the twentieth century, and to some extent can still be seen today. These include:
    • a sense of cultural closeness to China;
    • the transformation of borrowed traditions;
    • limiting of outside influences and tendency toward seclusion;
    • social stability and hierarchy

Origins of the Korean People

  • In prehistoric times the Korean peninsula was populated by nomadic peoples migrating from the Northeast Asian mainland, who developed settled agricultural communities around 4,000-5,0000 years ago.
  • Chinese historical records show the existence of tribal states in northern Korea and Manchuria (northeast China) before 1,000 BCE and parts of the Korean peninsula were occupied by Chinese military forces during the Han dynasty around the time of Christ.
  • According to Korean legend, a semi-divine figure named Tangun established the first Korean kingdom in 2,333 BCE and named his kingdom Choson (1392-1910), which was also the name of the last Korean dynasty and the name for Korea currently used in North Korea (in South Korea, the name for Korea is "Hanguk").

Three Kingdoms (c. 50 BCE–668 CE)

  • In the first century BCE numerous tribal states on the Korean peninsula consolidated into three kingdoms: Koguryo (37 BCE-668 CE) in the north (extending into Manchuria), Paekche (18 BCE-663 CE) in the southwest, and Silla (57 BCE-668 CE) in the southeast. All were strongly influenced by Chinese culture and government administration, including the use of the Confucian examination system to train government officials. Buddhism, originally from India, was also adopted from China and became an important part of Korea’s religious culture and remains so to the present day.
  • Development of a writing system: Like the Japanese and Vietnamese, Koreans adopted the Chinese writing system. However, like Japanese, the Korean language is structurally very different from Chinese, and Chinese characters were modified and new characters invented to correspond to Korean grammatical patterns. A modified Chinese writing system called idu was used along with "pure" classical Chinese to write the Korean language, until an indigenous Korean writing system was developed. This system was called hungmin chongum (meaning "correct sounds for instructing the people") when it was invented in the mid-fifteenth century but became known as Hangul after 1913. It is a phonetic writing system, that is one of the simplest and most efficient writing systems, promulgated by King Sejong in 1446 during the Choson dynasty.

Unified Silla (668–935 CE)

  • The Tang dynasty of China (7th-10th centuries) was a "golden age" of Chinese civilization, and Chinese culture strongly influenced China’s neighbors at this time, especially Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Of the three, Korea was probably the most faithful to the Chinese "model," although it maintained its cultural distinctiveness and, unlike Vietnam, was never incorporated into the Chinese empire itself.
  • In the seventh century, the Korean kingdom of Silla allied with Tang China to defeat its rivals Paekche and Koguryo, and by 668 Silla had conquered most of the Korean peninsula. Historians often refer to the period from the Silla conquest until the end of the Silla dynasty as "Unified Silla," although the extreme north of the peninsula and a large part of Manchuria were under the control of the Parhae kingdom, which had incorporated part of the Koguryo aristocracy into its ruling elite.
  • The state religion of Silla was Buddhism, and some of the most impressive Buddhist monuments in Asia were built during the Silla period near the Silla capital of Kyongju in southeastern Korea.
  • Silla was also very active in maritime trade in East Asia, and the kingdom was even known by Arab traders, who were the first to transmit knowledge of Korea, or "al-Sila" as the Arabs called it, to the West.

Koryo (918–1392)

  • In the late ninth century the Silla kingdom declined, and the Korean peninsula fragmented again into three rival states, calling themselves the "latter three kingdoms." The northern-based "latter Koguryo" triumphed, and in 918 latter Koguryo established its rule over the whole Korean peninsula, shortening its name to "Koryo." The capital of Koryo was Kaesong, in present-day North Korea. It was the name of this dynasty, adopted by Portuguese explorers from the Japanese pronunciation of Koryo (Korei), that became the Western name for "Korea."
  • Mongol Domination (1231-1336). In the thirteenth century the Mongols, a nomadic people from northern Asia who conquered China and much of Asia and eastern Europe, invaded Korea. Koryo became a vassal state of Yuan dynasty (Mongol) China. The Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan attempted to use Korea as a bridge to conquer Japan, but the Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 both ended in failure. Finally, the Mongols were driven out of Korea in the middle of the fourteenth century.
  • Koryo, like its predecessor Silla, upheld Buddhism as the state religion. During the Mongol invasions devout Koryo monks transcribed Buddhist scriptures called the Tripitaka onto more than 80,000 wooden blocks. The Tripitaka Koreana, which is currently housed in South Korea, is the oldest extant wood block text of Buddhist scripture in the world.

Choson (Yi Dynasty) (1392–1910)

  • In 1392 a Koryo general named Yi Song-gye deposed the Koryo king and established a new dynasty, which he called Choson, after the legendary early Korean kingdom. Choson is also sometimes called the Yi dynasty, after the name of its ruling family.
  • One of the Choson founders’ goals was to eliminate the power of the Buddhist church; consequently, Buddhism was no longer supported by the state, temple lands were confiscated, and Choson established Confucianism as the state "religion."
  • Korean state rituals, philosophy, ethics, and social norms were strongly influenced by Chinese Confucianism.
  • As in China, government-sponsored examinations were required for men to enter the state bureaucracy, and a position in the government was considered a mark of high status for an individual and his family.
  • But unlike China, the pool of eligible examination takers in Korea was officially limited to members of the upper social class, called yangban.
  • Choson dynasty Korea was characterized by strict social divisions according to status and occupation, close observance of Confucian rituals such as ancestor veneration, separation of male and female with pronounced male domination, and, after the end of the sixteenth century, self-imposed isolation from most of the outside world.
    Invasion and Seclusion (16th century)
  • In 1592 and 1597, the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having recently united the feuding domains of Japan under his leadership, invaded Korea as the first step in his attempt to conquer China. China, then under the Ming dynasty, came to Korea’s aid and defeated Hideyoshi’s forces, but in the process Korea was devastated by the war. Korea was again invaded in 1627 and 1636 by the Manchus, a nomadic people from continental Asia, who forced Korea to pay tribute to the Manchu king. The Manchus went on to conquer China in 1644.
  • After this, the Choson government followed a policy of seclusion, restricting its interaction with Japan largely to ceremonial contacts through the island of Tsushima, and limiting its contact with China to a few tributary missions a year.
  • By the middle of the nineteenth century, when European powers were encroaching on East and Southeast Asia in pursuit of trade, diplomatic relations, and colonial conquest, Korea’s continued seclusion earned it the nickname "Hermit Kingdom."
    Two Centuries of Peace (1600s-1850s)
  • Koreans today sometimes refer their country as a "shrimp among whales," the recurrent victim of conflict among larger outside powers. In fact, Korea traditionally neither thought of itself as a "small" country nor did it experience many wars or invasions, especially compared to Europe at the same time.
  • The Choson dynasty, one of the longest-lived actively ruling dynasties in East Asia, experienced more than 250 years of internal peace and stable borders.
  • Like China and unlike Japan, there was no entrenched military class in Choson. Rather, Koreans put great emphasis on scholarly learning, in the Confucian tradition, and looked down upon military pursuits.
  • The early Choson period was also a time of artistic and scientific advances in Korea. The Choson king Sejong promulgated a phonetic writing system for Korean in 1446. Now called Hangul, the Korean alphabet is one of the simplest and most efficient writing systems in the world. But the scholarly yangban class made limited use of Hangul and continued to write most of its literature, philosophy, and official documents in classical Chinese until the twentieth century.
    Imperialism: Western and Japanese
  • By the mid-nineteenth century Korea was one of the last Asian holdouts against Western imperialism, which had conquered much of southern Asia and was making inroads on China. Vietnam, which like Korea was a close tributary state to China, had been conquered by the French in the 1860s.
  • Following the successful opening of Japan to trade and diplomacy with the West in 1854 through the "gunboat diplomacy" of Commodore Perry of the US Navy, the British, the French, and the Americans all attempted to open Korea in a similar fashion. Korea, however, refused to comply to Western demands, and engaged in naval skirmishes with the French and the Americans in the 1860s and early 1870s.
  • In the end, the country was forced to open up not by the West, but by Japan itself. The 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa between Japan and Korea, named after the island off the west coast of Korea where it was signed, was a classic "unequal treaty" of the kind Western powers were imposing on Asian countries, including China and Japan, in the nineteenth century. The treaty gave Japan special trading rights and other privileges in Korea that were not reciprocated for Koreans in Japan. The United States and major European countries soon followed with their own treaties of trade and diplomacy with Korea.
  • By the end of the nineteenth century, rivalry over Korea led to war between Japan and China (1894-95) and, ten years later, between Japan and Russia (1904-5). Japan won both wars, and in 1910 Japan annexed Korea as a colony, ending the Choson dynasty after more than 500 years of independent rule.

| back to top |

III. COLONIALISM, LIBERATION, AND CIVIL WAR

Japanese Colonial Rule (1910–1945)

  • Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) was a deeply ambivalent experience for Koreans. On the one hand, Japanese colonialism was often quite harsh. For the first ten years Japan ruled directly through the military, and any Korean dissent was ruthlessly crushed. After a nationwide protest against Japanese colonialism that began on March 1, 1919, Japanese rule relaxed somewhat, allowing a limited degree of freedom of expression for Koreans.
  • Despite the often oppressive and heavy-handed rule of the Japanese authorities, many recognizably modern aspects of Korean society emerged or grew considerably during the 35-year period of colonial rule. These included rapid urban growth, the expansion of commerce, and forms of mass culture such as radio and cinema, which became widespread for the first time. Industrial development also took place, partly encouraged by the Japanese colonial state, although primarily for the purposes of enriching Japan and fighting the wars in China and the Pacific rather than to benefit the Koreans themselves. Such uneven and distorted development left a mixed legacy for the peninsula after the colonial period ended.
  • By the time of the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Korea was the second-most industrialized nation in Asia after Japan itself.
  • But the wartime mobilization of 1937-45 had re-introduced harsh measures to Japanese colonial rule, as Koreans were forced to work in Japanese factories and were sent as soldiers to the front. Tens of thousands of young Korean women were drafted as "Comfort Women" - in effect, sexual slaves - for Japanese soldiers.
  • In 1939, Koreans were even pressured by the colonial authorities to change their names to Japanese names, and more than 80 percent of the Koreans complied with the name-change ordinance.

Liberation, Division, and War (1945–1953)

  • The Japanese surrender to the Allies on August 15, 1945, which ended World War II, led to a time of great confusion and turmoil in Korea.
  • The country was divided into zones of occupation by the victorious Americans and Soviets, and various individuals and organizations across the political spectrum from Communists to the far Right claimed to speak for an independent Korean government. The Soviets and Americans failed to reach an agreement on a unified Korean government, and in 1948 two separate governments were established, each claiming to be the legitimate government of all Korea: the Republic of Korea in Seoul, in the American zone, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Pyongyang, in the Soviet zone.
  • On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces invaded the South. The Korean War drew in the Americans in support of South Korea and the Chinese in support of the North.
  • In July 1953, after three years of bloody fighting in which some three million Koreans, one million Chinese, and 54,000 Americans were killed, the Korean War ended in a truce with Korea still divided into two mutually antagonistic states, separated by a heavily fortified "De-Militarized Zone" (DMZ). Korea has remained divided ever since.

| back to top |

IV. CONTEMPORARY KOREA

  • The Republic of Korea (South Korea) today is a prosperous nation with a per capita annual income of around $US 10,000, putting it in the middle ranks of developed nations–less affluent than the United States, Japan, or Germany, but on par with Portugal, Spain, and Greece. It is also a developing democracy, having thrown off military rule in the early 1990s and maintaining a representative civilian democratic government.
  • The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), although ahead of the South economically until the 1960s or even the early 1970s, has suffered great economic hardship in recent years, and went through a period of severe famine in the mid-1990s. North Korea’s government is a single-party state established along Leninist principles borrowed from the Soviet Union, and was under the leadership of Kim Il Sung from its founding in 1945 until Kim’s death in 1994. After Kim Il Sung’s death, leadership passed to his son Kim Jong Il.
  • At the end of the Korean War in 1953, both Koreas lay utterly devastated. In addition to the loss of millions of lives, the two Koreas were beset with a ruined economic infrastructure, millions of displaced persons, and hundreds of thousands of war orphans. South Korea in 1953 was one of the poorest countries in the world. Despite a huge amount of economic assistance from the United States, the United Nations, and other Western countries for post-war reconstruction, the South Korean economy did not really begin to pick up again until the early 1960s. In 1961 the civilian government was removed in a coup led by Major General Park Chung Hee, who ruled South Korea until his assassination in 1979.

Economic and Political Development in the Two Koreas Today

    South Korea
  • The Park Chung Hee era saw both extraordinary economic growth and deepening political dictatorship. In the 1970s and 1980s Korea was known as one of the four "Little Dragons" of newly industrialized East Asian countries, which also included Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
  • After Park’s death and a brief period of civilian rule, South Korea was again brought under the control of the military, this time under General Chun Doo Hwan.
  • Despite the continued economic growth and rising international stature of South Korea, culminating in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, protests against Chun’s dictatorship grew throughout the 1980s. Chun stepped down in 1987 and was replaced by his close comrade-in-arms, Roh Tae Woo, who was elected president in a closely fought race against two long-time political dissidents, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung.
  • In 1992, Kim Young Sam, who had by then joined Roh Tae Woo’s ruling coalition, was elected South Korea’s first civilian president since the 1961 military coup.
  • Another presidential election was held in December 1997, amidst a devastating financial crisis that deeply shook the economies of South Korea and several other Asian countries. This time Kim Dae Jung was elected president, his fourth attempt at the presidency since 1971, when he was defeated by Park Chung Hee.
  • Under Kim Dae Jung’s presidency the South Korean economy made a substantial recovery from the 1997-98 financial crisis, democratic institutions were further developed, and South Korea pursued a policy of engagement and dialogue with the North.
    North Korea
  • North Korea also recovered from the destruction of war with a great deal of outside assistance, in the North’s case from the Soviet Union, China, and several Eastern European states. The North’s economy recovered more quickly than the South’s, and in the late 1950s North Korea may have had the fastest economic growth rate in the world.
  • In the l960s North Korean leader Kim Il Sung began advocating a policy of juche, or "self-reliance," partly to avoid becoming entangled in the growing conflict between China and the USSR. Although North Korea was not completely isolated and continued to receive some outside aid, it generally pursued a policy of economic self-sufficiency.
  • Much like traditional Korea, North Korea tightly restricted travel in and out of Korea and North Koreans’ contacts with foreigners. Also like traditional Korea, North Korea’s closest ally has been, and remains, China.
  • After the East European communist states collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1989-90, many observers predicted that North Korea would follow suit. The absorption of East Germany into the German Federal Republic (West Germany) suggested that a similar kind of unification could occur in Korea, with the collapse of North Korea and it absorption into the far more affluent South.
  • But such a scenario did not occur, and despite grave economic hardship and the death of North Korea’s leader Kim Il Sung, the North Korea regime remained in place into the twenty-first century. Kim Il Sung was replaced as leader by his eldest son Kim Jong Il, a succession that North Korea had been planning for decades.
  • How long such an impoverished and isolated regime can last, seemingly so out of touch with the rest of the world, is impossible to predict. But by the turn of the century North Korea showed no noticeable sign of political collapse or even significant change, despite years of profound economic hardship.

North-South Relations

  • Korea’s division was a product of the cold war, but continued long after the global cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union ended in 1991. In some ways, North-South Korean division has been more complete and hostile than the divisions between East and West Germany, North and South Vietnam, or China and Taiwan. Direct communication, including the exchange of letters and phone calls between ordinary citizens on non-official business, much less travel back and forth, is almost non-existent. The one exception, introduced in the late 1990s, was the luxury cruise ship line to the Kum Kang Mountains in North Korea, sponsored by the South Korean corporate giant Hyundai, which brought many South Korean tourists for brief visits to the North.
  • As of 2000, communication and travel between the two Koreas had not reached nearly the level of the two Germanies in the 1970s or contemporary Taiwan and mainland China. Nevertheless, there have been several periods of official inter-Korean contact and attempts at reconciliation between the two Koreas.
  • In 1972, the two regimes signed a joint declaration on peace and reconciliation for the first time. Nearly twenty years later, after a series of high-level visits between the two governments, a more extensive agreement on reconciliation, non-aggression, exchange and cooperation was signed in late 1991.
  • In June 2000, the leaders of the two Koreas, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il, met in Pyongyang for the first-ever North-South summit meeting since the two states were created in 1948. While the summit meeting raised high hopes for unification between the two Koreas, the summit meeting appeared to be only the first step in a long process of mutual recognition and co-existence.
  • Divided Korea is an anomaly in today’s post-cold war world. More than 50 years after the country was occupied by the allied powers, the two Korean states remain bitter rivals and are officially still at war with each other.
  • What began as a temporary expediency to effect the surrender of Japan in Korea at the end of World War II has become an enduring national division. The two Koreas have developed drastically different economic and political systems.
  • Yet both sides insist that their ultimate goal is a unified Korea. The long history of political, cultural, and linguistic unity on the Korean peninsula up to the twentieth century suggests that, at some point in the future, unification is probably inevitable. But as long as both regimes remain in place, the two Koreas will most likely continue to work at a gradual reconciliation, leading toward some form of unification that cannot be foreseen at present.

Korea and the World Today

  • Korea, long an important source of cultural and religious creativity and commercial trade in East Asia, has become an important player on the world stage today, especially in the economic realm. With neither the economic stature of Japan nor the military might and population of China, Korea (at least South Korea) is nevertheless a major trading nation and participant in global affairs.
  • Nor is Korea a "small country": with 46 million people, South Korea alone is larger than an average European nation. In land area Korea is about the size of Britain.
  • The combined population of North and South Korea is nearly 70 million, larger than Britain or France.
  • Furthermore, more than five million people of Korean descent live in other countries. The largest overseas Korean communities are in China (two million), the United States (over one million), Japan (700,000) and the states of the former Soviet Union (500,000).
  • In modern times Korea has been at the center of rivalry between regional great powers and between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Korea’s current division is a result of that rivalry, but has outlasted the cold war as a problem unique to Korea.
  • The hostility and potential for military conflict between the two heavily armed Korean states is a cause of great concern for the rest of East Asia, as well as for the United States and other countries in the world.
  • Despite their many differences, the two Koreas have both built modern industrial societies on the basis of a common history and cultural heritage.
  • The high value placed on family, social propriety, and education are part of that heritage, closely associated with Korea’s Confucian traditions.
  • Whether and in what form the two Koreas may one day be unified remains to be seen, but however the current division is resolved, Korea has long been an important and integral part of East Asian affairs, and is becoming increasingly visible in world affairs as well.

| back to top |

Korea: A Guide for Teachers | © Columbia University, East Asian Curriculum Project
Asia for Educators | afe.easia.columbia.edu

print | close