It is interesting, in view of recent events, to note that it has been a tradition in Korea for the military to take rule by a coup whenever the existing government becomes corrupt and inefficient. Traditionally, too, the military force returns the government to civilians when essential reforms have been made. The yangban, or upper ruling class of Korea, is divided into two groups, the tangban, or civilian, and the soban, or military. Government belongs properly to the tangban, but should they fail, the soban takes over and restores the government and then returns it to the tangban.
The Yi dynasty, the last royal Korean ruling house (that is, the last “truebone” family, to employ a term which is in standard usage in Korea and which I have used in my novel in this literal translation), came to power with many great reforms, the most notable perhaps being the creation of an alphabet, under the decree and guidance of the great King Sejong. The new dynasty had been founded upon the principles of Confucianism and the improvement in the life of the common people was immediate and far-reaching. Any citizen could petition the King, and many reforms were made as the result of this communication. King Sejong, however, felt that the written language, based on the Chinese, was too cumbersome for easy communication with his people. With the help of a group of his finest scholars an alphabet was devised, the hangul. It is considered today the best and the simplest in the world. As King Sejong invented it, this alphabet had fourteen consonants and eleven vowels. It remains the same today except that one vowel has been deleted. These twenty-four letters allow for combinations which express every possible sound of the human voice in a remarkably accurate way, for King Sejong and his scholars studied the principles of phonetics, using the literature of many foreign countries as well as that of Korea.
Again, however, Korea was not to live in peace. While she prospered in all ways, including the arts, Japan was growing into a strong military power, under an ignorant but able man, Hideyoshi Toyotomi. He was the son of a peasant, ill-educated, boastful and ambitious, but able to unite contending war lords and rebels under his leadership. The Koreans had driven the Japanese pirates from their shores, and these pirates then attacked Chinese ports with such success that the Japanese conceived the idea of making Korea a stepping-stone to mainland China.
With this dream Hideyoshi went to the Emperor of Japan, and as a reward asked only that when he had conquered it, the vast and ancient land of China be given him to rule as Viceroy. The imperial permission was granted and in 1592 he set out for Korea with a fleet of wooden warships. He landed in the south with 200,000 men and marched north. The Koreans were not prepared but they fought bravely on land. Meanwhile a Korean admiral, Yi Sun-shin, devised an iron-clad warship shaped like a turtle, with openings through the iron for the firing of blazing arrows. They were called turtle-boats and they were the first iron warships in history. With a fleet of turtle-boats, Admiral Yi destroyed the Japanese wooden ships in the Korean Straits and isolated the Japanese troops. Unfortunately the Admiral was mortally wounded, but his death was kept a secret until the worst of the war was over. At the end of seven years the Japanese were vanquished and so diminished in power that, although they never forgot their dreams of the conquest of China, it was centuries before they could invade Korea again with the same purpose.
The dynasty of Yi was brilliant and long. Opening with the end of the fourteenth century, it has been called the modern age of Korea, continuing as it does into the present. King Sejong, the fourth monarch of this dynasty, was not equaled, however, in all its history. He was a Korean Leonardo da Vinci in the variety and magnitude of his gifts. The Koreans have always been and still are a people of superb creative talents, but King Sejong, in the thirty years of his rule, became a deathless legend. The level of Korean culture under his rule reached extraordinary heights, great progress being made even in science, and especially in mathematics and astronomy. One invention, for example, was a water clock which showed automatically the time of day, the change of season, the hours of the rising and setting of sun and moon. Another invention was an accurate rain gauge for use in every part of the kingdom to serve as the basis for crop forecasts. Perhaps most important of all was the accumulation and codification of medical knowledge into an encyclopedia, Vibang Yujip, a work of three hundred and sixty-five volumes, finished in 1445. The Chinese have recently used this encyclopedia to recover some of their own sources of medical information lost in the war with Japan.
King Sejong also modernized Korean music and theory with the help of the famous musical theoretician, Pak Yon. Any visitor to Korea today realizes how extraordinarily talented the people there are in all the arts but especially in music. Perhaps the emphasis which Confucius placed upon the disciplines of music in the formation of moral character influenced King Sejong to provide for the publication of many books of music and for the arrangement of court music into beautiful compositions with divine themes.
Yet King Sejong did not suppress Buddhism. In his liberal spirit and under his personal approval, Buddhist scholars revised the Buddhist works of the previous dynasty and translated them into hangul and thus made them comprehensible to the people. As the centuries passed, the Yi dynasty grew in glory and achievement. The creative spirit of the people expressed itself in a vital literature. In this dynasty, too, the first western invasions took place. Catholicism entered in the seventeenth century, and French priests were murdered on Korean soil, as were shipwrecked sailors from foreign countries. Korea had had enough of invaders, and she asked only to be left a hermit nation, growing within her own skill. It was a wish that could not be fulfilled. Western expansionism was forcing the old nations of Asia into chaos. Portugal and Spain were engaging in active trade with Japan, and the crews of their ships, wrecked by typhoons in the Yellow Sea, often found refuge in islands off the southern coast of Korea.
Russia, too, was expanding. In the middle of the seventeenth century, a Russian regiment forced its way along the Amur River and fought the Chinese in Manchuria, near Korea. And Korean records tell us that in 1653 thirty-six “men of strange appearance,” unknown before, with “blue eyes and yellow hair and high noses,” staggered ashore from their wrecked ship. They were Dutchmen, and they were taken to Seoul, the capital of Korea, where they joined the army, married and lived for the rest of their lives, although in 1666 eight of them went back to Holland, and one of them, Hendrik Hamel, wrote of his life in Korea and so provided the first book about Korea in a western language.
In 186 °China went to war with Great Britain and France to protect her own sovereignty and her rights, with the result that Russia acted as mediator, and with the peace demanded a reward and was given the Maritime Provinces. This meant that at the northeastern tip of her peninsula Korean soil touched Russian soil — a significant portent for the future. In 1866 an American ship, the General Sherman, sailed up the Taedong River and relationships began between Korea and the United States, not always wise, not always peaceful, but established in 1883 by a treaty of amity and commerce.
It is shortly before that fateful year that my novel, The Living Reed, begins. The reader may well ask, as the story unfolds, how much of it is fact and how much is fiction. The basic Korean family is true in the sense of factual material passed through the creative process of a writer’s brain. The historical material, however, is all factual, including the trial of the conspirators, the fire in the Christian church, and other such incidents — even, I add in sorrow, the events of the day the Americans landed at Inchon after the second world war. All American and other diplomatic persons, including Koreans, are factually presented. The political events are taken from history. The character of Woodrow Wilson is based on fact well documented, and whatever he says in the novel he said first in life. The way his words gripped the imaginations of the people of Asia is authentic, and a Korean delegation did call on him in Paris as did emissaries of other small nations. But I have allowed my imagination, dwelling in Korea, to develop my Korean characters as I have known them on their own soil and as I saw them in the years when I lived in China and knew them there. To the Koreans, wherever we meet them in my book, I have tried to be true.