The Imjin War of 1592

At the Battle of Myeongnyang in 1597, Yi Sun-sin had 13 warships against 133 Japanese ships in a narrow tidal strait.

For two centuries after its founding, Joseon fought no major war, only border clashes and small expeditions. Then in 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just unified Japan after a long civil war, sent a huge army across the strait. His stated goal was to march through Korea and conquer Ming China. The war that followed lasted seven years, drew in Ming armies on Joseon's side, and left much of the peninsula in ruins. Koreans call it the Imjin War, after the name of the year 1592 in the sixty-year calendar cycle.

The landing at Busan

On the 13th day of the fourth lunar month of 1592, Japanese troops led by Konishi Yukinaga and So Yoshitoshi landed at Busan. The commander Jeong Bal at Busanjin fortress and Song Sang-hyeon at Dongnae fought back, but both positions fell. The invaders pushed north quickly, and Joseon had not imagined a war on this scale. King Seonjo left the capital, and in his absence the palaces of Hanyang, including Gyeongbokgung, burned.

Control of the sea

The war turned at sea. Yi Sun-sin, commander of the Jeolla Left Naval Command, had spent the year before the war building ships and gathering weapons. Starting at Okpo, his fleet won battle after battle, using cannon fire and ramming tactics against Japanese ships that relied on boarding. In the seventh lunar month of 1592, near the island of Hansando, he lured the enemy fleet out of a narrow channel into open water and surrounded it in a crane-wing formation. Most of the Japanese ships were destroyed. Hansando is counted with the land victories at Haengju and Jinju as the three great victories of the war.

With the sea lanes blocked, Japanese armies in the north could not be supplied by ship along the west coast, and Jeolla province, the main grain region, was kept safe. Volunteer militias formed across the country, and Ming troops arrived. The allied forces retook Hanyang and pushed the Japanese back to the southern coast. In the eighth month of 1593 Yi Sun-sin became the first Naval Commander of the Three Provinces.

Thirteen ships

The last battle

Hideyoshi died in the eighth month of 1598, and the Japanese armies began to withdraw. Joseon wanted to stop them from leaving unpunished. On the 18th and 19th days of the eleventh month, a combined Joseon and Ming fleet under Yi Sun-sin and the Ming admiral Chen Lin attacked the retreating ships at Noryang, the strait between Namhaedo island and Hadong. The allies won, but Yi Sun-sin was struck by a bullet and died in the battle. With the last Japanese troops gone from their fortresses, the seven-year war ended.

The cost was enormous. Many people were killed or taken to Japan as captives, farmland went untilled, and records and buildings were lost. The war also reshaped East Asia: Ming was weakened by the expense, and Japan soon came under a new government. For Joseon, the experience shaped its defence and its view of Japan for centuries.