Battle of Chungju (Tangeumdae, 1592)

The Battle of Chungju, often called the Battle of Tangeumdae after the hill where it was fought, took place on the 28th day of the fourth lunar month of 1592, which was 7 June in the Gregorian calendar. Only fifteen days earlier, on the 13th day of the same month (23 May), the first Japanese troops had landed at Busan, opening the Imjin War, the war that Toyotomi Hideyoshi of Japan launched against Korea. The battle was the Joseon court’s main attempt to stop the invaders before they reached the capital, Hanseong (today’s Seoul).

On one side was Konishi Yukinaga’s First Division, which had led the invasion from Busan. On the other was Sin Rip, one of Joseon’s most renowned generals, with an army that the Revised Annals of King Seonjo put at only 8,000 men and whose core was cavalry. Rather than hold the mountain pass of Joryeong, Sin Rip drew up his army on open ground in front of Tangeumdae, where the Dalcheon flows into the Namhan River, so that the water was at his back. The Japanese approached in several columns, fired arquebuses (matchlock guns) and closed in from the flanks; the wet rice fields hampered his horses, and his army broke. Many soldiers drowned. According to the Revised Annals, Sin Rip and his aide Kim Yeo-mul shot down several dozen of the enemy and then threw themselves into the water.

The consequences came quickly. The news reached the court on the evening of the 29th; before dawn on the 30th (9 June) King Seonjo left Hanseong for the north, and on the second day of the fifth month (11 June) Konishi’s troops entered the capital, about twenty days after landing. Ever since, people have argued about Sin Rip’s choice. Yu Seong-ryong, the minister who wrote the memoir Jingbirok, recorded that the Ming general Li Rusong later lamented that such a strong position had not been held. Some modern historians reply that, with the troops and time he had, the open ground was a reasonable choice.

The First Division, about 18,700 men under Konishi Yukinaga, landed at Busan on the 13th day of the fourth lunar month (23 May 1592). The fortress of Busanjin fell the next morning and Dongnae the day after; their commanders, Jeong Bal and Song Sang-hyeon, were killed. Within days Katō Kiyomasa’s Second Division and Kuroda Nagamasa’s Third Division landed as well. Yu Seong-ryong’s Jingbirok describes three lines of advance: a central route through Miryang, Daegu and Sangju; an eastern route through Gyeongju and other towns, which joined the central route at Mungyeong before crossing Joryeong into Chungju; and a western route from Gimhae through Seongju and Jirye into Chungcheong Province by way of Yeongdong, and on to Cheongju.

In Hanseong the court reacted in haste. Yi Il was appointed sunbyeonsa (field commander) for the central route; other officers were sent to the eastern and western roads, and Byeon Gi was ordered to guard the Joryeong pass. None of them had an army of his own. According to Jingbirok, when Yi Il tried to take 300 picked soldiers from the capital, he found the military registers full of clerks, students and townsmen, many of whom came forward begging to be excused; in the end he was sent ahead, and the rest were to follow under another officer. The Revised Annals say he set off with some sixty mounted officers.

The provincial system made things worse. Under the defence plan then in force (jeseung bangnyak), the Gyeongsang governor ordered local garrisons to gather at assembly points and wait for a commander sent from the capital. Troops from Mungyeong and other towns camped in the open near Daegu; according to Jingbirok, when heavy rain fell, food ran out and the enemy drew near, they dispersed in the night before any commander arrived.

Yi Il reached Sangju to find that the magistrate had fled. He rounded up a few hundred farmers; Jingbirok puts his whole force, including the men he had brought, at only 800 or 900, while the Revised Annals give about 6,000. He had no scouts. In Jingbirok’s account, when a man from nearby Gaeryeong came one evening to warn that the Japanese were close, Yi Il had him jailed for spreading panic and executed him the next morning; soon afterwards Japanese soldiers hidden under a bridge shot an officer sent to investigate (the Revised Annals put the execution on the evening of the warning and the ambush in woodland). The Japanese then opened fire and closed in from both sides; Jingbirok says the Korean arrows fell to the ground after a few dozen paces. Yi Il fled, abandoning his horse and clothes, reached Mungyeong and went on to join Sin Rip. The battle is usually dated to the 25th day of the fourth month (4 June); the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s article on the battle dates it to the 23rd, the day it also gives for Yi Il’s arrival, while its table of battles gives the 24th.

Sin Rip was born in 1546 into the Pyeongsan Sin family. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture he preferred martial arts to books, passed the military examination at 22, and served in the capital and as deputy magistrate of Jinju before being sent to the northern frontier along the Tumen River, where Joseon faced Jurchen communities.

His fame came in 1583. That year a Jurchen leader named Nitanggae (also written Itanggae), who had earlier received titles and gifts from the Joseon court, joined a rising around Gyeongwon and the frontier forts fell one after another. Sin Rip, then magistrate of Onseong, joined forces with other commanders to break the siege of the fort of Hunyung, took more than fifty heads, and pursued the raiders across the Tumen to destroy their settlements; the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture adds that he drove back a force of more than 10,000 under Nitanggae at Jongseong in the fifth month and that he trained some 500 armoured horsemen. Jingbirok has him charging with only ten-odd riders and making the Jurchen lift their siege of Jongseong. The court made him army commander of northern Hamgyeong Province in 1584.

His later career had ups and downs. He was dismissed in 1587, reappointed to a frontier command in southern Hamgyeong, moved to a sinecure after executing a soldier in 1588, and in 1590 became army commander of Pyeongan Province and then governor of Hanseong. Yu Seong-ryong wrote that Sin Rip and Yi Il were the two most famous generals at court, but also that Sin Rip had a reputation for harshness and killed people to assert his authority.

Jingbirok records a revealing conversation. On the first day of the fourth month of 1592, twelve days before the invasion, Sin Rip visited Yu, who asked him how strong the Japanese would be. Sin Rip made light of them. Yu warned that the Japanese, who had once relied on close-combat weapons, now also had arquebuses; Sin Rip replied: “Even if they have arquebuses, can they hit every time?” Yu compared him to Zhao Kuo, a Chinese general of antiquity who underestimated his enemy and was destroyed. This story was written down after the war by a man who knew how it had ended, and it should be read with that in mind.

When reports of the defeats reached Hanseong, Sin Rip argued that Yi Il had gone south alone with no support and that a fighting general should be sent after him at once. King Seonjo made Sin Rip dosunbyeonsa, chief field commander, and gave him a sword with the words: “Behead anyone, from Yi Il down, who does not obey orders.” Kim Yeo-mul, a civil official who had come first in the 1577 examination and was then in prison, had been released at Yu Seong-ryong’s request so that Yu could use him; Sin Rip then asked for him as his aide, and the king agreed. According to the Revised Annals, Sin Rip took several thousand archers and other men from the capital, with war-horses supplied by court officials, and together with troops gathered from nearby districts had only 8,000 men; Jingbirok says more than 8,000 soldiers from the counties of Chungcheong joined him at Chungju.

The road from Sangju to Chungju crossed the Sobaek mountains at Joryeong, a steep pass above Mungyeong; according to Jingbirok, the central and eastern Japanese routes joined at Mungyeong before crossing it. According to the Revised Annals, Sin Rip camped at Danwol station near Chungju and rode with a few men to look at the pass. There Yi Il arrived from Sangju, knelt and asked to be put to death. Asked about the enemy, he said: “With untrained people against an invincible enemy, nothing could be done.” Kim Yeo-mul urged: “They are many and we are few; we cannot meet their spearhead head-on. We should hold this narrow pass and defend it.” He also suggested seizing high ground and counter-attacking. Sin Rip rejected both: “This ground is no use for cavalry. We should fight one battle on the open plain.” The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says the Chungju magistrate Yi Jong-jang also argued against the plan.

Jingbirok tells the story a little differently. Sin Rip had wanted to hold Joryeong, it says, but when he heard of Yi Il’s defeat he lost his nerve, went back to Chungju, called Yi Il and Byeon Gi, the officer guarding Joryeong, to join him there, and so “abandoned the strong position and did not defend it”.

The last day before the battle went badly. On the evening of the 27th (6 June) a trusted officer secretly reported that the Japanese had already crossed the pass. Sin Rip suddenly left the town, throwing the camp into confusion, and slipped back to his lodging late at night; the next morning he had the officer executed for a false report and told the court that the enemy had not yet left Sangju. Yi Jong-jang and Yi Il, sent forward to scout, had been cut off, so no further reports came. Kim Yeo-mul, expecting defeat, sent a letter to his son: “We have called for troops from three provinces, and not one man has come. For a man to die for his country is only right; but the nation’s shame is not yet wiped out and my high hopes have turned to ashes. I can only look up to heaven and sigh.” On the Japanese side, the Revised Annals say the invaders approached Joryeong cautiously, scouted again and again for ambushes, and found it empty; Jingbirok adds that at the old fortress of Gomo near Mungyeong they “passed singing and dancing”.

Tangeumdae is a low hill on the north-western edge of Chungju where the Dalcheon flows into the Namhan River; the Revised Annals place it five li from the town and the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture about 4 km north-west of it. Sin Rip drew up his army there with the water behind it, a formation known as baesujin, “a battle line with the river at its back”. Jingbirok describes the ground as lying “between two rivers in front of Tangeumdae”, with rice fields to left and right where water and grass were mixed, “not suited to galloping”; the Revised Annals likewise note many rice paddies in front.

According to the Revised Annals, at dawn on the 28th (7 June) the Japanese divided their forces. The main body went straight into the town of Chungju; a left column came down along the bank of the Dalcheon; and a right column went east along the hills and crossed the river upstream, “weapons glittering in the sun and the sound of guns shaking heaven and earth”. Sin Rip rode towards the town, his troops lost their order, and at three blasts of a horn the Japanese in the town poured out. By then the Koreans were surrounded. Jingbirok, which does not mention the town, says the enemy came from Danwol station in two columns, one along the hills to the east and one down the river, with “gunfire shaking the ground and dust touching the sky”, and that Sin Rip twice tried to charge into the enemy line himself but could not break in.

Modern narratives in English, following Samuel Hawley, describe the Japanese side in more detail: Konishi and Sō Yoshitoshi on the left and centre with about 15,000 men, Arima Harunobu, Ōmura Yoshiaki and the lord of the Gotō islands (named Gotō Mototsugu in English Wikipedia, Gotō Sumiharu in Japanese Wikipedia) with about 3,700 fanning out in a wide arc on the right, arquebusiers firing from beyond the range of Korean bows, and pikemen stopping the cavalry charges. The details of Japanese numbers and deployment come from these later reconstructions rather than from the Korean records.

The end was a rout towards the rivers. “Men competed to throw themselves into the water, and the floating corpses covered the river,” say the Revised Annals; Jingbirok says all the troops rushed into the river and “the bodies covered it as they floated down”. According to the Revised Annals, Sin Rip and Kim Yeo-mul rode and shot until they had killed several dozen of the enemy and then both leapt into the water; when Sin Rip’s nephew, his sister’s son, tried to escape, Sin Rip cried “Why should you live?”, seized him by the hair and drowned with him. Only two or three strong men got away. Jingbirok says more briefly that Sin Rip went back to the river and drowned, and that Kim Yeo-mul died among the fleeing troops. Yi Jong-jang and his son were killed; Yi Il escaped through the hills to the east. Japanese records cited in modern accounts claim about 3,000 heads and several hundred prisoners. The people of Chungju, trusting in the great army, had not fled, and according to the Revised Annals they were slaughtered more cruelly than in any other district.

In Hanseong people had been waiting daily for news of victory. Jingbirok says that on the evening before the king’s departure three men in felt hats rode in through the eastern gate and, asked for news, said they were servants of Sin Rip’s officers: “Yesterday the commander was defeated and killed at Chungju, and the army has scattered.” Within hours the whole city was in turmoil. According to the Revised Annals, on the evening of the 29th (8 June) the king met his ministers, who advised that he go to Pyongyang for the time being and ask the Ming for troops. When an official begged him to defend the capital, Yu Seong-ryong replied that the plea was loyal but that circumstances left no choice. Princes were sent to raise troops in the provinces: Imhae to Hamgyeong, Sunhwa to Gangwon. Late that night a dispatch arrived from Yi Il warning that the enemy would enter the capital “today or tomorrow”.

Before dawn on the 30th (9 June) the king and the crown prince rode out in pouring rain. The Annals of King Seonjo record that fewer than a hundred relatives and officials followed and that palace women walked behind weeping. As the party left, Yu saw fire rising from the great storehouse inside the South Gate. They crossed the Imjin River as dusk fell and burned the timber of a riverside building, both to light their way onward in the dark and so that the enemy could not use it for rafts. Parts of the capital, including the palaces, burned in the days that followed; the sources disagree about who set the fires.

The Japanese followed fast. Jingbirok says that from Chungju they split again, one force heading for Yeoju and crossing the river towards Yanggeun, the other going by Juksan and Yongin to the southern bank of the Han River. The court had appointed Kim Myeong-won to hold the Han, but by the Revised Annals’ account he too had almost no soldiers. Konishi’s division entered the undefended capital on the second day of the fifth month (11 June), and Katō’s a day later; Jingbirok dates the entry to the third. It was about twenty days since the landing at Busan.

One more episode shows how war and diplomacy ran side by side. After Sangju, Konishi released a captured Korean interpreter, Gyeong Eung-sun, with letters asking that the official Yi Deok-hyeong meet him at Chungju on the 28th if Joseon wanted to talk. Yi set out, but on hearing that Chungju had fallen he sent Gyeong ahead; Gyeong was killed by Katō Kiyomasa’s men, and Yi turned back. The war would continue for six more years.

No single cause explains the defeat, and the sources point to several. The first was the army itself. Sin Rip’s men had been gathered in days: archers and other volunteers from the capital, men from nearby districts and, according to Jingbirok, troops from Chungcheong counties. Joseon had enjoyed a long peace, and its military registers, as Yi Il discovered, were full of men who could not or would not fight. Yi Il’s own verdict at the pass, “untrained people against an invincible enemy”, applied to Sin Rip’s army too.

The second was information. At Sangju Yi Il executed a man who warned of the enemy; at Chungju Sin Rip executed the officer who reported that the Japanese had crossed Joryeong, and his scouts were cut off. In both battles the Japanese arrived before the Korean commander knew where they were, and in both they came from more than one direction at once.

The third was weapons and experience. The Japanese armies had been formed in more than a century of civil war in Japan, and they used their arquebuses together with spears and swords. In the Korean accounts their gunfire did damage while Korean archery failed: at Sangju, Jingbirok says, the Korean arrows fell after a few dozen paces, and the Revised Annals say the frightened soldiers could not draw their bows fully. Modern reconstructions add that the arquebusiers fired from beyond the range of Korean bows. Sin Rip’s faith in a cavalry charge reflected his successes against Jurchen raiders in the north, but the paddy fields at Tangeumdae took away the speed his horsemen needed, and the rivers behind left no room to fall back and regroup.

Yu Seong-ryong, writing after the war, did not blame the generals alone. He thought the court’s plan of sending Sin Rip to support Yi Il was sound; what went wrong, in his view, was that the naval and army commanders of Gyeongsang fled or held back, so that the Japanese “marched day and night across hundreds of li of empty land” and reached Sangju within ten days, before the two generals could join forces. A literary work of 1611, Hwang Jung-yun’s Dalcheon mongyurok, went further and blamed a military system that left the country without trained soldiers.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not cross to Korea himself. He left Kyoto at the end of the third month and reached his new headquarters at Nagoya castle, on the coast of Hizen in Kyushu, on the 25th day of the fourth month of the Japanese calendar (5 June 1592), two days before Tangeumdae. From there he sent orders to his commanders across the strait.

Far to the west, the Ming empire was fighting another war. In March 1592 the garrison of Ningxia, on the frontier facing the Mongols, had mutinied, and from mid-May a Ming army besieged the city. On 1 June, less than a week before Tangeumdae, the rebels and some 2,000 Mongol horsemen attacked the besiegers and were driven off by artillery. After the war in Korea began, the Ming court urged its generals to finish the siege quickly. This connection is documented: the Ningxia campaign tied down the Ming army in 1592, and when the city fell in October its commander Li Rusong and many of his troops were sent to Korea.

Elsewhere, events of the same year had nothing to do with Korea and are mentioned only to set the scene. On 3 March 1592 Queen Elizabeth I of England had granted a royal charter founding Trinity College Dublin, the sole college of the University of Dublin, Ireland’s oldest university.

The critical tradition begins with two closely related texts. In Jingbirok, Yu Seong-ryong writes that “afterwards the Ming general Li Rusong, pursuing the enemy across Joryeong, sighed: ‘With such a strong position, he did not know to hold it. General Sin can be called a man without strategy.’” The Revised Annals repeat the anecdote almost word for word. Yu adds his own verdict: Sin Rip, “though quick and bold and famous in his day, was not strong in planning”, and he quotes an old saying that “a general who does not understand war hands his country to the enemy”. Kim Yeo-mul’s advice to hold the pass, Yi Jong-jang’s opposition to the plan, the wet ground at Tangeumdae and the lack of scouting all support this view.

There are also arguments on the other side. Sin Rip’s own reason, as the Revised Annals report it, was that his strength lay in cavalry and that horses could not be used in the pass. His men were largely untrained and might have melted away in the hills, as the Gyeongsang troops at Daegu had done. Time was also short: only about two days separated Yi Il’s defeat at Sangju, conventionally dated to the 25th, and the Japanese crossing of Joryeong on the 27th, although how much time Sin Rip had in all to prepare the pass is uncertain, since Byeon Gi had been ordered to guard it earlier. English-language accounts following Hawley say that Yi Il’s arrival forced Sin Rip to abandon a plan to fortify it. In a 2013 study the historian Yi Sang-hun compared four possible battlefields, Joryeong, Danwol station, Chungju fortress and Tangeumdae, and argued that Tangeumdae, which limited the Japanese approach, could make use of the wind against their arquebuses and suited cavalry, was the best choice in the circumstances. English Wikipedia’s article on Sin Rip also mentions a suggestion by unnamed “modern analysts” that the river at his back was meant to stop raw troops from fleeing; it cites no specific source for it.

Neither side can be proved. A successful stand at Joryeong might have delayed the First Division, but the Japanese were advancing on several roads, including a western route through Chungcheong, and a delay is not the same as a victory; equally, the open ground did not bring the advantages Sin Rip expected. The sources that condemn him also have their own perspective: Yu was one of the leading ministers responsible for the war effort, writing a book of reflection and warning, and the Revised Annals were compiled by a later faction and borrowed heavily from Jingbirok. A balanced judgement is that the choice of battlefield mattered, but that the defeat also grew out of an unprepared army, a failure of intelligence and a Japanese army far more experienced in war.

The debate itself began early. In 1600 and 1611, eight and nineteen years after the battle, two writers, Yun Gye-seon and Hwang Jung-yun, each wrote a dream narrative called Dalcheon mongyurok (“Record of a dream journey at the Dalcheon”). In Hwang’s version the ghost of Sin Rip asks how the world judges him; told that people blame his lack of wisdom, he answers that the river-backed line showed his resolve to fight to the death and that it was the lack of trained soldiers that made him a defeated general.

The name Tangeumdae (彈琴臺) means “terrace where the zither was played”. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, it comes from a tradition about Ureuk, a musician from the Gaya confederacy who went over to Silla in the sixth century. King Jinheung, moved by his music, let him live at Chungju, where he taught the gayageum, song and dance to pupils and in his free time sat on a rock and played; the hill was named after that. The story belongs to local tradition rather than to the records of 1592, but it explains why the site honours both a musician and a general.

Sin Rip was posthumously made chief state councillor and given the title Chungjang. Kim Yeo-mul received the posthumous title Jangui in 1788, and in the reign of King Sunjo sacrifices were offered for him, Sin Rip and others who had died at the old site by the Dalcheon. Their families also stayed prominent: Kim Yeo-mul’s son Kim Ryu later became chief state councillor, and Sin Rip’s son Sin Gyeong-jin took part in the coup of 1623 that put King Injo on the throne.

Tangeumdae was designated a provincial monument of North Chungcheong in 1976 and a national Scenic Site (myeongseung) in 2008. On the hill stand a memorial to Sin Rip’s battle (1978), a stele for Ureuk (1977) and a pavilion over a stele honouring Sin Rip’s death. Local tradition points to a cliff called Yeoldudae as the place where he leapt into the river; Korean Wikipedia notes that the written records name a stretch of the river instead. His tomb is in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province.

The fullest Korean accounts are Yu Seong-ryong’s Jingbirok, written after the war by the chief minister of the time, and the Revised Annals of King Seonjo (Seonjo sujeong sillok), compiled in the 1640s and completed in 1657. They are not independent witnesses: many passages of the Revised Annals on the first weeks of the war, such as the list of commanders sent south and the Li Rusong anecdote, follow Jingbirok almost word for word, while adding details such as Kim Yeo-mul’s advice and the attack from the town. The original Annals of King Seonjo are brief for these weeks. Later works such as the compilation Yeollyeosil gisul and the war chronicle Nanjung japrok add further details, some of them hard to check.

Dates need care. Korea and Japan both used lunisolar calendars, but their calendars could differ by a day; the Korean Wikipedia article on the battle gives the 28th in the Korean calendar and the 27th in the Japanese one. The Gregorian dates used here were converted with the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute table. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s article on the battle puts Sin Rip’s visit to Joryeong on the 24th and his deployment at Tangeumdae on the 26th, while its article on Sangju dates both Yi Il’s arrival and the battle to the 23rd; its table of battles gives the 24th and most accounts the 25th.

Numbers vary widely. For the Korean army, the Revised Annals say 8,000; Jingbirok says more than 8,000 Chungcheong troops joined Sin Rip at Chungju; Korean Wikipedia adds the two to reach a maximum of 16,000, but this is a speculative estimate: the Revised Annals’ 8,000 already includes troops collected from nearby districts, so the two figures may partly describe the same men. Korean Wikipedia treats much larger figures in some later works as exaggerations. For the Japanese, the figure of about 18,700 for the First Division comes from modern tables of Hideyoshi’s order of battle. Losses are even less certain: the Japanese claims of about 3,000 heads and several hundred prisoners, the figure of about 8,000 dead attributed by Korean Wikipedia to the Jesuit Luís Fróis, and English Wikipedia’s “about 150” Japanese casualties are not independently established by the sources examined here.

Even Sin Rip’s death is told in more than one way. The Korean records agree that he died in or by the river, the Revised Annals saying that he leapt in and Jingbirok that he drowned, and this is the tradition followed here. Korean Wikipedia, however, quotes a later Japanese history, Rai San’yō’s Nihon gaishi, as saying he was beheaded, and cites Fróis for a story that a young Japanese warrior captured and beheaded a senior Korean commander who refused to be spared; a folk tale recorded in Yecheon in 1984 also has him beheaded. English Wikipedia, following Hawley, has him escape the battlefield and drown himself nearby. Some episodes in English narratives, such as Katō Kiyomasa deliberately holding back to let Konishi fail, rest on Japanese and missionary sources that are not reflected in the Korean records and should be treated with caution.