Nurhaci

Nurhaci was a chief of the Jianzhou Jurchens, a people living in the hills and valleys north of the Yalu River, in what is now Liaoning province in north-east China. Born in 1559, he spent forty years turning a quarrelsome world of small Jurchen chiefdoms into a single state with its own script, army organisation and khan, and in his last decade he took Liaodong from Ming China. His son Hong Taiji renamed the people Manchu (1635) and the state Qing (1636), and the Qing went on to rule China from 1644 to 1912.

Nurhaci matters for Korean history too. His homeland bordered Joseon along the Yalu and Tumen rivers. During the Imjin War Jianzhou envoys proposed, through the Ming, that his troops fight the Japanese. Nurhaci received a Joseon envoy in 1596, wrote to King Gwanghaegun in 1618, and in 1619 defeated a Joseon army that the Ming had summoned to fight him. The sections below follow his life from 1583 to 1626, including the Battle of Sarhu, and then ask how a chief with a few suits of armour came to shake the Ming.

Dates in this article are Gregorian, converted from the lunar calendars of the Ming, Qing and Joseon records, which in this period agreed on the months; lunar dates are marked as such.

Ming writers divided the Jurchens into three groups: the Jianzhou Jurchens nearest Liaodong and Korea, the Haixi Jurchens further north (the four states of Hada, Hoifa, Ula and Yehe, called the Hulun in Qing sources) and the “Wild” Jurchens of the far north-east. The Ming ruled them indirectly: chiefs received titles and seals as heads of nominal “guards” (the Jianzhou Guard dates from 1403) and patents (chishu) that let them bring tribute and trade. Horse markets outside frontier towns such as Kaiyuan, Fushun and Qinghe bought Jurchen horses, furs and ginseng.

For more than twenty years the frontier was held by Li Chengliang, regional commander of Liaodong in 1570–1591 and 1601–1608, who played chiefs against one another. The Ming History says his family came from Korea; his son Li Rusong retook Pyongyang from the Japanese in 1593. A Ming private history says Nurhaci served Li with great deference and that Li handed him the tribes he had subdued; the official Ming History, compiled under the Qing, leaves Nurhaci out of Li’s biography altogether.

Even in 1596 the seal on Nurhaci’s letters read “Seal of the Jianzhou Left Guard”, a Ming office. His rise took place inside the Ming frontier system before it turned against it.

In the spring of 1583 Li Chengliang attacked the fort of Gure, held by the chief Atai, and Nurhaci’s grandfather Giocangga and father Taksi died in the attack. The Qing records, written after the dynasty was founded, say that a rival chief, Nikan Wailan, incited the Ming troops, that the two men had gone into the fort to bring out Giocangga’s granddaughter, and that the Ming admitted a mistaken killing and gave Nurhaci thirty patents and thirty horses. The Ming History reports only Li’s victory and some 2,300 heads taken; a Ming memorial of 1619 says Li had used the two men as guides and killed them along with Atai’s people.

The Qing’s first Veritable Record of the founder, completed in 1636, then says that Nurhaci, wishing to avenge his grandfather and father, “had only thirteen suits of armour left” and raised troops in the 5th lunar month of 1583 (from 20 June), at the age of 25. A later revision says the armour was his father’s. Qing records also say his first attack, on Nikan Wailan’s town of Turun, was made with fewer than a hundred men.

There is no independent contemporary witness to the thirteen suits of armour, and the figure does not mean thirteen horsemen. It is best read as the way the Qing chose to remember their beginning: a small, wronged family that grew by its own strength. Thirty-five years later, the first of Nurhaci’s Seven Grievances against the Ming would again be the killing of his father and grandfather.

Over the next years Nurhaci brought the Jianzhou chiefs under his control. In 1587 he built the walled town of Fe Ala in the hills of the upper Suksuhu valley, and in 1589 the Ming made him a commander-assistant (dudu qianshi). The Haixi states watched his growth with alarm. According to the Qing records, in the autumn of 1593 (9th lunar month) a coalition of nine peoples led by Yehe, with Hada, Ula, Hoifa and the Khorchin Mongols, marched on him by three roads. The Qing records give their strength as 30,000; a Ming history, which dates the battle to 1594, says 70,000 to 80,000.

The battle was fought near Gure Mountain, where the valleys narrow. The Qing account says Nurhaci told his commanders that wounding one or two of the enemy leaders would make the rest flee; when the Yehe chief Bujai’s horse fell, Bujai was killed and the coalition broke. Bujantai of Ula was captured, or, as the Joseon envoy Sin Chung-il heard two years later, surrendered. After this, Sin was told, “near and distant tribes came over one after another”.

Nurhaci then took the Hulun states one by one: Hada fell on 25 October 1599 and was absorbed in 1601; Hoifa on 3 November 1607; Ula on 8 March 1613, when its chief Bujantai fled to Yehe; Yehe, protected by Ming troops, held out until September 1619. In 1603 he moved his seat a few kilometres north to Hetu Ala; a Joseon report of that year describes the new fortress, its stockade not yet finished.

Korea heard of Nurhaci early. On 22 August 1589 the army commander of Pyeongan Province reported what Jurchen defectors said: “Noeulgajeok calls himself king (wang).” In the autumn of 1592, with the Japanese in Pyongyang, the Ming Ministry of War passed on a proposal from Jianzhou tribute envoys: Nurhaci had 30,000–40,000 horsemen and 40,000–50,000 foot soldiers, and the envoys expected him to agree to cross the frozen river in winter and attack the Japanese. The ministry itself doubted the Jurchens, and Joseon declined; minister Yun Du-su said that if it were true, “our country will perish”. Whether Nurhaci himself had authorised the proposal is not known, and no record has been found of an offer made to Joseon directly.

In the winter of 1595–96, after a Joseon official at Wiwon killed Jurchens who had crossed to dig ginseng, the court sent the officer Sin Chung-il to Fe Ala. He crossed the frozen Yalu at Manpo on 21 January 1596, passed the old Goguryeo capital at Ji’an and reached Nurhaci’s house on 27 January. His report and route map, the Geonju gijeong dogi, give the earliest eyewitness picture of Nurhaci: walls of stone and earth around a stockaded house, some 150 commanders, no one who could read. Nurhaci was “sturdy, with a straight, large nose and a long, firm face”; at the New Year feast he played the lute and said that “the two countries will be as one country”. King Seonjo, reading the report, said Joseon was caught between great enemies to the south and north.

In 1601 Nurhaci asked for a Joseon appointment and was told he already held a Ming title. In the spring of 1607 his brother Šurhaci and his sons, sent to bring over Jurchens on the lower Tumen, defeated an Ula army at Ogalam near Jongseong and rode past the walls of Gyeongwon. The revised Seonjo annals say they passed through Joseon’s frontier “as if through an empty land”; a historian’s comment in the Seonjo annals called Ula a vicious dog and Nurhaci a tiger hiding in the mountains.

In 1596 Sin Chung-il noted that no one around Nurhaci could read. Three years later, in the 2nd lunar month of 1599, the Qing records say Nurhaci ordered his scholars Erdeni and G’ag’ai to write the Jurchen language in Mongolian letters. When they objected that they did not know how, he answered: write the letter a with the letter ma below it, and is that not ama, “father”? This was the first form of the Manchu script; in 1632 Dahai added dots and circles to remove its ambiguities. A written language allowed laws, orders and records in the rulers’ own tongue; the Manchu archives of Nurhaci’s reign survive because of it.

The Qing records also say that in 1601 Nurhaci set up companies (niru, “arrow”) of 300 men, each under a company chief, replacing the old hunting parties organised by clan and village. Under the year 1615 they describe the full system: five companies to a jalan, five jalan to a gūsa, or banner; four banners, yellow, red, blue and white, doubled to eight by adding bordered flags. Later Qing compendia date the first four banners to 1601 and some put the eight in 1614. Sin Chung-il had already seen horsemen with flags of five colours in 1596.

The banners were more than an army. Every family was registered in a company, which raised soldiers, farmed land and received booty. Historians such as Mark Elliott see the banners as the institution that held the conquest elite together and later defined who was Manchu; Mongol and Han banners were added under Hong Taiji in the 1630s and 1640s.

On 17 February 1616, the first day of the lunar year, Nurhaci was proclaimed khan at Hetu Ala, aged 58 by East Asian reckoning. The Qing records say his sons and officials, standing by banner, presented a memorial, that he was given a title meaning “bright emperor who nourishes the nations” and that the era was named Tianming, “mandate of Heaven”; Qing chronology counts his reign in Tianming years.

The state is usually called Later Jin (後金), after the Jurchen Jin dynasty of the twelfth century; the Manchu form is sometimes given as Amaga Aisin gurun. But the enthronement entries give no state name, and Nurhaci’s seal reads “seal of the khan of the Jin state, mandated by Heaven” (abkai fulingga aisin gurun han i doron). Other titles circulated too: a Ming record of 1618 quotes him as “khan of the state of Jianzhou”, and the Joseon annals render the heading of a letter received in 1619 as “Later Jin khan”, which need not reproduce the original Manchu wording. Surveying more than a hundred official uses, Lu Zhengheng and Huang Yi-long concluded that the state called itself simply Jin, and argued that Tianming was not a reign name in the Chinese sense; this article uses the familiar names.

Neither Joseon nor the Ming seems to have registered the enthronement at once. No entry announcing it has been found in the Joseon annals for 1616–17; in 1619 a Ming official cited a Joseon report that Nurhaci had “dared to found a state, change the era and call himself ‘We’”.

While Nurhaci built his state, the Ming government was faltering. From the late 1580s the Wanli Emperor largely abandoned regular court audiences, and vacancies in the ministries and censorate went unfilled for years. The Ming History says the war in Korea, “eight years from start to finish”, cost more than seven million taels of silver; other entries give 7.8 million. To raise money the emperor sent palace eunuchs to collect mining and commercial taxes; in Liaodong the eunuch Gao Huai’s exactions provoked mutinies in 1608.

The frontier was also changing. Li Chengliang was dismissed in 1591, and in his absence Liaodong’s commanders changed often. In 1606, back in command, he and the governors abandoned the six forts around Kuandian as too exposed and drove the settlers back inside the frontier: the Ming History gives over 64,000 households, the Dongyi kaolüe over 60,000 people; a Ming critic later called it “not abandoning land but presenting it”. Nurhaci’s people moved into the empty land.

Historians differ on how much the Imjin War itself weakened the Ming in Liaodong. But the chronology is clear: while Ming armies and silver were committed to Korea, from 1592 to 1598, Nurhaci defeated the coalition at Gure Mountain and drew neighbouring tribes to him, and the Ming did little to stop him; his conquest of the Hulun states began with Hada in 1599.

On 7 May 1618 Nurhaci announced Seven Grievances against the Ming to Heaven and marched with 20,000 men. In the Qing records the Ming had killed his father and grandfather without cause, broken a sworn border agreement to protect Yehe, made him execute ten men over a border killing, let Yehe give his betrothed to the Mongols, driven his people from their fields at Chaihe, Sancha and Fu’an before harvest, insulted him on Yehe’s word and forced him to restore Hada. The wording survives only in later Qing texts, but a document of this kind existed in 1618: a Ming compilation records that in June (the intercalary 4th month) Nurhaci sent released Chinese captives with a letter in which he called himself “khan of the state of Jianzhou” and set out “seven grievances”, and a Joseon record of July summarises a letter with the same theme.

Fushun fell on 9 May. Ming records say Jurchens announced that they were coming to a great market and broke in when merchants came out to trade; the Qing records say a letter persuaded the Ming officer Li Yongfang to surrender as the walls were scaled. A relief army of about 10,000 under Zhang Chengyin, regional commander of Guangning, was destroyed on 15 May; the Ming History says some ten thousand died and that “the whole court was shocked”. In September the fort of Qinghe fell too.

Joseon was drawn in at once. On 4 June a dispatch from the Ming governor of Liaodong asking Joseon to join an attack reached the court, and on 9 August the new Ming military commissioner, Yang Hao, demanded 10,000 picked troops. Nurhaci also wrote: on 7 July twelve Jurchen horsemen appeared across the Yalu at Manpo with a letter addressed “to be opened by the King of Joseon”, saying that Joseon had no grievance against their master and should guard its own land and not raise troops.

King Gwanghaegun, enthroned in 1608 and invested by the Ming in 1609 (the interpreter at the ceremony was Gang Hong-rip), had watched the north closely. In 1614 a frontier commander told him that Nurhaci’s men were “not to be compared with an ordinary tribe; their commands are strict and their weapons fine”. In 1618 the king spoke of loyalty to the Ming but argued against sending troops: the request came from the Liaodong governor, “not from the Son of Heaven” (16 June); Nurhaci was “truly a formidable enemy under heaven”, nothing like the Jianzhou chiefs Joseon had once defeated (22 June); and the troops should wait at Uiju on the Yalu.

His ministers agreed that Joseon’s soldiers were weak — the Left State Councillor Han Hyo-sun said they were all farmers and “not one is fit for use” — but argued that the debt of the Imjin War, when the Ming had saved Korea, made refusal impossible. After Yang Hao’s demand Joseon gave way. On 23 August 1618 it sent the Ming a roster of 10,000 men: 3,500 musketeers, 3,500 archers and 3,000 close-combat soldiers (salsu; the surviving text repeats “archers” here by a copying slip), under the civil official Gang Hong-rip as commander-in-chief and Kim Gyeong-seo as his deputy. On 7 September Gwanghaegun still refused to send more men deep into Jurchen land, calling it “a matter of the survival of the state”.

Gwanghaegun’s policy is often called “neutral diplomacy”, but the label is a modern interpretation and disputed: some historians praise his realism, others argue that neutrality was impossible within the Ming-centred order. By the end of 1618 Joseon was committed to a war it did not want.

Yang Hao planned to end the war in one stroke. Four columns were to converge on Hetu Ala: Du Song from Fushun in the west, Ma Lin from the Kaiyuan–Tieling area in the north with Yehe allies, Li Rubai from Qinghe in the south and Liu Ting from Kuandian in the east with the Joseon army. The Ming proclaimed 470,000 men; the Qing records say Yang Hao had 200,000; a Ming compilation of contemporary reports counts 88,550 officers and men, not counting the Koreans. Heavy snow delayed the start, and the columns left their passes days apart: Liu Ting on 9 April, Ma Lin on 12 April, Du Song on the afternoon of 13 April and Li Rubai on 14 April.

Nurhaci judged that the southern movements were a feint and that the main army was coming from Fushun, and concentrated against it. On 14 April Du Song crossed the Hun River, so deep and fast that his wagons and cannon were left behind, and divided his army: one camp on the hill of Sarhu, near where the Hun and Suksuhu meet, while he attacked the cliff of Jilin (Girin hada) at Jaifiyan, where Jurchen labourers guarded by 400 horsemen were building a fort. Late in the day Nurhaci arrived, threw the troops of six of his eight banners against the Sarhu camp and broke it, then turned on Du Song, who was killed. The Qing records say Ming weapons and bodies floated down the Hun “like ice breaking up”. The valley is now under the Dahuofang reservoir, built in the 1950s.

On 15 April the Jurchens turned north and routed Ma Lin at Shanggiyan Hada; Ma escaped, but his supervising official Pan Zongyan was killed. Li Rubai was ordered back by Yang Hao and withdrew almost without fighting, which later brought accusations against him. Nurhaci’s army moved on short interior lines while the Ming columns came separately over the mountains. The famous saying “however many roads you come by, I go by one” is not in the Qing records; it is found in later Ming writings.

The eastern column met the Jurchens last. On 17 April Liu Ting’s vanguard, strung out and plundering villages after scouts reported no enemy ahead, was attacked at Abdari ridge (Abudali gang): the Qing records say Hong Taiji struck from higher ground and Daišan from the flank, and the two rear Ming camps were overrun before they could form up. Liu Ting was killed. Some Ming sources, the Ming History and the later Draft History of Qing add that the Jurchens used Du Song’s banners and uniforms to deceive him; the early Manzhou shilu does not.

About 13,000 Joseon soldiers crossed the Yalu around Changseong between 3 and 7 April 1619, according to the diary of Yi Min-hwan, a staff officer with Gang Hong-rip. Liu Ting’s camp had no heavy guns; he told Gang that Yang Hao “must want me dead” and that his own troops numbered no more than 10,000. The march over snowy passes went badly: on 12 April Gang reported that the ten days’ rations each man had carried were gone, and Ming officers accused the Koreans of dragging their feet.

On 17 April the Joseon army reached Bucha (Fuca), a plain among hills about 60 li from Hetu Ala. Gang ordered his divisions onto high ground, but Kim Eung-ha’s left division had already camped on the plain behind portable barriers. Jurchen cavalry enveloped it, and the right division came down to join it. Every account mentions wind: the Joseon annals say a north-west wind blew away the powder so that the guns could not be used; the Qing records say the gun smoke blew back on the Korean lines; Yi Min-hwan, watching from the centre, wrote that after one volley the horsemen were inside before the guns could be reloaded. Both divisions were destroyed in moments.

Kim Eung-ha died fighting. The Joseon annals say he leaned against a tree shooting with three bows and kept hold of his bow after a spear pierced his chest, and that the Jurchens called him “the general who leaned on the willow”; later writings added that he fought on with his sword and bare hands. Yi Min-hwan, who was there, wrote only that he “heard afterwards” that Kim had fought to the death.

The hungry centre division was left on its hill. Yi Min-hwan says the Jurchens called for an interpreter and said they had no quarrel with Korea; the deputy commander Kim Gyeong-seo went to their camp, and on 18 April Gang Hong-rip followed and the army laid down its arms. The Qing records say instead that Gang lowered his flags and sent word first that “this coming was not our wish”; who opened the talks cannot be settled. The Ming officer Qiao Yiqi, who had sheltered with the Koreans, threw himself from a cliff. Joseon losses are uncertain: the annals later speak of eight to nine thousand dead at Bucha, the Qing records of 5,000 who surrendered.

A long tradition holds that Gwanghaegun secretly told Gang Hong-rip to watch events and choose his side, and the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s entry on the battle reports it. The written instructions say less. On 17 March 1619 the king noted that although Joseon troops sent forward in January had returned without meeting the enemy, the Jurchens would bear a grudge, so the upper Yalu must be guarded; on 18 March, rebuking Gang for detaching 400 musketeers to the Ming camp, he told him “not simply to follow the Ming generals’ words, but to strive only to stand where he cannot be defeated”. Neither is an order to surrender.

After the battle Gang reported (15 May 1619) that on the march he had secretly told the Jurchens through an interpreter that Joseon would stay behind the Ming lines and avoid battle; the Border Defence Council condemned him. Gwanghaegun asked his ministers whether Joseon could resist this enemy at all and defended Gang’s secret reports from captivity. The explicit charge of a secret order comes from his enemies: the proclamation deposing him in April 1623 said he had “secretly instructed the commander to watch events and choose his side”, and the editors of his annals, working after the coup, added that the surrender had been planned.

Historians remain divided. Some, following Yi Byeong-do, see a deliberate policy of avoiding war with Nurhaci; Oh Hang-nyeong thinks that, judging from the circumstances, a secret order probably existed, but criticises Gwanghaegun’s policy as opportunism; Jang Jeong-su emphasises back-channel negotiations with the Later Jin involving the Border Defence Council and how their character changed, rather than a single royal order. Gang Hong-rip remained a captive until 1627, when he returned with the Later Jin army that invaded Joseon; he died that September.

Sarhu opened Liaodong. Kaiyuan fell on 26 July 1619 and Tieling on 3 September; on 29 September Yehe was destroyed and its chiefs Gintaisi and Buyanggū were put to death. Nurhaci moved west towards the Ming, to a new fort at Jaifiyan in 1619 and to Sarhu in 1620. In May 1621 he took Shenyang (4 May) and, after a two-day battle, Liaoyang, the Ming capital of Liaodong (11–12 May); the military commissioner Yuan Yingtai burned himself to death in a gate tower. Liaoyang became Nurhaci’s capital.

In March 1622 he crossed the Liao River, defeated a Ming army at Xiping and entered Guangning on 5 March as its officials fled to Shanhai Pass. That year he ordered a new walled city built a few kilometres east of Liaoyang, Dongjing, the “Eastern Capital”. On 10 April 1625 he moved again, to Shenyang, which he called a crossroads from which roads ran west to the Ming, north to the Mongols and south to Joseon.

Ruling Liaodong meant ruling a large Han Chinese population; after a revolt in 1623 Nurhaci turned from concessions to discrimination and killings. Ming resistance continued near Korea: in 1621 Mao Wenlong took Zhenjiang near the Yalu mouth, Nurhaci’s troops pursued him into Joseon territory in December, and he later based himself on Ka Island off Cheolsan, drawing Joseon deeper into the conflict.

Early in 1626, hearing that the Ming had pulled back most of its forces behind Shanhai Pass, Nurhaci crossed the Liao River again. On 19 February he reached Ningyuan, held by Yuan Chonghuan, who refused to surrender. Attacks on 20 and 21 February failed against a garrison firing cannon and incendiaries from the walls, including large Western-style guns; on 22 February his troops destroyed the Ming grain depot on Juehua Island instead. He was back in Shenyang on 6 March. The Qing records say that “since the age of 25 he had won every battle and taken every city he attacked; only Ningyuan he could not take”, and that he returned unhappy.

A widespread story says he was wounded by cannon fire at Ningyuan and died of it. The evidence is thin: the Ming writer Zhang Dai says a shot hit the yellow tent and wounded a “subordinate prince”, which some historians take to mean Nurhaci, while others note that in late April 1626 he led a campaign against the Khalkha Mongols in person. The Qing records say only that he fell ill in September, went to the hot springs at Qinghe and died on 30 September 1626 at Aiji Fort, about 40 li from Shenyang, while returning by boat. The next day his widow Lady Abahai, mother of Dorgon, was made to follow him in death.

Nurhaci was buried in the Fuling tomb east of Shenyang. His eighth son Hong Taiji was chosen khan.

The answer begins inside the Ming system. Nurhaci rose as a Ming-titled chief who held trade patents and used the frontier markets, and, according to a Ming private history, served Li Chengliang; the patents and titles brought him wealth and standing over rivals. The Ming’s habit of managing the Jurchens by dividing them, and by backing one chief against another, let him absorb his neighbours one at a time, while Ming attention and silver were drawn to Korea in the 1590s and to troubles at court.

Second, he turned a confederation into a state. Joseon visitors in 1596 saw a chief with 150 commanders and no one who could write; twenty years later he had a script, written orders, a registered population organised in companies and banners, and a khan’s title. The banners turned scattered clans into a disciplined army that could move fast and concentrate, and the script and records gave the new state a memory and a law of its own.

Third, the Ming was weakening from within. An emperor who largely abandoned regular audiences, unfilled offices, the cost of the wars of the 1590s, eunuch tax collectors and mutinies in Liaodong, and the withdrawal from Kuandian in 1606 all reduced the frontier’s ability to respond. When Nurhaci struck in 1618, a Joseon frontier commander and Gwanghaegun had already judged him stronger than any Jurchen chief they knew.

Finally, he won the decisive battles: Fushun and Qinghe in 1618 showed that Ming forts could fall; at Sarhu in 1619 he beat a divided offensive column by column; in 1621 he took Shenyang and Liaoyang. The thirteen suits of armour are a Qing story, but the shaking of the Ming was real: within three years of declaring war he held Liaodong east of the Liao River, and Joseon was caught between its old protector and a new power on the Yalu.

Hong Taiji continued his father’s war. In 1627 the Later Jin invaded Joseon (the Jeongmyo War), justifying it partly by Mao Wenlong’s presence on Ka Island, and imposed a “brotherly” relationship. In 1635 he renamed the Jurchens “Manchu”, and in 1636 he proclaimed the Great Qing; that winter the Qing invaded Joseon again and forced it to break with the Ming. In 1644 the Qing entered Beijing.

The Qing remembered Nurhaci as their founder, Taizu, in Veritable Records revised under later emperors; much of his story, from the thirteen suits of armour to the grievances, comes from them. In Korea he is remembered through Sin Chung-il’s visit, the defeat at Bucha and the long argument over Gwanghaegun’s choices.

The Qing accounts of Nurhaci were written after he became a founder to be honoured. The first Veritable Record (1636) and the illustrated Manzhou shilu already contain the thirteen suits of armour, the Ming’s “mistaken” killing of his father and grandfather and the providential wind at Bucha; later revisions polished his words and changed names and numbers. The Manchu archives (Manwen laodang) are closer to events but were not consulted directly for this article.

Ming sources have their own interests. Commanders blamed one another after Sarhu, and the Ming History, compiled under the Qing, left Nurhaci out of Li Chengliang’s life, draws on Qing-derived narratives for the war and its imperial annals misdate Liu Ting’s death to the day corresponding to 20 April. Ming-side reports and later writings are the source of stories such as the market trick at Fushun, the disguise at Abdari ridge and the “one road” saying.

Korean sources include eyewitnesses: Sin Chung-il’s report of 1596 and Yi Min-hwan’s diary of the campaign and his captivity. But Sin wrote as a spy, Yi revised his diary after returning and had his conduct to defend, and the Gwanghaegun annals were compiled by the king’s opponents, whose comments must be separated from the documents they preserve. Numbers in all three traditions, from the 470,000 Ming soldiers to the Joseon dead, are claims rather than counts.