Yi dynasty

The Yi dynasty (Menghean: 대의 / 大義 Dae Yi or 의조 / 義朝 Yi Jo) was the ruling dynasty of Menghe between the mid-13th and early 16th centuries, spanning a total of 258 years. It was established in 1253 by Emperor Yi Taejo, who overthrew the corrupt and declining Sŭng dynasty and instituted a new social order based on Chŏndoism. Within Menghe, the Yi dynasty is widely remembered as a military, technological, and economic golden age, marking the apex of Menghean prosperity and strength.

At various times during this period, the Yi armed forces counted over one million men, and from 1330 onward the Yi navy enjoyed supremacy over the South Menghe Sea. The development of early gunpowder-based weapons gave Yi forces an additional edge over their opponents. By the beginning of the 15th century, Menghe had reached its greatest territorial extent, stretching deep into what are now Dzhungestan, Innominada, Polvokia, and Maverica. Even Themiclesia was temporarily brought into Menghe's orbit as a high-ranking tribute state after General Cho Myŏng-wŏn besieged Kien-k'ang in 1385.

The subjugation of nomadic bandits, pirates, and warring coastal states brought about a "Pax Mengheana" which allowed for the flourishing of trade in the eastern hemisphere. The Yi dynasty sat at the center of a vast maritime trading network which reached as far as Rajamaa, Qusayn, Dayashina, and eastern Meridia, involving a previously unprecedented flow of luxury goods. This was accompanied by major improvements in Menghe's domestic economy, including a doubling in population, large investments in water management infrastructure, and the early emergence of commercialized household production for urban markets. Some prominent historians and political economists have argued that by 1500, Menghe was on the brink of an "industrious revolution" which might have led to its emergence as a non-Western trading hegemon.

Though it exhibited some signs of domestic political decay, the Yi dynasty was ultimately toppled by the Menghean Black Plague, which may have been brought to the country by rats on Sylvan trade ships. In the course of five years, half of Menghe's population, including nearly the entire royal family, was wiped out, ushering in a major political, social, and economic collapse. The State of Suk, which largely escaped the plague's effects, would later establish the Myŏn dynasty in 1528, but the period after the fall of the Yi dynasty would still be remembered as the Four Dark Centuries.

Names and symbols

In Menghean-language usage, Yi Jo (의조 / 義朝) refers to the Yi dynasty as a period in time or as a succession of rulers, while Dae Yi (대의 / 大義) refers to the Yi dynasty as a political entity. The full, formal name for the regime, as used in contemporary proclamations and documents, would be Dae Yi Jeguk (대의 제국 / 大義帝國), or "Great Yi Empire." The country itself was still known as Menghe (멩국/ 孟國, Mengguk) as a shorthand or abbreviated form, though Jungguk (중국 / 中國), literally "Middle Kingdom," also appears in many writings of the time, due to the belief that Menghe occupied the center of a flat, square world.

Though his rebellion originated in the province of Donghae, Emperor Taejo of Yi chose to name it the Yi dynasty, using the Mengja character 義 (meaning "proper conduct" or "righteousness"). Righteousness is one of the Five Virtues in Chŏndoism, referring to a knowledge of the correct path to uphold order in the universe and a willingness to take action to do so. A highly devoted follower of the still-young Chŏndo movement, Taejo was motivated by a desire to end the corruption and decadence of the late Sŭng court, which in his view resulted from the poor moral example set by its rulers.

Some paintings show Yi dynasty soldiers and officials walking or marching under a banner bearing the character 義, and a few such signs and banners have been uncovered in tombs and other historical sites. Contemporary writings suggest that the purpose of this banner was to remind soldiers and officials to maintain proper discipline and follow the right moral path, and thus it would be incorrect to consider it a national flag, as no such concept existed at the time. Military forces more commonly marked their units with an azure banner edged in gold.

History

Establishment

Donghae peasant uprisings

Misrule by the late Sŭng emperors led to rising unrest among the general population, especially after court officials announced in 1248 that they would raise agricultural taxes in Donghae province, despite having failed to pay reparations for earthquake damage the year before. This news led to a series of peasant uprisings throughout the eastern region, which had already suffered prolonged hardship under Sŭng rule.

The Donghae peasant rebellions were associated with the teachings of Choe Je-u, who had criticized the immoral behavior of Sŭng officials and called for a return to morally right rule. Though Choe was sentenced to public torture and beheading in 1224, this only deepened popular resentment. Modern historians have debated the extent to which Chŏn-gyo teachings influenced rural peasants, but it is clear that they spread widely among scholars and other mid-level elites, building cross-class sympathy for the peasants' plight.

Overwhelming the divided town garrisons, which were also restless about rising food prices, the peasants were able to capture a string of minor cities in the northeast, including Ranju, Dongrŭng, and Jŏjŏn (today Hyŏngnam). With these three areas under their control, they were able to besiege the larger cities of Anchŏn and Kimhae (today Donggyŏng). Fearing that this could lead to the emergence of a rival state or dynasty, the aging Chŏljong Emperor recalled Do Wŏnho's army from the northern frontier and sent it to South Donghae in 1251 to suppress the rebellion by force.

Do Wŏn-ho's rebellion

Do Wŏn-ho was himself a native of the city of Hyangchun, which was located just south of the area of unrest and had itself suffered from a lack of maintenance effort. The General wrote in his memoirs that his heart became heavy when he saw the pitiful state of the roads and houses on the way to the city, and he flew into a rage when he saw that the provincial administrator was hosting sumptuous feasts while people begged for food in the streets. He reluctantly set off for Ranju to defeat the rebel armies there, but only with deep reservations about his mission.

According to legend, it was Ju Wŏn-ho's own soldiers who pleaded for him to intervene, entering his tent one night and insisting that he take charge of the Mandate of Heaven now that the Sŭng dynasty had lost it. Under the army structure of the time, many of Ju's soldiers were themselves Hyangchun or South Donghae natives, and it is possible that they shared his sympathy for the plight of the population there. Whatever the case, in 1252 Ju Wŏn-ho turned his army around and marched on Hyangchun, declaring that the true villain was the provincial administrator. Soldiers in the city garrison opened the gates without putting up resistance, and Ju Wŏn-ho took charge of the city, effectively starting his own rebellion. As one of his first acts, he ordered that the granaries be opened and emergency food relief distributed to the general populace, a move which gained him immense popularity.

Having consolidated his control in Hyangchun and recruited local peasants to bolster the ranks of his army, General Ju Wŏn-ho began to march on the Sŭng capital at Hwasŏng in the fall of 1252. Along the way, he captured Haeju and Yŏngjŏng, again with very little resistance. Sŭng forces were heavily demoralized by this point, and many of the soldiers had not been paid in months or years due to the illegal diversion of funds out of the treasury. In March of 1253, the rebel army reached Hwasŏng, taking the city after a short battle with the Imperial Guard. Having seized the throne, Ju Wŏn-ho declared the formal establishment of the Yi dynasty, and took on the era name Chŏndŏk, or "Heavenly Virtue." He is better remembered by the posthumous title of Taejo, or "Great Ancestor," assigned to the founder of each dynasty.

Reign of Emperor Taejo

With the fall of the capital and the capture of the royal family and upper court, the rest of the country soon fell under the control of Emperor Taejo of Yi. As an emergency measure, he demanded that the spoils captured from the court be used to finance relief projects for the general population, including the repair of dykes and canals which had flooded or become blocked up. Invoking Chŏndo philosophy as state doctrine, he also ordered that state officials maintain modest lifestyles, and instituted harsh punishments for corruption.

Yet Emperor Taejo of Yi was also concerned with the larger issue of ruling the country. He did not abolish taxation, though he did lighten it somewhat, and under his rule the conscription of corvée labor increased as part of a campaign to expand public works projects. His successor, the Chŏnsun Emperor, relocated the capital from Hwasŏng to Ryowŏn, which he renamed Junggyŏng. This entailed the construction of an enormous palace complex, as well as a wall and fortress to protect it from the nomadic incursions which still threatened this area at the time.

Culture

Language

Like the Sŭng court before it, the Yi imperial court continued to communicate in Gwanhwa (관화 / 官話), literally "dialect of officials." This was a formal language derived from Classical Menghean, with all vocabulary represented by ideographic characters, each of which represented a single syllable. Conjugation, formal/informal markers, and subject/object markers, widespread in today's Botong-ŏ ("Standard Menghean"), were absent in this form of the language, which was considered to give it a more sophisticated and pleasant-sounding quality. Yi-era Gwanhwa did, however, lack vowel tones, which were present at least as late as the early Sŭng dynasty.

One problem which Emperor Taejo faced was the need to communicate laws and decrees to the mass population. Literacy in Gwanhwa was very low, limited mainly to scholar-officials and prosperous merchants. Furthermore, many local dialects had grammatical rules that required conjugation, or "local vocabulary" which lacked a Mengja-character counterpart. These could be represented phonetically with Mengja characters, but the resulting language was clumsy and artificial. Such dialects were especially widespread in the Donghae and Haedong areas, where Taejo set up his first power base.

As a solution to these issues, Emperor Taejo ordered his scholars to compose a new system of writing "so simple that a wise man may learn it in an afternoon and a simpleton may learn it in a week." The result was the Sinmun alphabet, which fused sub-units each representing a consonant or vowel into phonetic characters that each represented a syllable. This alphabet, officially promulgated in 1264, contributed to a substantial increase in public literacy, and allowed local dialects to more easily express grammatical changes to pronunciation. Most court records and elite literature still used Gwanhwa and Mengja characters, but these could now be accompanied by simplified phonetic text in Sinmun writing or a full translation into almost any local dialect.

Religion

After coming to power, Emperor Taejo promoted Chŏndoism as a sort of state philosophy or state religion, demanding that officials conduct their lives according to the Chŏndo moral code which Choe Je-u had preached between 1205 and 1224. At the outset, he tried to discourage other traditional faiths, on the basis that sacrifices to otherworldly gods should not take precedence over one's duties in the mortal world; yet after this led to persistent opposition from scholar-officials, Taejo softened his course, tolerating Sindo and Buddhist religious practices in the court but insisting on Chŏndo primacy in official doctrine. By the 1340s, official Chŏndoism even encouraged spiritual worship as a way of fulfilling proper rites and expressing one's humility in the face of larger spiritual forces.

The Chŏnsun Emperor, successor to Emperor Taejo of Yi, created an Imperial Bureau of Rites which held supreme authority over the interpretation and promulgation of Chŏndo thought. The Imperial Bureau of Rites transformed Chŏndoism, which had emerged as a protest against authority, into a source of legitimacy, stressing the commoner's duty to maintain proper order in the universe by obeying a morally just Emperor.

As the Yi empire expanded to cover more territory in Hemithea, it absorbed new religious communities, especially Shahidism in the southwest and Tengriism on the central steppe. Emperors of the Yi dynasty extended to these religions the same protection which they had offered to Sindoism and Buddhism, even sponsoring the construction of mosques and allowing local authorities in some regions to adjudicate court cases through Sharia law. Such tolerance was contingent on reciprocal support for Yi authority, however, and like their Sŭng predecessors, the middle and late Yi Emperors did not hesitate to crack down on religious movements suspected of protesting political decisions.

Science and technology

Gunpowder

Menghean classical manuscripts refer to rudimentary gunpowder weapons as early as the Five States and Seven Fiefdoms period, when Chŏn Yŏm's army used hand-thrown "fire bombs" to attack Chŏllo and Batu fortifications during Tae's second offensive in the middle of the 5th century. Grenade-like weapons remained in use throughout the Jin and Kang dynasties, but they saw little development throughout this period, save for possible improvements to the formula of the explosive. During the late Sŭng dynasty, engineers produced illustrations of fire-lances, which contained bamboo canisters near the spearpoint and fired a shotgun-like mixture of gunpowder and clay fragments. These were single-use, short-range weapons, which could be fired once and then used as a regular spear or halberd. They were mainly used in defensive warfare, for example, to repel enemy forces attempting to climb a wall, and they were not produced in large numbers.

During Emperor Taejo's offensive against the Jŏng dynasty in the north, Yi forces began to make wider use of bronze hand cannons. The oldest surviving weapon of this type, which bears an inscription dating it to the 28th year of Chŏndŏk (1281), was 34 centimeters long and had a caliber of 2.6 centimeters. Yi-dynasty hand cannons of this type were mounted on the end of a wooden pole, much like a short spear, the end of which would be dug into the ground or slung under the crook of the shooter's arm. Illustrations from manuscripts and frescoes suggest that they were operated by a crew of three: one to aim the weapon, one to hold a burning cord or other match to a hole drilled over the chamber, and one spearman to defend the gun crew from attack. It is unclear whether the first generation of hand cannons fired shrapnel projectiles like their Sŭng predecessors, but by 1311 manuscripts refer to the use of stone balls as ammunition.

By the early 14th century, some Yi warships carried scaled-up hand cannons, usually four or five per side. At first these were only mounted on specialized "cannon ships," as the bulk of the fleet still relied on boarding tactics. Naval cannons quickly proved effective at destroying enemy warships, but they spread less quickly at sea than on land, likely due to concerns about the danger of carrying large supplies of gunpowder on every ship.

Historians have debated the extent to which the Yi dynasty's use of hand cannons and other gunpowder weapons contributed to its conquest of the central steppe and the South Hemithean Plain. Even compared to matchlock muskets, they were clumsy, inaccurate, slow-firing, and unreliable weapons, and as such Yi forces on land and at sea continued to supplement them with archers and crossbowmen. Their main effect seems to have been on morale, especially during their early introduction against forces which had not yet encountered them. Because the weapon was easy to point and shoot, a hand cannon team could be trained more quickly than an archer, but the Yi dynasty had no shortage of manpower throughout its existence and hand cannon teams only made up a portion of its overall forces.

Though the Yi dynasty kept the formula for gunpowder a closely guarded secret, the widespread use of hand cannons during its conquests gradually led to the diffusion of firearms abroad. Rajian sailors are known to have obtained a small number of hand cannons from a Menghean shipwreck south of what is now the Organized States in 1339, and in 1347 Rajland was producing its own hand cannons domestically. How they obtained the knowledge to manufacture gunpowder remains a mystery, with one theory holding that they abducted Yi scholars from Portcullia.

List of Yi emperors

Emperors of the Yi dynasty
Tyrannian name	Personal name		Reign	Era name		Temple name
Emperor Taejo of Yi	Yun Jong-gwan	尹宗權	1253-1289	Chŏndŏk	天德	Taejo	太祖
Chŏnsun Emperor	Yun Sim-ji	尹審知	1289-1305	Chŏnsun	天順	Gojong	高宗
Sŭngnyŏng Emperor	Yun Gan-sun	尹乾順	1305-1311	Sŭngnyŏng	承寧	Hyŏnjong	玄宗
Gŏnhyi Emperor	Yun Ji-wŏn	尹知遠	1311-1323	Gŏnhyi	乾熙	Sejong	世宗
Jŏngdŏk Emperor	Yun Go-chi	尹高熾	1323-1349	Jŏngdŏk	正德	Mokjong	穆宗
Kaeyo Emperor	Yun Jŏng-hwa	尹廷和	1349-1362	Kaeyo	開耀	Yingjong	英宗
Taechang Emperor	Yun Hu-jo	尹厚照	1362-1401	Taechang	泰昌	Mujong	武宗
Gwangpyŏng Emperor	Yun Gye-bang	尹桂芳	1401-1418	Gwangpyŏng	廣平	Injong	仁宗
Sŏndŏk Emperor	Yun Gi-ok	尹祁鈺	1418-1433	Sŏndŏk	宣德	Hyijong	熹宗
Yŏnggwang Emperor	Yun Wŏn-ho	尹元昊	1433-1469	Yŏnggwang	永光	Anjong	安宗
Sungbok Emperor	Yun Jun-wu	尹純佑	1469-1475	Sunbok	崇福	Hyojong	孝宗
Yŏngrak Emperor	Yun Yu-sung	尹由崧	1475-1498	Yŏnghŭng	永興	Gwangjong	光宗
Honghyi Emperor	Yun Byŏng-jang	尹秉璋	1498-1511	Honghyi	洪熙	Aejong	哀宗

See also

• Menghean Black Plague
• Menghean Won