Chapter 816: The Poverty-Stricken Peninsula

Why, in all of Chinese history, was China never able to control the entire Korean Peninsula, which lay right at its doorstep?

This is a question that people of later generations could never help turning over in their minds.

Because from the perspective of later ages, the Korean Peninsula seems like such a fine piece of land!

It has a large population, and its technology and economy are fairly developed. South Korea in particular sits just across the Korea Strait from Japan. If Korea were in hand, then whenever one felt displeased, one could reach over and give the little Japs two slaps at any time and any place. What a fine thing that would be.

Moreover, the provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin would gain seaports, and who knows how much economic growth that would bring.

But in reality, across the whole of human history, this broken patch of land called the Korean Peninsula was never really any good.

Just look at the terrain: a wretched peninsula, yet crossed by towering mountain ranges that reach the clouds and run through nearly the whole of it.

They practically slice this tiny scrap of land in half, so that in ancient times travel between Korea's west coast and east coast was extremely inconvenient.

The great majority of the peninsula is mountainous. Only the Taedong, Han, and Nakdong Rivers, descending from the high mountains, managed to wash out three small plains at the sea's edge: Pyongyang, Hanseong, and Busan. More than half the people on the entire peninsula are crammed into these three places.

This produced a bizarre situation: the plains are few and small, the common people are concentrated on these little plains, the population is too large, and it is very hard for them to eat their fill and dress warmly.

In a year when the harvest was slightly better, people could live for a few years, but then the population explosion would bring per-capita grain shortages, and the common people would starve to death on a massive scale. This grim natural culling came around almost every twenty or thirty years.

And the common people who lived in the mountains were like damn monkeys, barely scratching out a little farmland among the rock crevices and valleys, living half on grain and half on wild vegetables and wild fruit. Even in a good year they suffered like the people of the Central Plains in a famine year.

What is more, this wretched place is especially cold. At times when the great cold winds blow, the temperature can rival that of the Heilongjiang region.

Even more exasperating is that the Korean Peninsula's conditions make communication with the Central Plains extremely inconvenient. From Korea to the Central Plains, the only routes are rugged mountain roads; there is no way to make use of water transport.

In a place like this, whether it was tribute or tax revenue, goods worth a thousand cash at the point of departure, by the time they were delivered to Luoyang or Chang'an, might well end up owing several hundred cash in freight charges. Never mind their value; it was a complete loss.

This meant that collecting a little tribute each year was fine, since the quantity was small anyway, and the central court could set the price high. That way I gained face and you gained substance. But as for taxes, they were completely pointless.

The only real possibility was sea transport, but before the Ming dynasty, sailing from Shandong to the Korean Peninsula was extremely inconvenient.

Because the sea is not a river. It does not have the driving force of rushing river water, so ancient sea transport generally relied heavily on ocean currents and the monsoon winds.

And both of these are very weak around the Bohai Bay area.

The ocean currents there are the weakest of the weak; even in later ages they could not carry away the nutrient-rich water produced by the cities around Bohai Bay.

The monsoon winds, too, are of very little use because of the way Bohai is enclosed on three sides.

Moreover, they mainly blow from the Shandong Peninsula toward the Liao Sea. That is to say, if one relied on the monsoon, a ship setting out from Dengzhou would most likely be blown either to Dalian or to Yingkou.

So setting out from Shandong toward Korea meant gambling on luck. With good luck, you went straight to Korea. With bad luck, you were blown to the Liaodong Peninsula. And the truly luckless had their ships capsized outright.

To sum up, this wretched place called Korea was truly of no use to the courts of the Central Plains.

First, it could not absorb surplus population. Second, it could not pay taxes. Instead, it would require wasted military spending just to garrison. Who would be so idle as to go occupy it?

After collecting a pittance of tribute, was it not better to tell them to get lost and go play in the mud by themselves?

Moreover, the efforts of the Central Plains courts in the direction of the Korean Peninsula had always been aimed at digesting Liaodong.

That was a fine place, far better than the peninsula, so they had no patience for messing around on the peninsula.

Then some might ask again: since direct rule by establishing the Four Commanderies of Han, as Emperor Wu of Han did, was entirely thankless, why not do as Zhang Zhao did and enfeoff a son as king in Korea?

What kind of talk is that? That is one's own flesh-and-blood son, not some child picked up off the street!

In a place so poor that even the dogs cannot lick up any dust, could you bear to send your son there to be a beggar king? How cruel a heart would that take!

Never mind the Han and Tang periods; even now, in an age when the peninsula is already relatively much more prosperous than before,

when word spread that Zhang Zhao was going to send Murong Xinzhang to southern Korea and the land of Wa, many people felt that our Sage Zhang was truly too heartless.

Cao Yuanzhong had complained to his face more times than anyone could count. Lady Cao Sanniang supported it on the surface, but behind his back her tears had nearly run dry.

Even Cao Yanming, the fourteenth of the Cao family, very earnestly sought Zhang Zhao out to talk, tactfully urging him not to treat Murong Xinzhang too harshly.

But Zhang Zhao knew that the Korean Peninsula was in fact not as bad as the rigid impressions of the people of this time made it out to be.

After the desperate struggles of Silla, Baekje, and the other states, although it was still a poor place, it could now support around a million people, and the coastal plains could support at least four or five hundred thousand.

Going to such a place to be king was still a hard post, but it could no longer be called being a beggar king.

And at this moment, this was the last chance to control the Korean Peninsula.

In the Han and Tang periods the place was too poor to be worth it, but by the early Northern Song, it could already accommodate a normal enfeoffed king.

The reason history never reached that point was simply that our Great Song was too formidable, was it not? They could not handle the Khitan, so never mind the Korean Peninsula, they did not even have the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan-Yun.

At the same time, the Liao state was no better. The Yelu house was incompetent in attack and shameless in retreat, pouring vast energy into holding on to the fragrant prize of the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan-Yun.

As a result, the several times they attacked Goryeo, they dared not draw off large forces for fear that the Song army would march north, and so the campaigns turned into minor skirmishes. The moment the Goryeo people knelt, the matter was settled.

Could you damn well not have spent a bit more effort properly developing Liaodong and the peninsula? You dispatched tens of thousands of troops just to ask the Goryeo people, "Do you submit or not?"

If either of those two had shown some backbone and achieved a great unification, none of the later mess would have happened.

This was also the reason Zhang Zhao agreed to hand southern Korea over to Murong Xinzhang. Good land was too scarce; the entire peninsula had only three areas of real value.

The West Korea Bay region, dominated by the Chongchon, Taedong, and Yalu Rivers, where the later Pyongyang, Pyongsong, and Sinuiju are located.

The Ganghwa Bay region, dominated by the Han River, including Kaegyong (Kaesong), the present capital of Wang's Goryeo, as well as the later cosmic metropolis of the South Korean bastards, Hanseong — all of it is here.

The Andong Prefecture region, centered on the mouth of the Nakdong River, which is the later South Korean area of Busan and Ulsan.

At the same time, in the land of Wa at this period, the only place that could be called prosperous was the island of Honshu, in the Heian-kyo and Nara region.

As for the rest, whether Shikoku or Kyushu, there were a few patches of good land here and there, but on the whole they remained extremely backward, and the Kanto region was not even worth looking at.

So Murong Xinzhang's so-called eastern expedition against Wa was in reality just a matter of striking at the Heian-kyo and Nara area. The rest of the land might take decades to slowly develop and secure a foothold in.

Yet even this small area around Heian-kyo was still far too backward compared with the Central Plains. Murong Xinzhang had so many meritorious followers to settle, and the several hundred thousand people going with him needed to live well. Zhang Zhao hoped even more that his dear son would firmly seize control of Wa on this expedition.

With so many people and such high expectations, it would be inappropriate to stingily give him only Wa.

Therefore Zhang Zhao prepared to take back for the court one of these three areas of the Korean Peninsula: the Sinuiju area around Pyongyang and opposite Dandong.

The sixth imperial son born to Yelu Abuli, Zhang Xianjiong, was already seven years old. Since it was now impossible to grant him the Liaodong that had once been promised, they might as well enfeoff him at Pyongyang.

And the remaining areas of Ganghwa Bay and Busan and Ulsan would all go to Murong Xinzhang, for the dear son to use in settling his subordinates.

At the same time, the tax revenues of these two still fairly prosperous areas, together with those of the Heian-kyo and Nara region, would bear most of the cost of the eastward search for the Americas.

What? You say you are worried that the descendants of the dear son might one day declare independence, like the Tang dependency of Silla in history?

Do not joke. Silla had a pure native as king, and as for what the soldiers of the Great Tang were like when they went abroad, we all know that in our hearts.

In the eyes of these soldiers, Silla might call itself a vassal and ally of the Great Tang, but they would never treat the people of Silla as equals — no, it was a slap on the left cheek and a backhand on the right, teaching these bumpkins how to behave.

Besides, Silla maidservants fetched such high prices in Chang'an — who could garrison there for a while and not think of taking a little "local specialty" back to sell, then go home and build a big mansion or something?

With this open seizure of benefits from Silla's upper class and covert plundering of the middle and lower classes, plus the Silla elite's extreme resentment that the Great Tang had not given them the old Baekje lands, and their deliberate, ongoing incitement of relations between the Great Tang and the local populace — under such conditions, it would be strange if they did not rebel.

But this time Murong Xinzhang was not going to protect a vassal state or strike at Goguryeo from both sides — he was going directly to become king. Under his own command he already had nearly five hundred thousand subjects.

With so many people going, how many of the middle and upper classes in the southern peninsula could survive?

Zhang Zhao had already sent a palace official to lay things out plainly to Murong Xinzhang: at least fifty thousand of the upper class of Goryeo and Wa must be executed — and that was all able-bodied men, with more than a hundred thousand women and children behind them.

One could say that killing these fifty thousand would nearly sweep away the entire local upper class.

And those following Murong Xinzhang were all Han people. They would not suffer discrimination from the motherland, and at the same time they would completely change the local ethnicity and culture. Their descendants would be no different from the people of the Central Plains — only someone with nothing better to do would seek independence.

Even if trouble did arise, a Central Plains dynasty holding such vast and excellent territory that still could not put down rebellions in the southern peninsula and Wa — that would be exactly what it deserved.

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