POST-IMJlN DE V ELOPMENTS 99
in his chronology of the period, the Yollyosil kisul, the closest mountain forts
were about nine miles from the main road and the farthest one or two days travel,
while "the main garrisons in Hwanghae and P'yong'an Provinces were turned
into ghost towns,"18 The Koreans were pursuing the same strategy used in the
second phase of the Imjin War - "strengthening the walls and clearing the fields"
- that had been criticized by some at the time. The idea behind the strategy this
time was less to deny the invaders access to food and provisions than to maxi-
mize the effectiveness of inferior troop strength by concentrating them behind
fortified redoubts situated at the top of strategic hills,
By February 1637, when Ming China was in disarray because of the rebel-
lions of Li Tzu-ch'eng and Chang Hsien-chung, the Ch'ing emperor invaded
Korea for the second time. Unfortunately for the Koreans, the Manchus were
aware of the Korean defense strategy and the location of the mountain forts.
When the invasion began, the Manchu cavalry merely skirted the forts in the
hills and pressed forward to capture the major towns on the way to Seoul. Mean-
while, Korean forces locked in their mountain redoubts could only stand by and
watch the Manchu armies pass.
In addition, the arrogance of Kim Chajom resulted in an inordinate delay in
communicating news of the invasion to the capital. Just before the invasion began,
a signal warning of an impending invasion was relayed from Dragon Bone Moun-
tain (Yonggolsan) near Uiju to Supreme Field Commander Kim Chajom's head-
quarters at Chongbang in Hwanghae Province, but because Kim had been telling
his subordinates for months that there was no chance that the Manchus would
invade that winter, he refused to believe that the beacon signals really meant a
Manchu invasion and decided against conveying the warning to the capital lest
it alarm the citizens of the capital needlessly. When he received more signals
on the sixth day after the initial signal warning, he interpreted it to mean that
the Manchus had come to the frontier to welcome a Korean envoy, refraining
again from informing Seoul. Not until the ninth day, the day of the invasion itself,
did he send one officer to reconnoiter the situation to the nOlth, and when the
man reported back that the Manchus were indeed on the way, Kim wanted to
chop his head off for spreading false information. He desisted when the report
was confirmed and only then did he send a report to the capital. The king received
word of the invasion barely two days before thc first Manchu troops arrived at
the capital, fourteen days after the first signal warning and only five days after
they had crossed the Yalu River. 19
The second invasion proved overwhelming; one wonders if even a better strat-
egy or an alert and less arrogant supreme field commander would have saved
the day. The initial invading army consisted of 120,000 men (70,000 Manchus,
30,000 Mongols, and 20,000 Chinese) - almost as large as Hideyoshi's invad-
ing army in 1592. Their advance was so rapid that a Manchu cavalry unit of sev-
eral hundred men blocked off lnjo's route of retreat to Kanghwa Island forcing
him to take refuge at the Namhan fort with a contingent of only 12,000 men and
insufficient rations. The fort was undermanned not only because of the short
