IOO EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYnotice, but also because Kim Yu had earlier blocked a request of Yi Sibaek's
father, Yi Kwi, to shift the duty assignments of soldiers from districts to the south
to regions closer to the fort itself. Eventually the fort was surrounded by a Ch' ing
force of 200,000 men who drove off Korean reinforcements from the southern
provinces. Defense was no longer tenable, in part because most troops inside
the fort refused to fight to the death against impossible odds and demanded that
the officials and generals responsible for the anti-Manchu war policy be turned
over to the Ch'ing emperor as he was demanding. Injo finally had to accept Ch'ing
terms and signed a treaty on February 7 (1.13 lunar), 1637, just a month after
the invasion began.co
What were the major reasons for this debacle? The stubborn and blockheaded
refusal of Kim Chajom to pass on the alarm signal to the capital was certainly
a fatal error because it prevented the king from making his escape to Kanghwa
Island as planned. The failure to assign men from districts near the Namhan fort
to its defense and provide it with adequate rations was serious, but by that time
the king was reduced to a last-ditch effort at siege defense. Once the Manchus
had closed the ring around the fort, it was only a matter of time until the defend-
ers ran out of food. The belated and insufficient build-up of troop strength in
the area north of the Ch'ungch'ong River and the decision to strip the lowlands
along the invasion route of troops and defensive forces and move them to out-
of-the-way hilltops were probably the worst of a number of blunders. This error
was particularly embarrassing because the Manchus even served notice to the
Koreans before the invasions that they were totally aware of Korean strategy!
When the Ch'ing emperor, T'ai-tsung, sent a note to King Injo in December 1636
threatening an invasion unless his terms were met, he said:
Your honorable country has constructed a number of forts on mountains, but we
are going to follow the main road right straight to your capital. Do you think can
stop us with these mountain forts? And your honorable country is depending on
Kanghwa Island [as a last refuge for your king], but if we lay waste all eight of
your provinces, can you make a state out of one small island? The ones who
speak for your country are your Confucian officials, but do you think they can
drive us off by wielding their pens?21T'ai-tsung was right on a couple of counts at least. The decision to shift troops
to mountain forts at the cost of building up a large, mobile army was a fatal
strategy, and even if the king had been able to take refuge on Kanghwa Island,
it would not have saved the country from destruction, just as it failed to do so
during the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Whether the failures of
policy were the fault of Confucian pen-wielders is not certain because many of
the decisions were made by men with military experience, not simply civil offi-
cials. The lack of a unified policy on strategic defense so divided the nation's
strength that neither the northern provinces nor the capital region had enough
forces to fulfill their tasks. The field commanders in the north may have been