by Derwin Mak
“Why? Wouldn’t the villagers exaggerate the number of pirates in their fright?”
“If the villagers reported the true strength of the pirates, the garrison commander might hesitate to give aid. After all, if there were ten ships full of pirates, a garrison of fifty soldiers would have a difficult fight. The commander might request more reinforcements from the Prefecture or he might send spies to investigate further, but he would certainly not send out his soldiers right away. If the villagers wanted immediate help to salvage whatever they could, their best bet was to lie and minimize the danger.”
“So you think that’s what King Seonjo is trying to do? To get China to send troops without knowing Toyotomi’s true strength?”
“I don’t think we can rule it out. Korea is a very powerful country. It is inconceivable that King Seonjo would be driven out of Hanseong and Pyongyang unless Toyotomi has an overwhelming force. And this all might be a trap in a Japanese-Korean alliance to lure our troops into Korea for an ambush.”
The Emperor was stunned. “Well, I really haven’t thought of that possibility. It will not be possible for us to raise a large army quickly. Toyotomi has been at war for decades and has perfected his logistics, and an invading army can live off the land and rely on the sword as a tax collector. But if we send an army to help Korea, we will be acting as guests in someone else’s house. We will have to keep the soldiers disciplined and leave the crops undisturbed and the village women unafraid. Our logistics will be ten times more expensive.
“I can only give you a small army, and so this will be a hard campaign. But the greatest general I’ve ever known is General Li Rusong, and he speaks highly of you as a resourceful commander. I understand you came up with the idea of using trained falcons to intercept Mongol messenger pigeons? And you invented the practice of wrapping armor with wet cotton rags to dampen musket fire? Clever! I am sure that General Li and you will do well in Korea.”
Yuansi clasped his hands and bowed. The Emperor’s humbleness surprised him, and the Emperor’s trust warmed his dantián, the pit of his stomach, where the qì of breath and life began. It reminded him of a hot water-skin that his mother used to put next to his stomach at bedtime on cold winter nights when he was little.
“Before you go, let’s talk about something more pleasant,” the Emperor said. “Do you know much about painting?” He pointed to a small horizontal scroll on the side wall, the paper faded to yellow with age.
The left side of the scroll was dominated by a jagged cliff hung with gnarled trees. In the bottom right-hand corner, a small fishing boat was drawn in great detail, with the warp and weft of the rattan-covered shelter on the boat carefully limned. A contemplative fisherman sat over an oar in the back of the boat, his fishing pole forgotten behind him. In the upper right hand corner was a poem.
Yuansi, who was barely literate, could not read the cursive script. He had never learned painting or calligraphy and had little use for pictures unless they were pictures of pretty girls—especially the kind that soldiers collected.
“I have never had the opportunity to study the arts,” he conceded. “In my wasted life I first lived as a pirate, and then, after General Li rescued me, as a soldier.” General Li Rusong had taken a liking to the youngster after capturing him from the pirates and treated him as a son.
“No matter,” the Emperor said. “The Bandit Liu Zhi was once teacher to Confucius, and native talent graced with insight sometimes far excels years of careful instruction. Let me try to explain to you how to look at a good painting.
“This painting was made two hundred and fifty years ago by Master Wu Zhen, who called himself the Plum Monk. We’ll never have another painter as great.
“The highest of all the arts is calligraphy, which is the art of harnessing the writer’s energy, his qi, and unleashing it in the service of freezing thought and capturing feeling. Practicing calligraphy is like doing tai chi, and there must be no wasted motion. Before even putting down the first stroke on paper, the writer must already know where the last stroke will go.”
Yuansi nodded. He had seen General Li practice calligraphy, and it did look a little like a dance or some kind of martial art. He could appreciate that.
“Painting, properly understood, is but a form of calligraphy. Do not focus on nonsense such as the sketch’s mimicry of life, the composition of figures, or the shading and perspective. Rather, look at a painting as a calligraphy scroll, and see how the painter’s qi took shape on paper. Envision his movements and breaths, his broad brushstrokes and fine bone work.
“You may examine a true masterpiece as long as you like, but you will not find a single failed stroke in it. In a painting, the painter lays out his spirit with no lies and no embellishments, much as a wild goose taking off leaves behind ever widening ripples in the lake.
“And so we can sit here together today, admiring the spirit of Master Wu.”
Yuansi was amazed. He stared at the painting, trying to see everything the Emperor showed him. “I will treasure your lesson, Bìxià. Hearing you speak for an hour is like going to school for ten years.”
“Oh, don’t flatter me. Here, take this copy of the scroll made by the royal painter so that you can have something beautiful to look at when you have a moment off the battlefield. Do not neglect the civilized side of life even in war. Otherwise there is no point to fighting.”
General Li Rusong’s horse, Red Tiger, snorted in the cold air of Jianzhou in late fall and gazed suspiciously across the Yalu River into the dense forests of Korea.
By the river shore, Li welcomed Yuansi and his small squad of scouts, returning from three weeks of reconnaissance inside Korea. They were disguised as Korean refugees in dirty rags and cotton headcloths.
“Come, have some warm rice wine to revive your spirits,” Li said.
Yuansi thanked him and drained his cup in a single gulp. “As I suspected, the Korean envoys were lying about the size of the Japanese army. Some Japanese soldiers claim that over three hundred and twenty thousand troops landed in Waegwan back in April, but that may be just puffery. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say the fighting strength of Japan in Korea right now is above one hundred and fifty thousand, maybe two hundred thousand.
“The Japanese garrisons are extremely effective, due to a combination of cruelty and manipulation. They would behead entire families and enslave whole clans if even one member resisted, and simultaneously they would buy off the local gentry. Despicable collaborators.” Yuansi spat on the ground.
“Using locals to control locals,” Li Rusong said, shaking his head. “Toyotomi knows what he’s doing.”
“Almost all surviving Korean forces have either surrendered or gone into the woods and mountains as guerillas. Toyotomi would have crossed over the Yalu into China months ago if the heroic Admiral Yi Sun-sin hadn’t destroyed all the Japanese supply ships and transports off Jeolla Province. I saw Admiral Yi four days ago, and he gives you his regards.” Yuansi handed Li a message from Admiral Yi, written in Korean. Li’s parents were Korean, and it was the language of his childhood.
Li said nothing, mulling over the news. Yuansi was a careful young man. If he thought Toyotomi had one hundred and fifty thousand troops in Korea, then that was as good as proven. Admiral Yi’s estimates of Japanese strength also confirmed Yuansi’s report. Li had under his command about twenty-four thousand cavalry, ten thousand infantry, and three thousand matchlockmen. He was outnumbered four to one and likely worse.
“The good news is that we still have the element of surprise,” Yuansi interrupted Li’s thoughts.
“Oh?”
“None of the Japanese commanders I spied on suspected that China would send troops into Korea. Most thought China too scared to come and meet them after what happened to General Zu Chengxun.”
All the men were silent for a moment, remembering the three-thousand-man cavalry vanguard commanded by the impetuous Zu. A few months ago, Zu ignored Yuansi’s advice for caution and led his
men into an ambush in Pyongyang, where most of his men died at the hands of the samurai.
Yuansi gritted his teeth. “I saw a mound Toyotomi’s troops had built out of the noses and ears cut from dead Korean and Chinese soldiers. Some Japanese commanders joked that the Wanli Emperor is so young that Toyotomi could be his father and that the Ming princesses would make excellent concubines for the daimyo.”
Li Rusong roared and swore in Korean. Red Tiger whinnied and reared up.
Yuansi continued, “No one knows that our army is here. The Japanese believe that they will have the whole winter to rest, secure their supply lines in Korea, and begin the invasion of China in the spring. We have to make them pay.”
Li shook his head. “But the surprise will be lost as soon as we march into Korea. It takes more than a week to go from here to Pyongyang. I don’t know how we are going to keep almost forty thousand marching men hidden. It’s a setup for an ambush.”
Yuansi paced alone in the silvery light of the almost-full Moon. His body was exhausted, but his mind could not sleep.
There was no torchlight. Moonlight reflected from the sheepskin tents where all the soldiers were asleep. Yuansi knew that patrols circled the perimeter of the camp to keep them safe. If you were in the woods only a few hundred feet away and didn’t know where to look, you could hardly tell that thousands of men were camped right here.
It’s easy to hide a sleeping camp, Yuansi thought. But how do you hide a marching army? In order to go from the Yalu River to Pyongyang, the army would have to go through the narrow plains between the tall mountains of the Rangnim Range in the east and the coast of Korea Bay on the west, easily visible to Japanese look-outs from miles away.
Perhaps the solution was to hide in the dark? If the troops could march at night by Moon and starlight and stay hidden in camps in the foothills during the day, they would be able to get all the way to Pyongyang without detection. But how could an army navigate in the dark? They would have to avoid the broad roads and villages and go through the uninhabited woods. They would have no way of knowing where they were or how far they had to go. It would be far too easy to get lost or stumble into a Japanese garrison.
Yuansi sighed and looked up at the night sky. He found the North Star and, at a slight distance from it, traced out the imaginary lines connecting the seven stars of Běidŏu, the Northern Dipper. He remembered lying on the deck of a kenminsen, the large trading/fighting ships used by the wōkòu, and watching the Northern Dipper spin all night around the fixed North Star, like seven men marching in formation, guided by a distant pole.
One of his favorite things to do, on those long-ago nights, was to make and fly Kongming lanterns. He would make the frame out of a lattice of light bamboo, shaped so that the lantern tapered down to a small opening at the bottom, like the hat worn more than a millennium ago by General Kongming, the greatest strategist who ever lived. He would then glue a layer of thin rice paper onto the lattice, making sure it was airtight, and then suspend a small candle in the center of the opening with a bamboo skewer or two. When the candle was lit, the warm air trapped by the Kongming lantern would lift it out of his hands, its warm glow receding from him until it was just another star in the sky, a distant point of light. Other children, on other pirate ships, would sometimes answer with their own Kongming lanterns, and Yuansi had loved to see them—giant fireflies hovering over the dark East China Sea.
Tired, cold, and still without a solution, the frustrated Yuansi headed back to his tent. He lit a candle and brought out the Emperor’s scroll. He tried to distract himself by practicing the Emperor’s lesson, tracing the brushstrokes on the scroll, imagining the Master’s posture and movements, savoring the marks left on the paper by his energy and spirit; not one single stroke out of place.
He noticed something: all the strokes in the trees and the cliffs seemed to point to the boat in the bottom right corner. It was as though the qì of the whole painting had a focus—the hunched-over figure of the fisherman. Invisible lines seemed to connect every spot on the painting to a single fixed pole, like the North Star, a center around which all other things measured themselves and knew their place.
Yuansi smiled to himself. He had a plan.
“Let’s check our position,” Li Rusong gave the order to Yue Lijing, his field clerk.
Li and Yue pulled their horses aside as the column of marching soldiers continued past. The January air penetrated their coats and cotton-covered armor and made them shiver. Red Tiger’s breath, ghostly white in the moonlight, curled around them.
Yue quickly set up a field desk and spread out a map of the sector of Northern Korea they were marching through. They had to work quickly, before the cold winter air froze their fingers. While Li prepared the covered lantern that cast a focused cone of light on the map, Yue took out his goniometer and surveying pole, got a reading on the North Star to fix true north, and began to scan the horizon both to the east and the west.
Far in the northwest, over the Yellow Sea and Korea Bay, Yue could discern a small group of six bright yellow flickering lights hovering in the shape of a hexagon.
“I see the Legs of the White Tiger,” Yue said. He took a careful reading with the goniometer and gave Li the angle of the cluster of lights from true north.
In the calm waters of Korea Bay, a small armored turtle ship from Admiral Yi’s fleet was at anchor. Every night, the ship would sail to that spot and launch those six Kongming lanterns, tied to silk threads so that they would stay anchored in the sky high over the ship.
Yue looked over to the northeast. Far in the distance, over the treetops, he could see another small group of five bright yellow flickering lights hovering in the shape of a small cross.
“I see the Horn of the Azure Dragon,” Yue reported. He took another careful reading with the goniometer and gave Li the angle of the lights from true north.
Yue silently prayed that the militiamen over in the mountains were safe. His brother had gone with Tan Yuansi into the mountains a month ago. His mission, like that of the other men Tan took with him, was to get in touch with the various militias hidden in the mountains. Every night, his brother’s group would go to a fixed spot and launch that cluster of five Kongming lanterns, also tethered by silk lines. Since their position in the mountains was so remote and inaccessible, made even more so by the December snow, Toyotomi’s garrisons could not get men out there to investigate.
The positions of the Legs and the Horn stations were clearly marked on the map before Li. Yue quickly drew out the measured angles from them and triangulated the army’s position.
With a few dozen scouts and the help of the Korean resistance, Yuansi had set up a grid of Kongming lantern stations spread tens of miles apart across Northern Korea. Guided by these Běidŏu positioning stations, the Ming army marched, undetected, during the nights towards Pyongyang.
“We should turn slightly to the east,” Yue said. “In another hour or so we should arrive at a good camp site. We are only about two days march from Pyongyang now. Yuansi and the Korean militias will join us there.”
Konishi Yukinaga could not believe his eyes. Before the gates of Pyongyang, the allied forces of Ming China and Joseon Korea ranged in battle-ready splendor.
“What have your spies been doing?” he screamed at his samurai. “How could an army of forty thousand men go from the Yalu River to Pyongyang without any warning?”
But it was too late for speculation. Konishi sent his men scrambling to the defense of Pyongyang.
Li Rusong ordered a general assault on Pyongyang from all sides, sparing only the eastern walls next to the Taedong River. It seemed as if the charging cavalry and infantry would easily overwhelm the Japanese defenders.
But dug in behind reinforced earthworks, the Japanese arquebusiers laid waste to the allied forces with their fusillades. The Japanese guns had much better range, accuracy, and penetration than the Chinese matchlocks. Even Red Tiger was shot from under Li Rusong in the middle of one of the
assaults.
“Damn the Portuguese,” Li Rusong swore as his wounds were dressed. “All these years we thought we bought the latest matchlock technology, and behind our backs, they were secretly selling more advanced weapons to Toyotomi.”
In light of the heavy casualties, Li ordered a change in tactics. Now, the allies would try to overwhelm the Japanese defenses with flame arrows and artillery fire. Soldiers held up well-oiled rattan shields and iron pavises to defend the field artillery and flaming arrow launchers from Japanese arquebus fire. The arquebuses, though more powerful, had shorter range than the arrows, and their bullets glanced harmlessly off of the pavises.
Volley after volley of cannon fire and flaming arrows propelled by gunpowder rockets arced into Pyongyang. Yuansi was impressed by the Korean militia’s hwacha, a two-wheeled cart that could launch several hundred flaming arrows at once. He made a mental copy of their design.
Soon the houses in Pyongyang were burning, and smoke covered half the sky. But Pyongyang was a big city, and as long as Konishi moved his forces around the walls and stayed under cover, they avoided much of the bombardment.
“We’ll run out of ammunition in another day,” Li Rusong said to Yuansi. The Ming army was not prepared for an extended siege.
Yuansi hovered in the sky over Pyongyang. He could see miles and miles around him in all directions. No pagoda in the world was as high as he was. It was glorious.
Above him was the biggest Kongming lantern anybody had ever seen, a giant floating cylinder about forty paces across at its widest point. Yuansi had made the frame from thick but light bamboo lashed together with silk ropes and covered it with multiple layers of rice paper.
He sat in a rattan basket attached by woven cords of silk to the hoop at the bottom opening of the giant Kongming lantern. Beside him in the basket were several large leather pouches with iron nozzles. One of them was filled with swamp gas, to provide high-heat flame for takeoff. The others were filled with distilled alcohol, to provide long-burning flames that would keep him airborne.
