Korean

The Koreans are the people of the Korean Peninsula, whose Bronze Age ancestors came from Manchuria and merged with agricultural populations. In 1337 their land was ruled by the Goryeo dynasty of Kaesong, founded in 918, a Buddhist kingdom long overshadowed by Mongol Yuan.

In 1392 the general Yi Seong-gye overthrew Goryeo and founded Joseon, moving the capital to Hanyang, later Seoul, and installing Neo-Confucianism as state ideology; the Hanja-writing yangban elite dominated scholarship and office. King Sejong (1418–1450) ordered the creation of Hangul, proclaimed in 1446, and pushed the border to the Amnok and Tuman rivers against the Jurchens.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 1592 and 1598 invasions devastated the peninsula until Yi Sun-sin's turtle ships and Ming intervention turned the tide. Manchu invasions in 1627 and 1636–1637 forced Joseon into brotherhood and then into Qing tributary submission. The eighteenth century brought a scholarly revival under Kings Yeongjo and Jeongjo, but after 1800 Andong Kim corruption and persecution of Catholics accompanied mounting peasant unrest.