Military coup in Goryeo: the generals seize power

In Goryeo the civil officials, recruited through examinations in the classics and literature, dominated the court and even led its armies in war, as Kang Gam-chan had done against the Khitans; military officers could rarely rise above the third rank. Resentment grew under King Uijong, who spent his days in excursions, banquets and poetry with his favourites while the guards went hungry and exhausted. The Goryeosa tells that years earlier, at a court exorcism on New Year's Eve, the young palace attendant Kim Don-jung, son of Kim Busik, had set fire to Jeong Jung-bu's beard with a candle, and that when Jeong struck him, Kim Busik wanted to have Jeong flogged.

On the 30th day of the eighth lunar month of 1170 — 11 October — on the way to Bohyeonwon, the king ordered his military officers to wrestle for his entertainment. When the elderly general Yi So-eung lost a bout, the junior civil official Han Roe slapped his face so that he fell down the steps, and the king and his officials laughed. At dusk, as the king entered the gate of Bohyeonwon, Yi Go and Yi Ui-bang, who had gathered the patrol troops on a forged royal order, killed Im Jong-sik, Yi Bok-gi and Han Roe and all the civil officials and eunuchs in attendance; then more than fifty civil officials were killed in the capital. On 13 October the king was sent into exile on Geoje and the crown prince on Jindo, and the conspirators enthroned the king's younger brother, the Duke of Ikyang, as King Myeongjong. Kim Don-jung fled but was later caught and killed.

The coup began a military regime that lasted about a century. Power first lay with the younger officers Yi Ui-bang and Yi Go; after their deaths Jeong Jung-bu ruled until the general Gyeong Dae-seung killed him in 1179. The generals answered Kim Bo-dang's attempt to restore Uijong in 1173 with a new purge of civil officials, and the deposed king was murdered at Gyeongju; in 1174 a revolt broke out in Seogyeong (Pyongyang). From 1196 the Choe family ruled as hereditary military dictators, and military rule ended only in 1270, when Goryeo came under Mongol overlordship.