King Jangsu raises the stele of Gwanggaeto the Great

Gwanggaeto (374 – 412 or 413), the nineteenth king of Goguryeo, came to the throne at eighteen and took the reign title Yeongnak, “Eternal Rejoicing”. According to the stele, he defeated the Paeryeo, probably a Khitan people, in 395, forced the king of Baekje to submit in 396, sent 50,000 foot and horse to relieve Silla from the Wa in 400 and subdued Eastern Buyeo in 410 — in all, the inscription claims, 64 walled towns and 1,400 villages. He died at thirty-nine, which by the stele’s reckoning was in 412; the Samguk sagi, compiled in 1145, dates his death to 413. His son Jangsu moved his remains to the mountain tomb on the 29th day of the 9th month of the jiayin year — 28 October 414 — and “then set up the stele to record his merits, to show to later ages”.

The monument, a single block of granite over six metres high (6.39 m according to the English Wikipedia), is inscribed on all four sides with about 1,800 characters of Classical Chinese in three parts: the legend of the founder Chumo, son of the Heavenly Emperor and of the daughter of the River Earl, born from an egg; the king’s campaigns year by year; and rules for the 330 households of tomb guardians. It stands among the royal tombs of Goguryeo’s capital at Gungnae, modern Ji’an on the middle Yalu; which tomb was Gwanggaeto’s is still debated. Forgotten after the fall of Goguryeo, it was found overgrown around 1876 by a local official, Guan Yueshan, and in 2004 it became part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of the capitals and tombs of the ancient Goguryeo kingdom.

One damaged sentence has made the stele famous far beyond Korea. It says that the Wa — usually taken to be people from Japan — “in the sinmyo year (391) came across the sea and defeated Baekje … Silla, making them subjects”. Japanese historians long read it as evidence of Yamato rule in southern Korea; Korean historians make Goguryeo the subject of the sentence or read the damaged characters differently. In 1972 the Korean-Japanese scholar Lee Jin-hui argued that the Japanese army had altered the inscription with lime, but later studies, among them the Chinese scholar Xu Jianxin’s work on a rubbing made before 1881, found no evidence that the Japanese had tampered with the characters.