Joseon held the Korean peninsula for 505 years
Joseon, or Great Joseon State, was a Korean dynasty lasting 505 years after General Yi Sŏnggye’s late-fourteenth-century coup against collapsing Goryeo. Neo-Confucianism became state ideology while Buddhism lost ground. Modern Korean bureaucracy, dialects, and administrative maps still carry Joseon DNA.
Goryeo, founded in 918, was failing amid spillover from the Yuan collapse when Yi Sŏnggye, sent on a campaign, turned his army back on Kaegyŏng in 1388 and deposed King U. He briefly kept the Goryeo name before founding his own house as Taejo in 1392; the country was renamed in 1393 and the capital moved to present-day Seoul. The kingdom lasted until the Korean Empire replaced it in 1897, and campaigns against the Jurchens pushed its northern frontier to the Amnok and Tuman rivers.
Succession was bloody from the start. In 1398 Taejo’s fifth son, Yi Pangwŏn, raided the palace and killed the chief minister Chŏng Tojŏn along with two half-brothers, including the crown prince. The disgusted Taejo abdicated, and a second fight among brothers in 1400 left Yi Pangwŏn in charge; as King Taejong he abolished the old Dopyeong Assembly in favour of a State Council whose decisions needed royal approval, lifting the throne’s power to new heights.
His son Sejong the Great, crowned in 1418, sent an expedition against Tsushima’s pirates in 1419, and a 1443 treaty let the island’s lord trade with fifty ships a year. In the north he built four forts and six posts and in 1433 sent Kim Chongsŏ to drive back the Jurchens, roughly fixing today’s border with China. Science, farming, medicine and literature flourished, and in 1443 he created Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which scholars scorned but which finally overtook Chinese characters in everyday writing in the late twentieth century.
Confucian doctrine sank deep roots in family life and government over the centuries, and Buddhist institutions were at times actively suppressed. Modern Korean bureaucracy, administrative divisions, dialects and etiquette all trace back to this court.
Source: Joseon
