Korea’s three kingdoms forged a peninsula identity
Goguryeo, Paekche, and Silla divided the Korean peninsula and roughly half of Manchuria for centuries. When Buyeo fell in 494 and Kaya in 562, only those three were left to fight for mastery, and the smallest and weakest of them, Silla, ended up uniting the peninsula.
The three kingdoms grew out of the web of statelets left after Wiman Joseon fell. Han China planted four commanderies in the north-west, and Goguryeo destroyed the last of them in 313. Between the first and third centuries CE the three moved from walled towns to full states. Goguryeo held the northern half of the peninsula plus Liaodong and Manchuria; Paekche and Silla split the south, with the island kingdoms of Tamna and Usan under them.
Goguryeo, probably the first and most advanced, peaked in the fifth century under Gwanggaeto the Great and his son Jangsu, and adopted Buddhism in 372. Paekche, said to be founded by two sons of Goguryeo’s founder near modern Seoul, became a seafaring power that passed Chinese writing, metalworking, ceramics, silk farming, and Buddhism to Japan. Silla, based at Seorabeol (modern Gyeongju), took its name in 503, made Buddhism official in 528, and produced gold metalwork showing steppe influence rather than Chinese.
A Sui-dynasty history said the three shared customs, laws, and dress, and they had warrior aristocracies rather than China’s literary elite. Silla, the weakest, relied on shrewd alliances, eventually with Tang China. Together they took Paekche in 660 and Goguryeo in 668; Silla then drove Tang forces out and held the land south of Pyongyang.
From the seventh century both Koreans and Tang writers called the three Samhan. A memorial stone of 686, found in Cheongju in 1982, boasts that the Three Han were unified, and Silla pursued a policy of absorbing refugees from its fallen rivals. The Han in Daehan Minguk, South Korea’s official name, recalls these kingdoms rather than the older southern confederacies.
Source: Three Kingdoms of Korea
