Balhae

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In 668 the kingdom of Goguryeo, which for seven centuries had held the forests and river valleys of southern Manchuria and the northern half of the Korean peninsula, fell to the combined armies of Silla and Tang China. Its capital was burned, its last king led away, its population scattered or deported into the interior of the Tang empire. Thirty years later, in 698, a commander out of that scattered world raised a new kingdom on the same ground. Dae Joyeong — by some accounts a Goguryeo officer, by others a leader of the Mohe, the Tungusic forest peoples of the eastern Manchurian uplands, and quite possibly both at once — gathered Goguryeo remnants and Mohe tribesmen, turned at the pass of Tianmenling on the Tang force pursuing him, and broke it. He proclaimed himself king of a realm he called Jin. Within a generation it was known by the name it would keep: Balhae, in the Chinese of its neighbors Bohai, the kingdom of the sea-bay. For two and a quarter centuries it stood across the north — a state of farmers and horsemen, monks and envoys, that ruled from five capitals and that Tang itself came to call Haedong Seongguk, the flourishing land east of the sea.

A successor raised from two peoples

Balhae was built from the start out of two stocks, and the seam between them ran through its whole history. The ruling house and the aristocracy were drawn from the displaced Goguryeo elite, who carried into the new kingdom the older state’s language of office, its tombs and its surnames, and above all its memory of empire. The bulk of the population were Mohe — the Heishui, the Sumo, and the other tribal groupings of the upper Songhua and Amur basins, herders and hunters and farmers of the cold north whose villages furnished the kingdom its soldiers and its commons. The court of Tang, observing its new northern neighbor, sorted Balhae’s people into exactly these two categories, the Goguryeo above and the Mohe below.

The kingdom did not leave this composition implicit. When King Mu, the founder’s son, sent his first embassy across the sea to the court of Japan in 727, the document the envoys carried declared that Balhae had recovered the lost territory of Goguryeo and inherited the old customs of Buyeo — the still older northern people from whom Goguryeo itself traced descent. The claim was a deliberate act of statecraft. It placed the new realm in a line of northern kingdoms reaching back beyond living memory, and it told the courts of East Asia how Balhae wished to be read: not as a fresh tribal confederation but as the restoration of a fallen power. The court of Nara received it in that spirit, welcoming the envoys as the return of Goguryeo, with which Japan had long traded.

That double inheritance is also the ground of a dispute that has outlasted the kingdom by a thousand years, taken up below. What the kingdom’s own acts make plain is that it governed as a single state over a population it never pretended was one people, and that it leaned, in how it spoke of itself abroad, on the prestige of the line it claimed to continue.

The five capitals and the shape of the state

At its height Balhae held a vast territory — the eastern reaches of Manchuria, the northern peninsula down to a frontier with Silla, the Liaodong approaches, and the maritime country that is now the Russian Primorye, where its frontier outposts looked onto the sea. To hold so wide a country it built an administration on a continental scale, organized around five capitals: one supreme seat and four secondary ones, set at the cardinal quarters. The Supreme Capital, Sanggyeong, was the heart; around it stood the Central, the Eastern, the Southern, and the Western capitals, each the center of a region and a node on the kingdom’s roads. Beneath them the land was divided into fifteen provinces and sixty-two prefectures, governed by appointed officials down to the county — a centralizing apparatus modeled on the bureaucratic state of Tang, even as actual control in the tribal hinterlands rested with local Mohe chiefs whom the court confirmed in place rather than displaced.

The Supreme Capital, Sanggyeong Longquanfu, stood near Lake Jingpo at the site now called Dongjingcheng, by the town of Ning’an in Heilongjiang — the permanent royal seat from the middle of the eighth century, with one interruption, until the end. Its plan was an act of deliberate ambition: it was laid out on the model of Chang’an, the Tang capital and the largest planned city on earth, reduced to roughly a fifth of its area but reproducing its logic — a great rectangle some four and a half kilometers east to west, a grid of walled wards, a broad processional avenue running south from the palace, and the royal precinct set against the northern wall, looking down the central axis over the city. To raise such a capital in the forests of the upper Songhua was to declare that the kingdom of the north belonged among the ordered, literate, city-building powers of the age, and meant to be measured against them.

The other capitals carried the same stamp. Excavation at Sanggyeong, at the Central Capital, and at the Eastern Capital has turned up the furniture of a confident court culture — patterned roof tiles and ornamental brick, ceramic dragon-heads, weapons, the underfloor heating that warmed the long northern winters, and Buddhist sculpture in quantity. The locations of the Supreme and Central capitals are fixed by the ruins themselves; the sites of the Southern and, in some readings, the Eastern remain argued over, the kingdom’s geography only partly recovered from the ground.

A realm of the Great Vehicle

Balhae was a Buddhist kingdom, and the faith it embraced was the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle that by the eighth century had spread across the whole of East Asia. The religion entered the kingdom along the same routes as its statecraft and its script — from the Tang, and from the shared Buddhist world of the peninsula, the same current that to the south had made Korean (Silla) Buddhism a thinking tradition in its own right. In Balhae it became the faith of the court, raised under royal patronage as a work of the state. In the Supreme Capital alone the spades have found the remains of some ten large temple sites; more lie at the other capitals and at the far maritime outposts, among them the walled settlement at Kraskino on the bay that opened the kingdom toward Japan. Across these sites the same objects recur: foundation platforms of Buddhist halls, stone lanterns, and seated Buddha images and bodhisattvas worked in stone and clay and gilt bronze, their forms carrying forward the older art of Goguryeo while taking in the manner of Tang.

The figure at the center of this devotion was the Buddha, and the cast of the kingdom’s piety was the bodhisattva ideal and the cosmology of the Mahāyāna sūtras that the wider tradition of Buddhism had carried east. As elsewhere in the region, the religion served the kingdom as more than private salvation: temple-building was a royal act, the order was an arm of the realm’s prestige, and the merit of the Dharma was understood to stand over the land and its ruling house. A Balhae monk named Sari is recorded making the journey to Tang and onward toward India in pursuit of the teaching at its sources, one traveler in the wide Buddhist traffic of the age. The kingdom’s Buddhism was not a provincial copy. It was the northern member of an East Asian Mahāyāna world whose texts, images, and pilgrims moved freely between the Tang, the peninsula, the islands, and this realm of the forests and the sea-bay.

Among the powers: Silla, Tang, and the courts across the water

Balhae did not stand alone. To the south, across a guarded frontier, lay Unified Silla, the kingdom that had taken the rest of the peninsula and that now shared the Korean world with the northern realm — the two together making what Korean historians name the period of the Northern and Southern States. The relation between them was wary more than warm: a contest of standing at the Tang court, occasional border friction, and a road that nonetheless ran between them, the Silla road, along which goods and travelers passed. They were peers and rivals, two states with overlapping claims to the same inheritance, coexisting without ever resolving into one.

With the Tang the relation was sharpest at the start and steadiest later. Under King Mu the two came near to open war: in 732 a Balhae fleet struck across the Bohai Gulf at the Tang port of Dengzhou on the Shandong coast, a raid that announced the young kingdom would not be handled as a client. Under Mu’s son, the long-reigning King Mun, the kingdom turned to accommodation. Mun accepted Tang titles, sent students to the imperial academy, adopted the apparatus of a Confucian-literate state alongside its Buddhism, and made of Balhae a settled member of the Tang world-order rather than a threat to it. From the Tang the kingdom took its script, its administrative forms, and the model of its capital; to the Tang it sent embassies, students, and tribute, and from the Tang it received, in the end, the name by which the age remembered it. The wider civilization whose forms the kingdom borrowed is treated under China; the Tang state itself, Balhae’s great neighbor and sometime adversary, is the specific power meant wherever this account speaks of the imperial court to the west.

Across the eastern sea lay the courts of Nara and then Heian Japan, and with them Balhae kept its longest and easiest friendship. From the first embassy of 727 the two exchanged envoys for nearly two centuries — some thirty-odd missions in each direction by the count of the Japanese chronicles. Balhae ships carried furs and ginseng, honey and worked goods across the water in the winter and returned with silk and other wares; the embassies were as much trade as diplomacy, and the Japanese court, often estranged from Silla, valued the northern kingdom as both a partner and a counterweight. King Seon alone, in a reign of a dozen years early in the ninth century, sent five missions east. Through these crossings the kingdom of the inner forests kept itself a maritime power as well, its name known and welcomed in capitals it could reach only by sea.

Haedong Seongguk

The kingdom reached its full extent in the ninth century, above all under King Seon, who campaigned northward to bring the outlying Mohe tribes under the crown and southwest toward Liaodong, and who consolidated the realm into the form of fifteen provinces and sixty-two prefectures by which it is counted. By this period Balhae governed a territory as large as any state of its world, threaded with roads, ruled from its five capitals, exporting its goods to three neighbors and receiving the students and titles of the greatest empire of the age. It was in recognition of this — a northern kingdom grown rich, orderly, and learned, a worthy member of the literate East Asian order — that the Tang gave it the name that fixed its standing: Haedong Seongguk, the flourishing land east of the sea. The phrase was a measure of arrival. The realm that had begun as a war-band rallied from a fallen kingdom was now spoken of, by the very empire it had once raided, as a country in full flower.

Something of that flowering can still be read at the Mausoleum of Princess Jeonghye and that of her younger sister Princess Jeonghyo, daughters of King Mun, buried in the country’s Goguryeo- descended manner. Jeonghyo’s tomb, opened by archaeologists in 1980 among the royal graves on Longtou Mountain in what is now Jilin, carried a granite epitaph of seven hundred and twenty-eight Chinese characters cut in eighteen lines of formal regular script, and — painted on the chamber walls — the first complete cycle of Balhae mural painting to survive: a court of figures in the dress of the age, warriors and attendants and musicians, the living color of a royal household that otherwise reaches us only through ruin and inference.

The contest over Balhae’s inheritance

Because Balhae was raised from two peoples and ruled a country that lies today across the borders of three modern states, the question of whose history it is has become one of the most charged disputes in the historiography of East Asia. Korean scholarship has long held Balhae a successor state to Goguryeo and a Korean kingdom, the northern half of the Northern and Southern States period, pointing to the Goguryeo-descended ruling house, the kingdom’s own claim to restore Goguryeo and inherit the customs of Buyeo, and its tombs and titles. Chinese scholarship has generally held the opposite: that Balhae was a state of the Mohe — a Tungusic people ancestral to later peoples of the northeast — a regional minority polity that received Tang investiture and belongs to the history of the Chinese northeast. This second reading was pressed systematically by the Northeast Project, a state-funded program of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that ran from 2002 to 2007 and treated Goguryeo and Balhae alike as local regimes within Chinese history; its conclusions provoked a sharp diplomatic and scholarly response from South Korea, which founded a research body — later the Northeast Asian History Foundation — in answer. Russian scholarship, whose ground includes the kingdom’s old maritime province, has charted its own course between the two. Each reading marshals the same dual composition to opposite ends, the one making the Goguryeo elite decisive, the other the Mohe majority. The kingdom itself, governing two peoples as one and naming a single ancestry abroad, sits across the line the modern argument draws.

Texts and scholarship

The Tang dynastic histories carry the spine of what is known: they record Balhae’s foundation, its embassies, its raid on Dengzhou, and its fall, sorting its people into the Goguryeo and the Mohe. The Japanese court records — the chronicles in the line of the Nihon Shoki — preserve the texts and dates of the kingdom’s missions across the sea, the single richest run of its diplomatic voice. The eighteenth-century Korean scholar Yu Deuk-gong gave the kingdom its place in Korean historiography in his Parhaego, the “Investigation of Balhae,” the first work to argue that the realm belonged to Korea’s past and to name the era the Northern and Southern States. Against the thinness of the written record — for the realm preserved no narrative history of its own — the decisive modern instrument has been archaeology: the excavation of Sanggyeong Longquanfu near Ning’an, the opening of the royal tombs on Longtou Mountain — the tomb of Princess Jeonghyo with its painted chamber and inscribed epitaph — and the digging of the temple sites and the maritime fortress at Kraskino in Primorye, work conducted across Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Japanese institutions and read very differently by each. The kingdom’s Buddhist remains in particular have been synthesized from this archaeological record, as in the survey of Balhae’s Buddhist temples drawn from the excavations. The doctrinal world the kingdom shared is set out under Buddhism and the Mahāyāna; the scriptural ground common to the whole East Asian Great Vehicle is held in the older translations of the Mahāyāna texts in the Sacred Books of the East. The fiercest of the modern literature is not about doctrine or art but about ownership: the dispute over whether the kingdom is Korean or Chinese has its own scholarship, of which the study of China’s Northeast Project and Korean history by Yoon Hwy-Tak is a representative Korean statement.

The closing of the north

The end came with a speed that matched the founding. By the early tenth century a new power had risen on Balhae’s western flank — the Khitan, the steppe people whose chieftain Yelü Abaoji had welded the tribes into a single state and would give it the dynastic name Liao. In the winter of 926, in one of the last campaigns of his life, Abaoji turned east against Balhae. The kingdom that had stood for two hundred and twenty-eight years did not hold. The Supreme Capital fell within days of the army reaching it; the last king submitted, and the realm was extinguished at a stroke. The Khitan set a son of Abaoji over the conquered country as king of a puppet state they named Dongdan, the Eastern Khitan kingdom, and within a decade folded it into the body of Liao. From 927 the conquerors hunted down the Balhae royal house to forestall any restoration.

What followed the conquest was dispersal more than death. The crown prince Dae Gwanghyeon led a great column of the kingdom’s people — aristocrats and commons, the Goguryeo-descended above all — south across the frontier to Goryeo, the rising kingdom that had taken the peninsula and claimed, by its very name, to continue Goguryeo; its founding king received the refugees and gave the prince a place among the royal clan. Others stayed in the north and fought on: bands of resistance held parts of Manchuria for decades, raising short-lived revival states — a Later Balhae, and the kingdom called Jeongan — that pressed the name against the Liao until they too were broken. So the realm ended twice over, once in the days it took the Khitan to enter Sanggyeong and again, slowly, in the failure of the men who tried to raise it from the ruins.

For a kingdom of its size and its two centuries, almost nothing of its own voice came through. The court that planned a capital on the measure of Chang’an, that sent its students to the Tang academy and its ships across the sea each winter, that carved seven hundred and twenty-eight characters into the granite over a princess’s grave, set down no history of itself that anyone kept. The Khitan who took the country had no reason to preserve its records, and the Goryeo that took its people made them subjects of another house. The two peoples Dae Joyeong had bound into one state in 698 went their separate ways within a generation of 926 — the Goguryeo-descended south into the Korean world, the Mohe back into the northern forests from which later powers of Manchuria would rise — and the single thing they had been together, the flourishing land east of the sea, closed its five gates and was gone before the century turned.

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