Growth, Transformation and Challenge in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries

Abstract

This chapter examines developments from the fourteenth century when hunting acquired new meaning, and more people seemed to participate. In the aftermath of the Qadan attack, King Ch’ungnyŏl’s authority as a militarised monarch solidified. The attack also reinforced hunting as an important military skill and time spent in the field as a significant definer of rulership and masculinity based on a neo-nomadic ethos where the king held power over the realm including wild beasts. Framed within the hunt of the late Koryŏ and wider climate change, this chapter outlines the shifting worldviews and political strategies on the peninsula and in Northeast Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of those forces impacting the peninsula were regional – the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in the 1360s and the rise of the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) – and unleashed political, religious and cultural shifts throughout the region. Other forces came in the form of climate fluctuations and population growth that complicated politics, societies and animal habitats. Korean leaders responded by forming new political bonds of their own both in and beyond the peninsula.