As recently as 2001, there were few lengthy discussions in English on the Imjin Waeran (Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea) aside from William George Aston's contribution to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (‘Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea’) from the 1870s and 1880s and a clutch of articles.Footnote ¹ The last nine years, though, have seen an extraordinary production of published worksFootnote ² and the appearance of translations of primary sources, some full, some partial, some finished, and some on the way.Footnote ³ Stephen Turnbull's Samurai Invasion appeared in 2002.Footnote ⁴ Just three years later, in 2005, Samuel Hawley published The Imjin War,Footnote ⁵ and now we have Kenneth M. Swope's A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail. The three books are each written from the perspective of the three main belligerents: Turnbull working from Japanese sources, Hawley from a Korean perspective, and Swope from Ming sources. These three offer detailed narratives on the war and allow English-language scholarship to set aside general narrative in favour of specific research agendas.

Kenneth Swope has given us a much-needed study of the Imjin Waeran from the Chinese perspective. His book's main purpose is to dispel the usual allegations that Ming China was tottering towards collapse and the Imjin Waeran helped it along. The meat of the study lies in its extensive use of primary Ming sources, and these are augmented with a judicious selection of the best of Japanese and Korean secondary sources and the occasional use of Japanese and Korean primary sources. Those familiar with the Imjin Waeran will find little that is new on the Japanese and Korean sides, but there is much that is new on the Chinese side. Swope has launched an extensive revision of the consensus on late Ming. He makes two points. The first is that the Ming had resuscitated their military capabilities in the late sixteenth century and were capable of waging war on multiple fronts. The second is a revision of the usual depiction of the Wanli Emperor as feckless.

A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail consists of seven chapters and an introduction. The first chapter draws on Swope's previous publications on late Ming military history and outlines the other two confrontations (the Ningxia Mutiny and the Bozhou Rebellion) that the Chinese faced simultaneously with the Imjin Waeran. He makes an argument for a Ming military revival (1570–1610) after a military decline (1450–1550). Chapter 2 covers familiar ground in discussing the tributary relationship between China and Korea and focuses on their military alliance and common interests. It reviews Japanese diplomacy towards Korea prior to the invasion and the influence of Korean factionalism on the various responses offered. Swope collects reasons for the invasion from pre-modern and modern commentators and settles on Hideyoshi's ambition to acquire control of East Asian trade and place himself at the centre of a new international political order as his two central goals. Swope reviews military preparations in Japan and the decrepit state of Korean military readiness on the eve of invasion. He closes the chapter with a wide-ranging comparison of the superior military technologies held respectively by the three main combatants: Korean compound bows and warship design, Japanese arquebuses, swords, spears, and armour, and Chinese cannon and warships. Herein lies one of his major themes: the role of technology.

Chapter 3 opens up Swope's main contributions in viewing the war through Ming sources. He covers the landing in Pusan harbour in the fourth month of 1592 to the arrival of the initial Ming Eastern Expedition forces at Ŭiju at the end of 1592. He gives us a narrative of the Japanese advance to Seoul, Kaesŏng, and P'yŏngyang, and the Korean collapse. He introduces Korean guerrillas such as Kwak Chaeu and the warrior monks under Hyujŏng and Yŏnggyu. Most importantly, he explains Zu Chengxun's arrogant and disastrous attempt to dislodge the Japanese from P'yŏngyang in the summer of 1592 and offers little-known background on the notorious Ming diplomat Shen Weijing. He describes how Li Rusong, the field commander, fresh from suppressing the Ningxia mutiny (introduced in Chapter 1), and Song Yingchang, overall commander, arrive in Korea.

Chapter 3 introduces several other themes that will appear again and again. The primary tactical flaw in the Japanese battle plan is revealed early – an over-extension and inability to secure logistic lines, and it is in this context that the importance of the guerrillas on land and Yi Sunshin at sea is explained. The importance of Chŏlla Province in the southwest receives attention as a source of supplies and men in keeping with the theme of logistics but the Korean success in holding Chinju and Yi Sunshin's repulsion of the Japanese démarches on the west coast are not highlighted for their larger geopolitical significance in preventing the Japanese from bypassing landed logistics to rely on the sea. Allied technological advantages were not limited to the turtle boat, but could be found as well in the Korean fore-and-aft sails, which were superior to the Japanese square sails, and in the array of cannon and other guns mounted on allied ships.

Swope's reliance on Chinese documentation becomes especially valuable in his recreation of Wanli's realization that Hideyoshi was not just directly threatening Ming territory but challenging Ming primacy in East Asia. This realization unleashed a determination in the Emperor to play his role as the Son of Heaven and defend his Mandate. Swope is careful to emphasize repeatedly that Wanli saw himself as Korea's saviour and that he was not planning to exploit the situation to acquire Korean territory. Even while the court discussion at the beginning of the second invasion in 1597 iterated the linkage of Korean security to Chinese security and invoked historical precedents from the Han and the Tang, Swope is careful to assert that “there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest the Chinese ever considered incorporating Korea into their empire” (p. 236). Swope argues that the Chinese command was solicitous of the Korean populace, even if Ming troop discipline was often lacking. He highlights the frequent proscriptions issued against Ming soldiers looting and raping to emphasize the benevolent intentions of Ming commanders in the knowledge that Korean scholars often stress Ming depredations wrought on the local populace. Although Swope points out that investigations found little evidence of abuse, he does not engage with Korean scholarship on this point.

Chapter 4 opens with the allied assault on P'yŏngyang and later Kaesŏng in early 1593. From Swope's point of view, the Japanese momentum was broken and Konishi's will to fight may have been shredded when the allies re-took P'yŏngyang, but Li Rusong then committed the same tactical and logistical mistakes as the Japanese and got ahead of his artillery in his rush to push the Japanese south, meeting defeat just north of Seoul at Pyŏkchegwan. Swope argues that it would be an exaggeration to say that Li Rusong lost his will to fight and then resorted to diplomacy, as depicted in Japanese primary and secondary sources, but Swope concedes that the defeat made the Ming commanders “less aggressive” (p. 162). The Japanese abandoned Seoul, negotiations began in earnest between the Ming and the Japanese over the loud protestations of the Koreans, and the Japanese retreated to an arc of strongholds around the southeast. While negotiations went on, in the late spring and summer of 1593, the Japanese again attacked Chinju and reduced the city, massacring all inhabitants – “the single greatest atrocity of the entire war” (p. 176). Swope describes Nongae, the kisaeng heroine, as pulling a Japanese commander over a parapet to fall to their deaths on the rocks below (p. 176), while the received consensus is that she enticed the Japanese onto a rock below the city wall that sits in the river and then pulled him into the water where they drowned together. The gratuitous nature of the Chinju massacre is shown by the fact that the Japanese did not garrison Chinju but withdrew. Swope acknowledges that this atrocity would have derailed negotiations had it not been for the two facts that the Ming envoys were already in Japan and the Koreans had been generally shut out of negotiations. Swope concludes the chapter with a discussion of the relative strengths of the Ming on display at this time. Despite the factionalism at his court, Wanli was committed to helping his Korean vassal, and the bureaucracy operated well in mobilizing, outfitting, and supplying Ming armies in a foreign land.

Chapter 5 reviews the peace talks and the misrepresentations to both sides from Shen Weijing and Konishi Yukinaga. Hideyoshi expected a Ming princess, three southern provinces, and a resumption of tributary trade, but the Ming court demanded a complete Japanese withdrawal and only proposed to invest him as King of Japan, with no tributary trade, no land in Korea, and certainly no princess. One of the Ming envoys saw that the Japanese were not withdrawing from Pusan and absconded rather than go on to Japan (Swope's Ming sources offer multiple versions of this affair). As the real diplomatic positions revealed themselves, the negotiations turned to tragic farce. Swope closes the chapter with a discussion of the famous scenes in Japan when the Ming envoys invested Hideyoshi and he finally realized, much to his distaste, just what they were actually offering. Swope correctly identifies the key failure of the negotiations – the Chinese and Japanese negotiators excluded the Koreans, the only party who could have fully informed either side of the other's true intentions. Koreans are still being excluded in that Swope fails to mention that the Koreans had actually dispatched a T'ongsinsa (Communication Embassy) to accompany the Ming ambassadors. When the Ming court put Hideyoshi in his place by investing him at the hands of lowly ambassadors, he was embarrassed, insulted and found grievance in the fact that King Sŏnjo or at least a Korean prince had not come to pay respects.

Chapter 6 relates the second Japanese expedition as borne of Hideyoshi's wounded pride and the proud refusal of the Korean court to dispatch King Sŏnjo or a prince to Japan to appease Hideyoshi. Swope's narrative begins in the spring of 1597 with the second invasion and concludes with the Battle of the Noryang Straits in late 1598. Swope refers to Hideyoshi's mental instability, which he takes from Mary E. Berry, and concludes that the purpose of the second invasion was merely “revenge first and foremost” (p. 230), followed by whatever else he could get. It was during the second campaign that Katō Kiyomasa, said to be more brutal than Konishi Yukinaga, rose to prominence, and Hideyoshi directed the taking of noses in lieu of heads. Japanese soldiers inflicted massacres on the local populace, while Ming soldiers preyed on their weakness, despite more threats of punishment from their commanders (p. 252).

Like before, the allies “deemed denying the Japanese access to the west coast as crucial” (p. 237), but Swope is not explicit as to the reason. It seems to have been not because Japanese freedom of the west coast would have allowed them to supply their armies by sea but because the autumn harvest of 1597 from Chŏlla “had to be secured for the allied forces” (p. 244). Both must have been factors. The Battle of Chiksan broke the back of the Japanese land drive north and their forces fell back on their strongholds along the southeast coast. Shortly thereafter, Yi Sunshin was victorious at Myŏngnyang, the sea battle that stopped the Japanese advance into the West Sea. Swope's description of this famous sea engagement is brief – probably because no Chinese were there – and leaves out an important factor in the battle, the extraordinarily swift current of the Myŏngnyang Straits. The Straits narrow to only 320 meters wide and the current often runs as high as 9.5 knots. Yi's victory of 12 ships against 133 has often been called a “miracle”, but it was more a tactical and strategic victory built on technology, leadership, and the forces of nature in an act of sheer genius – but that is a Korean story, not a Chinese one, and it is unfair to criticize Swope for failing to re-tell everybody's favourite anecdote. He offers detail on the Siege of Ulsan from late 1597 and early 1598 and takes the opportunity to introduce detail on a little-known aspect of the Ming campaigns, the presence of Chinese censors in Korea looking for evidence of malfeasance or incompetence to indict the generals. At least one venal censor is introduced who widens his indictment to impugn even King Sŏnjo, and Swope follows the case.

Finally, Swope discusses the reasons for Japanese failure and withdrawal. He begins by arguing that Ming naval power “was an important factor in the final defeat of the Japanese” (p. 265) and defends Chen Lin (the Chinese admiral) against Korean criticisms: Swope says he was not a “vainglorious bully” (p. 350, n. 106), as portrayed by Koreans, but a “strict disciplinarian” (p. 265) and seasoned fighter of pirates in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, a few pages later, at the Battle of Noryang, we read that Chen broke from the line and made a reckless dash ahead of his fleet, which put him in danger. In rescuing his ally, Yi Sunshin received a mortal gunshot wound.

Swope isolates two reasons for Hideyoshi's failure in Korea. One was a multipronged attack strategy that multiplied the number of logistics lines that had to be defended, and the other was the lack of an overall field commander that created confusion and tension between rivals such as Katō and Konishi. While the Japanese divided their commands, the Ming court sought unified commands but only under Chinese domination. This meant that Yi Sunshin did not direct allied naval operations and that may have cost him his life, since it seems that Chen Lin was in need of a bit of discipline himself. In any event, even Hideyoshi finally recognized that his advance was denied on land and sea and that he would be left with only a string of fortresses around the southeast coast. Before his death he ordered withdrawal.

In Chapter 7, Swope's conclusion, he returns to his revision of Wanli's reign with an opening statement that the Ming court wanted to extract their forces as quickly as possible from Korea following the Japanese evacuation so that they might deal with another rebellion in Sichuan. The point is that the Ming empire was “far from contracting and ossifying” (p. 294); it was still capable of mobilizing men and resources to impose its will internally, at the frontiers, and even abroad in Korea. Swope estimates the total cost of all three campaigns (Ningxia, Korea, and Bozhou) at about 30 percent of annual revenues compared to English military expenditures of up to 90 percent of annual revenues in the mid-seventeenth century. But fortunes change. The Ming forces that were victorious in Korea were not the Ming forces that were defeated at the Battle of Sarhu in 1619 by Nurhaci.

A secondary point delivered in his concluding chapter is again to deflect accusations from “nationalistic-minded Koreans” (p. 294) that the Ming empire was seeking to control Korea. I failed to find any reference by Swope to Korean scholarship making this extreme claim. What does stand out is Swope's implicit contestation with Han Myŏng-gi,Footnote ⁶ a leading Korean scholar of Korean–Chinese relations in this period, over how to characterize Ming motivations: as “benevolent” or “self-interested”. Han depicts Chinese intervention as motivated by a self-interested defence of Liaotung. Swope does acknowledge Chinese geopolitical concern at several points. For example, he reports a telling statement made in the Ming court: “If Korea falls, then Liaoyang is imperiled. If Liaoyang falls, then Beijing is next, so you see we can't just abandon Korea …” (p. 218). This view from Beijing sums up the geopolitical importance of the peninsula to China, but Swope also argues in many contexts that Wanli's intentions were largely concerned with fulfilling Ming moral commitments to a vassal state. “Benevolence” and “self-interest” were not mutually exclusive and this confluence gave Ming foreign policy significant strength.

Swope offers a strong argument for Ming military rejuvenation and Wanli's direct involvement, but he also ventures beyond the battlefield to discuss the geopolitics and wider implications of the conflicts he describes. Swope opened his book by arguing for the appellation “First Great East Asian War” in full cognizance of the wars ending in Korean unification under Sillan hegemony from the late sixth to the late seventh centuries and in full cognizance of the Mongol wars of the thirteenth century. He sets aside these other possible candidates, however, to pursue a vision that links the Imjin Waeran with what the Japanese now often call the Fifteen-Year War (1931–1945), or the cascade of events that led to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the creation of Manchukuo, the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – Swope's “Second Great East Asian War”: Hideyoshi's threat to Ming's political and economic hegemony found echo in the 1931 and 1937 Japanese assaults on China from a base in Korea. The key common element is the characterization of Japan as a power moving through Korea towards China. The danger with linking the 1590s to the 1930s is that such a view easily sees any involvement by Japan in Korean affairs as yet another re-enactment of a threat to China, whereas Chinese involvement appears benign. The Imjin Waeran was a “Great East Asian War”, but to yoke it to a radically different set of circumstances some three and a half centuries later invites unnecessary political debate and distracts from an otherwise interesting discussion.

In the conclusion, Swope returns to this argument for the “First Great East Asian War” from which sprang the “Second Great East Asian War”: Japan explicitly rejected the Ming order, and Hideyoshi “sowed the seeds from whence Pan-Asianism sprouted” (p. 292) in the late nineteenth century. It is true that Meiji-era praise of the Imjin Waeran reversed Tokugawa-era denunciations, but the seikanron 征韓論 debate did not “rage in Japanese circles since the 1860s” (p. 293); it had a specific origin in 1873 with the rejection of Meiji diplomatic letters announcing the Restoration to Korea. To be sure, this was a similar sting of embarrassment that Hideyoshi felt when the Chinese put him in his place, but history never really repeats itself – events just appear to have strong similarities. Swope states that “Hideyoshi's blueprint for the conquest of China was later adopted by the Japanese invaders of the 1930s” (p. 297). Here he is committing the same mistake that he has accused others of making regarding the vitality of Ming China. Namely, just as Ming military decline into the early 1500s changed in later decades to produce the successes of the Korean campaign, there were numerous changes in the domestic and international order surrounding Japan, Korea, and China from 1598, when the war ended, to the nineteenth century. Although the geography was the same, the people, their technologies, their ideas, their interaction with each other, and their larger world were vastly different from the 1590s and the early seventeenth century. We cannot be asked to recognize significant change in Chinese circumstances over a few decades and not in Japanese circumstances over a few centuries.

Given Swope's rightful and extensive concern with logistical problems and the central strategic prize of the west coast, I was rather expecting close parallels to be drawn with the Korean War. The UN operation had massive logistical capabilities sourced from Japan (and far beyond). In both cases logistical operations were rooted in Pusan. MacArthur's strategic sense led him to Inch'ŏn, just as the Japanese navy attempted to get beyond Yi Sunshin and into the Yellow Sea, but the US Navy achieved what Hideyoshi's navy could not. By controlling the Yellow Sea and west coast approaches, the UN command could supply their troops all the way up the peninsula without having to cross Korean mountains or deal with guerrilla resistance. Ignorance and hubris in Washington and in SCAP's offices in Tokyo propelled them to threaten the PRC's existence by gratuitously marching north of the 38th Parallel, and that brought the PRC into the conflict in 1950, just as the Japanese push northwards brought Ming armies into Korea in 1592. Although Swope dabbles with a geopolitical argument, the book's strengths rather lie in his close examination of Ming records on the Imjin Waeran and the Chinese view that emerges rather than in any larger geopolitical analyses.

When Swope attempts to address the effect of the war on Japan, large and small contestable points come in legion. I thought that New World crops such as tobacco and red pepper were introduced to Japan from European traders and then from Japan to Korea, not from Korea to Japan (p. 288). Regarding the speed of Tsushima's re-establishment of relations with Korea (the Kiyu Agreement of 1609), it is the consensus that the need for trade lay with Tsushima, not Korea (p. 289). Ieyasu may have considered trade with Korea as important, but no one has provided evidence to show priorities. Hideyoshi was probably seeking trade with China, but Ieyasu's intentions were focused on Korea, and they were largely political. He wanted foreign legitimization for his fragile new order and the physical presence of a Korean envoy from the Korean King would serve that purpose well. On the other hand, Tsushima's survival depended on trade (or pillage) from Korea. But these are minor points. Swope does not discuss the main, immediate effect on Japan, which must surely have been the evisceration of the power of the house of Toyotomi. It was destroyed by Tokugawa in 1615, and that was reported to the Koreans as revenge. Aside from well-known statistics on Korean destruction, the long-term effects on the peninsula receive no discussion. There is also no discussion of any long-term effects on China, but that is exactly Swope's point: the Ming had reconstituted their military and finances sufficiently to cope with the Korean campaign, leaving no significant impact.

There are a few problems with the book's apparatus. First, and foremost, is the fact that citations are composite by paragraph, which makes it difficult to identify what information goes with what citation. In connection with citations, Swope has cited individual papers from a 2006 conference held in Tongyŏng, South Korea, using only his English translations for the individual paper titles and the English title of the conference volume, but the conference papers were published in Korean and Japanese and not in English (see note 2). Second, it may be common in Chinese studies to render months and days in the solar calendar, but the purpose here is unclear, particularly when discussing a multinational conflict. To cross-reference Chinese information against Korean and Japanese sources requires a re-conversion to lunar dates. Third, the maps are marred by unnecessary redundancy; they are missing place names mentioned repeatedly in the text; and there are occasional romanization problems: e.g., Matsuura is rendered as “Matsura”, a mistaken romanization of the characters: 松浦. Finally, the battle descriptions are exciting, but they are probably drawn directly from Chinese reports with florid language designed to augment claims for rewards (e.g., during the Battle of Chiksan in the fall of 1597, “spears flew” and “blades flashed”, p. 248). Maps of particular engagements would have helped immensely in following the battles described in detail in the text.

Despite the problems mentioned above, A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail is a pleasure to read, and it is a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on the Imjin Waeran, because we now have an authoritative Chinese view. But the book is more than that, because Swope has provided us with convincing arguments that the Ming empire was quite up to the task and that Wanli, while perhaps being a wastrel in other matters of state, was deeply and critically involved in the Korean campaign.