All events · The Medieval World

The Mongol Invasions of Korea and the Deportation of Captives

1231–1259 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing

Displaced

206,800

The Goryeosa, the official dynastic history compiled in the fifteenth century from Goryeo records, states that in the campaign of 1254 alone 206,800 people were taken captive and that the number of the slain could not be counted. That is a court-recorded administrative figure rather than a chronicler's rhetorical number, which makes it unusually specific for the period, but it covers one campaign of six and cannot be extended to the whole war; totals for the other campaigns are not given.

Share of the population affected

6.9%

of the population of Goryeo Korea at the time of the first Mongol invasion, 1231

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What happened

Between 1231 and 1259 Mongol armies invaded Korea six times. The Goryeo military government moved the court to Ganghwa Island, out of reach of an army without a navy, and left the mainland population to absorb the invasions. The Goryeosa records that the 1254 campaign alone carried off 206,800 captives, and describes the burning of settlements and the killing of those who resisted; the nine-storey wooden pagoda of Hwangnyongsa, one of the great monuments of Korean Buddhism, was destroyed in the invasion of 1238. Goryeo submitted in 1259 and was drawn into the Yuan orbit as a subordinate kingdom whose rulers married Mongol princesses, and was subsequently made to build and man the fleets for the failed invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. The captive figure is one of the few precise numbers in any thirteenth-century account of Mongol warfare, though it covers a single campaign.

Parties

Mongol armies invaded Goryeo Korea repeatedly over three decades, taking captives on a large scale, while the Goryeo court sheltered on Ganghwa Island until it submitted in 1259

Disputed

The 206,800 captive figure comes from the Goryeosa, compiled in the fifteenth century from earlier records; it is unusually specific but rests on a single source, and no comparable figures survive for the other five campaigns.

The denominator

Goryeo kept household registers but the totals do not survive intact. Korean historical demographers reconstruct a thirteenth-century population of roughly 3 million, with estimates ranging from about 2.5 to 5 million depending on assumptions about household size and the large unregistered slave and temple population.

The 206,800 figure comes from a single Goryeosa entry for captives taken in the campaign of 1254 and is treated by many historians as a chronicler's round number rather than a count; it is not a total for all three decades.

Where the baseline comes from

Mongol invasions of Korea — Wikipediaopen-edited
Goryeo — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No usable figures. The Goryeosa states for 1254 that those killed 'could not be counted', which is an admission of ignorance rather than an estimate, and gives no totals for the other campaigns.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingDestruction of PropertyCultural Destruction

The taking of captives, the burning of settlements and the destruction of the Hwangnyongsa pagoda in 1238 are recorded in the Goryeosa and in the Korean monastic record.