The Tomb of King Muryeong Opens
Wind, campfire and river sounds change with every scene, and the music follows the story.
In the ninth month of 475, 30,000 troops of Goguryeo’s King Jangsu surrounded Hanseong, the Baekje capital. King Gaero, who had fallen for the scheme of Dorim, a Go-playing monk, and drained the kingdom’s treasury on great building works, sent his son Munju south to seek help, but the fortress fell and the king lost his life. Munju came back with 10,000 Silla troops, took the throne, and in the tenth month of that year moved the capital south to Ungjin (today’s Gongju).
Characters
His name was Sama
Name not recorded
The future King Seong
The minister who killed King Dongseong
excavation team · Imagined character
Imagined character
The rainy season, summer 1971. Songsan-ri, Gongju, South Chungcheong Province.
Rainwater was seeping into Tomb No. 6, an old Baekje tomb, so work began on cutting a drainage channel through the hill behind it.
Out of the mud emerged an arch of bricks stacked in a curve.
There are flowers stamped on them!
Work stopped, and an excavation team was hastily put together. On the night they uncovered the entrance, the rain came down in sheets.
not one has ever been found
with its owner’s name inside.
The afternoon of July 8, 1971. Before the sealed entrance, people laid out makgeolli, watermelon and dried pollack, and held a memorial rite first.
When two of the sealing bricks were lifted out, white vapor gushed from the gap.
At the end of the flashlight beam, a stone beast with an iron horn on its head stood guard in the middle of the passage.
When the dust was brushed away, characters carved in the stone appeared.
Whose tablet was it?
The story begins 1,470 years earlier,
on this very ground.
Having lost Hanseong in 475, Baekje moved its capital south to Ungjin.
The Songsan-ri hill, where the Tomb of King Muryeong was found in 1971, lies here in Ungjin, too.
In the eleventh month of 501, King Dongseong, who had gone hunting and was stranded by heavy snow at Mapochon, was stabbed by an assassin.
The one who had sent the assassin was the minister Baek Ga. The king died in the twelfth month.
In the twelfth month of 501, Sama took the throne. He is the king later known as “King Muryeong.”
The Samguk Sagi records that he stood eight feet tall, with features as fine as a painting, and was so kind and generous that the people gave him their hearts.
In the first month of the following year, Baek Ga entrenched himself in Garim Fortress and rose in revolt.
The king led his troops in person as far as Udu Fortress and ordered Hansol Hae Myeong to attack Garim Fortress.
Baek Ga opened the fortress gate, came out and surrendered.
The king had Baek Ga executed.
In 506, a great epidemic broke out, and from spring no rain fell for three months, so the streams and ponds dried up.
In 510, the king had the embankments built strong and drove the people who had been wandering about idle back to farming.
Soon after taking the throne, the king sent troops to attack Goguryeo’s Sugok Fortress, and he also drove back invading Malgal and Goguryeo forces.
In the ninth month of 512, the Goguryeo army seized Gabul Fortress
and smashed Wonsan Fortress.
The king led 3,000 swift horsemen north of the Wicheon Stream.
Seeing how few the king’s troops were, the Goguryeo army made light of them and did not draw up its battle lines.
The king devised an unexpected stratagem and struck swiftly.
The Goguryeo army was crushed.
In the eleventh month of 521, the king sent an envoy across the sea to Liang to present a memorial.
The envoy’s ship crossed the Yellow Sea, bound for Jiankang, the Liang capital (today’s Nanjing, China).
In the twelfth month, the Emperor of Liang (Emperor Wu) granted King Muryeong the title “Great General Who Pacifies the East.”
In the second month of 523, the sixty-two-year-old king set out north for Hanseong.
The king called up the people of the districts north of the Han River to build Ssanghyeon Fortress, and returned in the third month.
In the fifth month of 523, King Muryeong died.
The Samguk Sagi does not say how old the king was.
His age was carved
on a stone tablet buried in the ground.
The king was laid in his tomb twenty-seven months later, in the eighth month of 525.
The new king, King Seong (Myeongnong), laid his father to rest in a tomb built of lotus-patterned bricks.
The king’s coffin was made of Japanese umbrella pine, a tree that grows only in the land of Wa across the sea.
And the tomb door was closed.
Once the queen was buried beside him four years later (529), the door never opened again.
Grass grew over the tomb, and trees grew.
Even those who surveyed the site in the 1930s took this hill for little more than the rise backing Tomb No. 6 next to it.
And so, some 1,400 years went by.
At the very start of the tablet, the tomb owner’s title and name were clearly carved.
It was the first time the owner’s name had been found in a royal tomb of the Three Kingdoms period.
As the news spread, reporters and onlookers swarmed in all night, and the excavation team hurried to collect the artifacts.
More than 4,600 artifacts were all brought out of the tomb in a single night.
The hurried excavation remained a lasting regret.
Even today, this is the only royal tomb of the Three Kingdoms period whose owner, and even the date of burial, are known from writing found inside it.
The king who raised up again
a kingdom shaken by the loss of Hanseong:
King Sama of Baekje — King Muryeong.
