Samguk Sagi - Background

Background

In taking on the task of compiling (this term is more accurate than "writing" because much of the history is taken from earlier historical records) the Samguk Sagi Kim Busik was consciously modeling his actions on Chinese Imperial traditions, just as he modeled the history’s format after its Chinese forebears. Specifically, he was harking back to the “Grand Historian” himself, Sima Qian (ca. 145-90 BCE) of the former Han Dynasty (206 BCE-24 CE), the title of whose singular history of China, the Shi ji (Korean sagi), Kim Busik adopted for his own work. Adopted as well from Chinese historiographical tradition was the classic four-part division of the standard dynastic history into Annals (bongi, 本紀), Tables (pyo, 表), Monographs (ji, 志), and Biographies (yeoljeon, 列傳).

There were various motivating factors behind the compilation of the Samguk Sagi in the 12th century. These may roughly be categorized as ideological and political. The ideological factors are made manifest in the work's preface, written by Kim Busik, where the historian states,

"Of today’s scholars and high-ranking officials, there are those who are well-versed and can discuss in detail the Five Classics 五經 and the other philosophical treatises...as well as the histories of Qin and Han, but as to the events of our country, they are utterly ignorant from beginning to end. This is truly lamentable."

In this quote can be discerned two clear motives. One was to fill the vast gap in knowledge concerning Korea's Three Kingdom Era. Though each of the three kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla had apparently produced their own histories these were largely lost in the continual wars and the fall of Goguryeo and Baekje and the dispersal of their records. The other motive was to produce a history that would serve to educate native Korean literati in native history, and provide them with Korean exemplars of Confucian virtues. This was especially important in mid-Goryeo as that dynasty became increasingly Confucianized.

But there were other factors not so clearly discerned. In Chinese tradition the compilation of a dynastic history also served political ends. The dynastic history was written by the succeeding dynasty and the very act of writing it served to illustrate that the succeeding dynasty had inherited the mandate to rule from its predecessor. In this context it should be remembered that the compilation of the Samguk Sagi was an officially sponsored undertaking, commissioned by the Goryeo king, with the members of its compilation staff approved by the central bureaucracy. As stated earlier, one aspect of its purpose would be to educate scholars and officials of the Confucianized bureaucracy in their native heritage, and native potential for attaining Confucian virtue. However, the fact that "native heritage" is primarily interpreted by the Samguk Sagi to mean "Three Kingdoms heritage" brings us to the work’s ostensibly broader purpose, and that was to promote Three Kingdoms, in contrast to the competing neighbors like Buyeo, Mahan, Gaya, which were absorbed into Three Kingdoms, as the orthodox ruling kingdoms of Korea, and to thus solidify the legitimacy and prestige of the Goryeo state, as Three Kingdoms’s rightful successor. In this way it helped confer the idea of zhengtong 正統, or "orthodox line of succession", upon the new dynasty. Though this objective was not directly stated in the memorial Kim Busik submitted in 1145, the intent was clearly understood. It was with just such intent that Goryeo's King Injong tapped Kim Busik to compile the history of the Three Kingdoms. Goryeo’s quest, through the writing of the Samguk Sagi, to secure its legitimacy, its carrying on of the "mantle of authority" (or Mandate of Heaven) from Three Kingdoms, meant as a necessary consequence that the compilers of the Samguk Sagi, unlike the Jewang Ungi or the Goryeo Dokyung (高麗圖經), emphasized United Silla, the last survivor among the Three Kingdoms, and ignored Balhae.