Gwanggaeto Stele
廣開土王碑
composition: secure
witness: the stele itself, standing at its original site near Ji'an; the earliest surviving scholarly rubbings date to the 1880s
A seven-meter stele erected in AD 414 by King Jangsu for his father Gwanggaeto the Great records, in roughly 1,800 Classical Chinese characters, the Goguryeo kingdom's founding legend, Gwanggaeto's military campaigns, and the households assigned to tend his tomb, making it Korea's major early historical inscription; its account of Goguryeo campaigns against Baekje, Silla, and forces described as Wae is read very differently by Korean, Japanese, and Chinese historians, and the passage bearing on Wae involvement has additionally been damaged in ways that further complicate any reading, so the stele's political interpretation is treated here as genuinely disputed even though the object and its date are not.
- Korea's major surviving early historical inscription, erected AD 414 for King Gwanggaeto
- records Goguryeo's founding legend, military campaigns, and royal tomb-keeping households
- a damaged passage on the polity the text calls Wae remains a live, disputed philological and political question
- rediscovered by scholars only in the late nineteenth century after a long gap in scholarly attention
Standing near the former Goguryeo capital at Ji'an on the middle Yalu River, the Gwanggaeto Stele was erected in AD 414 by King Jangsu to commemorate his father, King Gwanggaeto, whose long reign (391-413) greatly expanded Goguryeo's territory. Its roughly 1,800 characters open with the kingdom's mythic founding by Jumong, list Gwanggaeto's military campaigns against Baekje, Silla, and a power the text calls Wae, and close by naming the households responsible for maintaining the royal tomb. Rediscovered by Chinese and Korean scholars only in the late nineteenth century after centuries of obscurity, the stele's brief but damaged passage concerning Wae has been read since the Japanese colonial period as evidence for a Japanese military presence on the peninsula, a reading Korean scholars have long contested on both philological and political grounds; no reading of that passage commands consensus.
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