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Thus, after a severe fight which cost the Japanese twenty-three hundred men, they had to evacuate Pyong-yang and retreat towards Seoul, the army under Kato Kiyomasa retiring at the same time from the northeast and fighting its way back to the central route.
He agreed to an armistice of fifty days, during which the Japanese pledged themselves not to advance more than three miles northward of Pyong-yang while Chen proceeded to Peking to arrange terms of peace.
For the landing-place of these re-enforcements the town of Pyong-yang was adopted, being easily accessible by the Tadong River from the coast.
The reader has seen how that second phase fared. The Japanese commander at Pyong-yang never received any accession of strength. His force suffered constant diminution from casualties, and the question of commissariat became daily more difficult. . . . Japanese historians themselves admit the fact that no wise effort was made to conciliate the Korean people.
Their first response to Korea's appeal was to mobilize a force of five thousand men in the Liaotung peninsula, which force crossed the Yalu and moved against Pyong-yang, where the Japanese van had been lying idle for over two months. This occurred early in October, 1592. The incident illustrated China's confidence in her own superiority.
He took the view that since the Korean provinces were still offering desperate resistance, supplies could not be drawn from them, neither could the troops engaged in subjugating them be freed for service at the front. Therefore it was essential to await the consummation of the second phase of Hideyoshi's plan, namely, the despatch of re-enforcements and munitions by water to Pyong-yang.
She could now attack Talien, Port Arthur, and Weihaiwei, naval stations on the Liaotung and Shantung peninsulas, where strong permanent fortifications had been built under the direction of European experts. These forts fell one by one before the assaults of the Japanese troops as easily as the castle of Pyong-yang had fallen.
It may be broadly stated that Korea was then divided into three principalities: Shiragi in the south and east; Kudara in the centre and west, with its capital at the modern Seoul, and Koma in the north, having Pyong-yang for chief city.
Pyong-yang offered great facilities for defence. The Chinese massed there a force of seventeen thousand men, and made preparations for a decisive contest, building parapets, mounting guns, and strengthening the position by every device of modern warfare.
The last and most important took place shortly after the Japanese troops had seized Pyong-yang. It resulted in the sinking of over seventy Japanese vessels, transports and fighting ships combined, which formed the main part of a flotilla carrying reinforcements by sea to the van of the invading army.
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