Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/287

 COEEA SUBJECT, TO KITAN. 263 Chinese government, which was then veiy weak and badly conducted, he thought it best to acknowledge the suzerainty of Kitan. His messenger was, in 1012, well received by the Elitan, who expressed their pleasure in having Gaoli their tributary, and asked the king to come and make his submission in person. Suspecting they meant him no good, he declined the journey to Peking, or Yenking as it was called, on the score of illness. As he refused to pay homage in person, the Kitan demanded the restitution of the country west of the Yaloo, with its six cities of Hing, Tie, Dong, Long, Qwei, and Go, all chows, which they had formerly granted to the Gaoli. And as the latter refused to deliver them up, the Kitan prepared to take them by force. We have already glanced at the manner and causes of the successful establishment of the Mujun dynasty of Kin over so much of China. Before they came into collision with China, the Nujun, or men of Bohai, were necessarily thrgwn into contact with the Coreans. The country of the latter would seem a large kingdom to their Nujun neighbours during the period before 1114, when the latter crossed the SongarL Compared with the northern nomads, the settled, agricultural Coreans, would also seem a wealthy people, — ^though then, as now, they were poor as compared with China. Among those possessions which consti- tuted the wealth of Corea, was one article widely famed for generations before and after the twelfth century, — ^laige pearls of a size and brilliancy not to be equalled by the pearls of any country then known to China. These were called "Eastern Pearls,'' a name given to large pearls even now. The Nujun were well acquainted with the existence and the value of those pearls. One Nujun, hoping to derive personal profit from the state of ill-feeling between the Liao or Kitan and Corea^ — ^both countries being then much larger and more wealthy than his own, — ^went to the Court of Liao, and informed it that a large collection of those valuable pearls was stored up in a fort seven days journey to the east of Kaichow, the Corean capital That fort enclosed a city much more splendid even than the capital, and it stood in the vicinity of the waters where alone those