Joseon

Joseon was a Korean kingdom founded in 1392 by General Yi Seong-gye, who overthrew the preceding Goryeo dynasty and took the throne as King Taejo, establishing a dynasty that would rule a unified Korea for over five centuries until 1897. The kingdom adopted Confucianism as its guiding state ideology in place of the Buddhism favored under Goryeo, reorganizing law, education and the civil examination system for government officials around Confucian principles, and moved its capital to Hanseong, the city known today as Seoul. Joseon reached a celebrated cultural height under King Sejong the Great in the fifteenth century, who commissioned the creation of the Hangul alphabet in 1443 to give Korean a native writing system independent of Chinese characters. The kingdom endured devastating Japanese invasions under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590s and Manchu Qing invasions in the 1620s and 1630s, and after centuries as a tributary state within the Chinese-centered order, its final monarch, Gojong, proclaimed the state transformed into the Korean Empire in 1897, ending the Joseon period.