Chungcheongnam-do historical timeline

This province was the heartland of one of Korea’s Three Kingdoms, and it has spent the centuries since living in its shadow.

Baekje

Founded around 18 BC, the kingdom controlled the Korean south-west for nearly seven hundred years. It was the most outward-looking of the three — trading with China, and transmitting Buddhism, writing, architecture and bronze-casting to Japan, where Baekje craftsmen built temples that still stand. Its court culture was refined and its metalwork extraordinary.

Two capitals

Under pressure from Goguryeo the court moved south to Gongju in 475, then to Buyeo in 538, where it built a planned capital with palaces, temples and gardens.

660

A combined Silla and Tang Chinese force took Buyeo. The kingdom fell, the court was deported to China, and a restoration attempt with Japanese support was crushed at sea in 663. Baekje ceased to exist, and much of what is known about it comes from archaeology rather than from records.

Muryeong’s tomb

In 1971 workmen laying drainage at Gongju broke into an undisturbed brick-vaulted royal tomb containing over four thousand objects and, uniquely, an inscription naming the occupant — King Muryeong, who died in 523. It transformed Baekje scholarship overnight.

Under Joseon

After unification the province became administrative farmland supplying the capital, governed from Hongju and Gongju, with grain shipped north along the coast. Its low hills and good soil made it wealthy in a quiet way, and the Confucian academies and clan villages that survive in the countryside date from this long, undramatic period.

Haemi

The Joseon fortress here was used in the nineteenth century to imprison and execute Catholics; over a thousand died, and the site is now a place of pilgrimage.