May 25, 1592 · Southeastern Korea Theater

Konishi's First Division came ashore at Busan and demanded passage to China. The garrison commander Jeong Bal refused and was killed with his men; at Dongnae, Song Sang-hyeon wrote on a wooden placard, 'It is easy to die, but hard to let you pass,' and died defending the wall. Both fortresses fell in a day.

June 7, 1592 · Chungju, central Korea Theater

Sin Rip, Korea's most respected general, abandoned the defensible Choryeong pass and chose to fight on the plain at Tangeumdae, where his heavy cavalry could charge — with the Han river at his back. Konishi's arquebusiers shot the horsemen down in the open ricefields. The army was annihilated against the river and Sin Rip drowned himself.

June 12, 1592 · Seoul Theater

King Seonjo abandoned the capital and fled north toward the Chinese border. The Japanese entered Seoul twenty days after landing at Busan and found much of it already burning — set alight by its own people, who had broken into the palaces and burned the slave registries and the archives before the enemy arrived.

June 16, 1592 · South coast, Geoje Island Theater

While the land war collapsed, a provincial naval commander who had spent the previous year repairing ships and drilling crews that nobody thought would be needed took his fleet to Okpo and destroyed 26 Japanese vessels without losing one. It was the first Korean victory of the war.

July 8, 1592 · South coast Theater

Yi feigned a retreat to draw the Japanese out of a fortified harbour, then turned on them in open water — and committed the geobukseon, the turtle ship, for the first time: a low, ram-bowed vessel with a roofed deck covered in iron spikes, cannon firing from every side, and a dragon's head at the prow belching smoke. The Japanese could not board it, and boarding was how Japan fought at sea.

August 14, 1592 · South coast, Gyeonnaeryang strait Theater

Yi lured Wakizaka's fleet out of the narrow Gyeonnaeryang strait with six ships, then deployed into the hakikjin — the crane wing — a concave crescent that enveloped the Japanese column in open water and brought every Korean gun to bear at once. Fifty-nine of seventy-three Japanese ships were destroyed. Yi lost none.

January 8, 1593 · Northern Korea Theater

Ming China finally intervened in force — 43,000 men under Li Rusong, with a siege train of heavy cannon far better than anything either Korea or Japan had. They blasted Pyongyang's walls, drove Konishi's starving First Division out into a winter retreat, and took back the north in a matter of days.

February 27, 1593 · North of Seoul Theater

Li Rusong, overconfident after Pyongyang, pushed toward Seoul with his cavalry ahead of his artillery and was ambushed in narrow, muddy ground at Byeokjegwan by a much larger Japanese force. His horsemen could not manoeuvre; he barely escaped, and pulled back north to Kaesong.

March 14, 1593 · Hill fort north-west of Seoul Theater

Gwon Yul held a hilltop earthwork with about 3,000 men — soldiers, monks, and civilians — against perhaps 30,000 Japanese, who attacked in nine successive waves. The defenders used hwacha, wheeled racks firing over a hundred rocket-propelled arrows at once, and threw the attacks back all day. The women of the fort carried stones in their aprons to the walls; the aprons are remembered in the name *haengju chima*.

July 27, 1593 · South-central Korea Theater

Hideyoshi had been humiliated when Jinju held out against him the previous year, and he ordered it taken and everyone in it killed. Ninety-three thousand Japanese besieged perhaps 6,000 defenders and 60,000 civilians who had crowded inside. The walls were undermined and collapsed in the rain after nine days, and the city was destroyed — soldiers, civilians, and, by several accounts, even the animals.

August 28, 1597 · South coast Theater

Japanese agents fed Seoul a false report that a Japanese general could be intercepted at sea; Yi Sun-sin, reading it as a trap, refused the order to sail. He was arrested, tortured, stripped of rank, and reduced to a common soldier. His rival Won Gyun took the fleet out, was ambushed at night at Chilcheollyang, and lost virtually all of it. Won Gyun was killed. Thirteen ships escaped.

October 26, 1597 · Myeongnyang strait Theater

Ordered to abandon the navy and fight on land, Yi replied that he still had thirteen ships and that as long as he lived the enemy would not take the western sea. He drew a Japanese fleet of at least 133 warships into the Myeongnyang strait — a channel a few hundred metres wide where the tide runs at ten knots and reverses. The Japanese could only enter a few ships abreast, the current wrecked their formation, and Yi's thirteen ships destroyed over thirty of them. He lost none.

December 1597 – January 1598 · South-east coast Theater

A Ming-Korean army trapped Katō Kiyomasa in an unfinished fortress at Ulsan in the middle of winter. His men ate the walls' horses, then paper, then drank their own urine; hundreds froze. He held for twelve days until a relief force arrived and the allies withdrew with heavy losses.

October 30, 1598 · South coast Theater

A large Ming-Korean army assaulted Shimazu Yoshihiro's fortress at Sacheon. A gunpowder explosion in the allied lines threw them into confusion and Shimazu counter-attacked out of the gate and routed them. His men took thousands of noses as trophies.

December 16, 1598 · Noryang strait Theater

Hideyoshi was dead and the Japanese were evacuating. Yi and the Ming admiral Chen Lin refused to let them leave unpunished and ambushed the withdrawal fleet in the Noryang strait at night. Some 200 of 500 Japanese ships were destroyed. At dawn, in the pursuit, Yi Sun-sin was hit by an arquebus ball. He told his nephew to beat the drum and not announce his death until the fighting was over, and died.