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"I still have twelve ships, and I am still alive. The enemy shall not take the western sea."

Yi Sun-sin passed the military examination at thirty-one — late, after falling from a horse and breaking his leg on his first attempt, which he splinted with a willow branch and finished the test on. His career then stalled repeatedly because he refused to flatter superiors or make the customary arrangements: he was demoted twice and once reduced to the ranks. In 1591 the prime minister Ryu Seong-ryong, an old childhood neighbour, pushed him into an obscure southern naval command over more senior objections. He spent the next year repairing ships, drilling crews, and building turtle ships for a war that the court had officially decided was not coming. When it came, he was the only Korean commander who was ready. Over six years he fought at least twenty-three engagements and won every one of them, usually outnumbered, against a navy built to board and grapple — while he fought an artillery war and simply never let them close. At Hansan Island he enveloped a fleet with the crane-wing formation and destroyed 59 of 73 ships without losing any, closing Japan's sea supply route and stopping the invasion by starving it. His own government arrested him in 1597 on a fabrication planted by Japanese agents, tortured him, and reduced him to a common soldier. Two months later, after his replacement lost virtually the entire fleet in a single night, they gave him back thirteen ships. He took them into the Myeongnyang strait against at least 133 and won. At Noryang, in the war's last hour, he was hit by an arquebus ball and told his nephew to keep beating the drum and not announce his death until the battle was over.

"I will assemble a mighty host and invade the country of the great Ming. I shall fill the sky with the light of my name."

The most extraordinary social ascent in Japanese history: born a peasant's son in Owari, Hideyoshi joined Oda Nobunaga as a sandal-bearer and ended as master of Japan. He was small, unprepossessing, and nicknamed 'monkey'; he was also the finest political operator of his age, and after Nobunaga's murder in 1582 he out-manoeuvred every rival and completed the unification by 1590. Then he had a problem: a hundred years of civil war had left him with the largest, most experienced, most heavily gunpowder-armed military establishment on earth, and nothing for it to do. Demobilising a class of professional warriors was more dangerous than employing them. He decided to conquer Ming China, with Korea as the road, and told the Koreans to either join him or be trampled. He appears to have genuinely believed he would rule from Beijing, and he assigned court positions in a Chinese empire he had not yet reached. He never set foot in Korea. He directed the war from Nagoya castle in Kyushu and from Japan, ordered Jinju destroyed to erase a personal humiliation, and demanded noses by the barrel as proof of kills. He died in 1598 with his armies bogged down and his dynasty doomed — his last recorded words worried about his five-year-old son, whom the Tokugawa destroyed within seventeen years. The invasion's only durable achievement was to exhaust the Ming, ruin Korea, and end his own house.

"It is easier to take a country than to feed an army in it."

A merchant's son from Sakai and a baptised Catholic — Christian name Agostinho — Konishi was Hideyoshi's most capable and least enthusiastic commander in Korea. He led the First Division ashore at Busan, took Seoul in twenty days and Pyongyang in two months, and then sat there watching his supplies fail because Yi Sun-sin had closed the sea behind him. He spent the rest of the war trying to end it. He and the Ming negotiator Shen Weijing conducted one of history's more remarkable frauds: each told his own master that the other side was surrendering. The Ming believed Hideyoshi was accepting vassal status; Hideyoshi believed he was being offered a Ming princess and half of Korea. When the Ming envoys finally arrived in 1596 to invest Hideyoshi as 'King of Japan', the deception collapsed in front of him and the second invasion followed. That Konishi kept it running for three years is a measure of how badly he wanted out. He loathed his co-commander Katō Kiyomasa, a militant Nichiren Buddhist who despised Christians, and their feud shaped the campaign as much as any enemy did. After Sekigahara in 1600 he was captured, and his faith forbade him suicide, so he was beheaded in Kyoto — the only major general of the war executed as a criminal.

"A man who does not train every day is not a warrior, whatever he calls himself."

Hideyoshi's cousin and one of his Seven Spears, Katō Kiyomasa was everything Konishi was not: a militant Nichiren Buddhist who hated Christians, a fortress-builder of genius, and a soldier who wanted the war. He drove the Second Division into the far north-east of Korea, crossed briefly into Manchuria, and captured two Korean princes. His feud with Konishi ran through the whole campaign — they competed for the road to Seoul, disagreed about the peace, and undermined each other to Hideyoshi. The rivalry outlived the war and helped split the Toyotomi camp at Sekigahara, where Katō sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu and Konishi did not, and Konishi was executed. He is remembered in Japan for the fortresses — Kumamoto castle is his, and he built it with the Korean sieges in mind, planting nut trees in the grounds and using edible taro stalks in the tatami as siege rations because he had nearly starved at Ulsan. In Korea he is remembered for the tiger hunts, the two captured princes, and the nose collecting. He died in 1611 shortly after brokering a meeting between Ieyasu and Hideyoshi's son, which has kept a poisoning rumour alive for four hundred years.

"I write this so that those who come after may know how it happened, and not let it happen again."

The Confucian scholar-official who held the Joseon state together while it disintegrated, and who is on this list mainly because of one appointment. In 1591 he pushed an obscure, twice-demoted officer named Yi Sun-sin into the Jeolla naval command over the objections of men with better connections. It was, on any reasonable accounting, the single most consequential personnel decision in Korean history. He had also argued for years that the Japanese were coming and that the country was unprepared, against a court that had sent two envoys to Japan and received two opposite reports and chose to believe the reassuring one. When the invasion came he ran the war effort: he organised supply for the Ming army, coordinated the guerrilla militias, and kept a fleeing king functioning as a government. He was forced out by factional enemies in 1598 on the very day Hideyoshi died, and went home to write the *Jingbirok* — the Book of Corrections — a brutally honest account of how his own government's factionalism, complacency, and contempt for military affairs had nearly destroyed the country. It is one of the great works of self-examination in any language, and it is the reason we know this war in the detail we do.

"Hold the hill. There is nowhere behind it worth standing."

Gwon Yul passed the civil examination at forty-six, late even by the standards of a system that rewarded patience, and was a middle-aged bureaucrat with no military reputation when the war began. He turned out to be Korea's best land commander, essentially because he understood two things the professionals did not: never fight the Japanese on open ground, and prepare the position before they arrive. He made his name at Haengju in March 1593, holding a hilltop earthwork with about 3,000 soldiers, monks, and civilians against roughly 30,000 Japanese attacking in nine successive waves. The defenders used hwacha — wheeled racks that fired over a hundred rocket-propelled arrows at once — and the slope made the arquebus far less decisive than it had been at Tangeumdae. The women of the fort carried stones to the walls in their aprons, which Korean still remembers in the phrase *haengju chima*. The Japanese abandoned Seoul within weeks. Gwon Yul was made commander-in-chief and spent the rest of the war doing what Korea could actually do: hold fortified ground, harass, and wait. He died in 1599, months after the last Japanese ship left.

"I will sail, since sailing is ordered."

Won Gyun is the war's cautionary tale and the reason Yi Sun-sin's story is a tragedy rather than a triumph. A naval commander of the neighbouring Gyeongsang province, he lost most of his own fleet in the opening days — by several accounts scuttling it himself — then fought alongside Yi in the early victories and spent the following years insisting to the court that the credit was his. The factional politics of Seoul made him useful. When Japanese agents planted a false report that a Japanese general could be intercepted at sea, Yi read it as a trap and refused to sail; Won Gyun's faction used the refusal to destroy him. Yi was arrested, tortured, and reduced to the ranks, and Won Gyun got the fleet he had wanted for five years. He took it out in August 1597, was ambushed at night at Chilcheollyang, and lost virtually the entire Korean navy — five years of shipbuilding and training gone in a few hours. He was killed in the rout. Thirteen ships escaped, and with them Korea's only remaining chance, which the court handed back to the man it had just tortured.

"Shall we cross the Yalu, then, and throw ourselves upon the Emperor?"

Seonjo had the misfortune to rule Korea during the worst catastrophe in its history and the additional misfortune of being unequal to it. His court was consumed by factional struggle between Easterners and Westerners; when he sent two envoys to Japan in 1590 to assess Hideyoshi's intentions they returned with opposite reports along factional lines, and he chose to believe the one that required nothing of him. When the invasion came he abandoned Seoul within three weeks and fled to Uiju on the Chinese border, seriously proposing to cross the Yalu and seek asylum in China — which would have ended the dynasty. His own subjects burned the palaces before the Japanese arrived. What saved him was the Ming intervention, the guerrilla militias that rose without him, and the navy of a man he later had tortured. His treatment of Yi Sun-sin is the part history has not forgiven: he believed the planted intelligence, arrested the one commander who had never lost, and appointed the rival who lost everything. Afterwards he was notably reluctant to reward the men who had saved the kingdom, and generous to the officials who had fled with him. He died in 1608 with the country wrecked and rebuilding.

"Korea is the fence of Liaodong, and Liaodong is the arm of Beijing."

The son of the great frontier general Li Chengliang and a veteran of the Ningxia rebellion, Li Rusong brought 43,000 Ming troops into Korea in the winter of 1592 with something neither Korea nor Japan had: a proper siege train of heavy cannon. At Pyongyang he blasted the walls, drove Konishi's starving division out into the snow, and retook the north in days. Then he outran his artillery. Pushing toward Seoul with his cavalry ahead of the guns, he was ambushed in narrow muddy ground at Byeokjegwan by a much larger force and barely escaped with his life. He pulled back to Kaesong and refused to fight again, preferring negotiation — and the war froze for four years. He had proved the Japanese could be beaten with guns and then demonstrated what happened without them, in the space of seven weeks. He is a contested figure in Korea: he saved the country and he also treated it as a Ming protectorate, was contemptuous of Korean commanders, and let his troops live off a land already stripped bare. He was killed fighting Mongols on the northern frontier in 1598, months before the war he had frozen finally ended.

"If we must go back, we shall go back through them."

The Satsuma lord was fifty-seven when the invasion began and the most feared Japanese field commander in Korea. His men were called the Oni-Shimazu — the demon Shimazu — and at Sacheon in 1598 he broke a Ming-Korean army several times his size with a counter-attack out of his own gate after a gunpowder explosion threw the besiegers into confusion. His troops took thousands of noses from the field. That victory was won six weeks after Hideyoshi had already died in Kyoto, which is the war in a sentence: a brilliant tactical success in a campaign that was already over and that nobody in Korea had been told about. He fought at Noryang covering the evacuation and got most of his men home. He went on to Sekigahara in 1600, where he found himself on the losing side, surrounded, and performed the most famous retreat in Japanese history — charging straight *through* the Tokugawa centre and out the other side, losing all but around eighty of his men. He survived to negotiate terms and Satsuma kept its lands, which is why the province was still powerful enough, 268 years later, to help overthrow the Tokugawa in the Meiji Restoration.