In Korea, Yi Song-gye moved his capital to Seoul, where he built a royal ancestral shrine called Chongmyo. This huge complex contains the world's largest wooden building and is included in UNESCO's World Heritage List. The Choson Dynasty adopted Confucianism as its officials doctrine, replacing Buddhism as the state religion.

About this time, both China's Ming rulers and Korea's Choson rulers began to close their borders to foreigners and to trade. Korea's sealed borders earned it the name of The Hermit Kingdom, and few outsiders knew much about Korean life and culture.

Under the Choson dynasty, Korea became a model Confucian state. During the reign of King Sejong the Great, a significant breakthrough in communication occurred – the invention of hangul in 1443. Hangul is a phonetic Korean script based on an alphabet. The Korean alphabet has earned great respect internationally for its rational simplicity. An emphasis on education and learning led to a growth of scholarly and popular literature. Korea also made advances in printing. The Chinese had invented non-metallic movable type in the eleventh century. Koreans improved on this invention, creating metallic movable type in print books as early as 1234. This invention occurred 200 years before Johannes Gutenberg printed the Bible with metallic movable type in Germany.

Korea Faces Foreign Pressure
In the late 16th century, 200 years of peace ended with Japanese invasions. Korea's Choson and China's Ming rulers eventually defeated the Japanese, but neither regained its former prosperity. In 1644, Manchurians invaders overthrew the Ming Dynasty and established a new dynasty, the Qing. The Qing demanded and received Korean allegiance as a tributary state.

Korea's isolation grew stricter, and social structure became more stratified. In 1653, 36 Dutch sailors were shipwrecked off the coast of Korea and were captured. Hendrik Hamel, one of these sailors escape from captivity in Korea, and wrote an eye-opening account about Korea for western readers called Description of the Kingdom of Corea.

During the next 200 years, French, British, Russian and American ships tried to open the Hermit Kingdom to trade but without success. The General Sherman, an American merchant schooner, was burned when it sailed up the Taedong River in Korea. In 1876, Japan forced Korea to sign the Kanghwa Treaty, giving it trading rights. Soon other imperialist powers also imposed treaties on Korea.

By the late 1800's, Japan was expanding its military power in Asia. After the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), and the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5), Japan gained a free hand to expand into the Korean peninsula. In 1910. It ended the Choson Dynasty, annexed Korea, and began a harsh 35-year rule over of the peninsula.

Japanese colonial rule lasted from 1910 to 1945. Japan expanded railroad transportation so that it could support Japanese military forces fighting China and Russia. Korean-owned companies were forced to send products like rice to Japan, causing severe hardships to Koreans. Koreans had to work dangerous jobs under conditions of forced labor. Culturally, Koreans suffered as well. The Korean language was forbidden in schools, and Koreans had to adopt Japanese names. Thousands of Korean girls and women were sent to serve as "comfort women," or prostitutes, for Japanese soldiers.