Ri Jang Son was famous patriotic commander who greatly helped recapture the Walled City of Kyongju by inventing pigyokjinchonroe during the Imjin Patriotic War (1592–1598) in Korea.
Ri was born of a smith’s family. In his childhood he loved to follow his father to the smithy and play around the place. He copied his father, making and polishing something pretty well. Later, in his teens, he was capable of making anything exquisitely, displaying his unusual skill. This was widely known from mouth to mouth so that his name came to be on everyone’s lips in Hansong, the capital city of the feudal state, as well, and the local government office assigned him to make presents to be donated to the king.
When the aforesaid war broke out owing to the invasion by the Japanese aggressors, Ri joined a righteous volunteers’ army and was appointed as leader of the army’s cannon-making team. In the post he invented jinchonroe that means an earthshaking cannonball. Then, one day, Chol Sok, a newcomer, told him how the latter’s wife had been caught and murdered by the enemy, and resentfully said he wished to have a smaller jinchonroe to fire on the enemy’s position. At the moment Ri’s whole body stiffened, his face darkening.
Later, having changed his grief into courage, Ri set about making pigyokjinchonroe (a flying earthshaking cannonball). At first, he cast several bowl-sized cannonballs different from the previous large and heavy ones, put one of them into the muzzle of taewangupho, a kind of large-calibre cannon, and charged the ball with powder. And he tamped about 30 caltrops on the ball, attached a blasting fuse to it and lit it before launching. The test was a failure, though. Still, he kept trying this way or that, but all the results were not good. Now he found that the fire of the fuse went out during its flight. That was the cause of the failure. He, however, could not think of any alternative.
Struggling to find a way to solve the problem, he was one morning drawing water from a deep well by means of a bucket, when the well rope made him think of an idea. If a groove is cut around the cannonball and the fuse is stuffed in the groove with a screw cover fixed, the fuse will not fall out, he thought. He immediately set to and made pigyokjinchonroe in a brief time.
One August morning in 1592 there took place a test fire of the cannonball in the presence of many people. There was a loud bang, and the fired cannonball flew and fell on a target spot 800 steps away from the shooting ground. A little while later there was a blue flash, and the cannonball blew up with a terrific explosion, scattering up dusty lumps of earth in the air and fracturing trees in the middle. All the people at the shooting place let out shouts of admiration at once.
Afterwards, there was drawn up an attack plan to retake Kyongju by starting the attack with the firing of pigyokjinchonroe as the signal, and the battle ended in victory. After the battle such powerful cannonballs helped mow down the Japanese invaders in groups in other battles, striking terror into the atrocious aggressors.
“Pigyokjinchonroe was an original weapon. It is said that Ri Jang Son, head of a cannon-making team under Kungisi (a government agency responsible for making weapons), developed the cannonball. As an improved sort of jinchonroe, pigyokjinchonroe is designed to be fired with taewangupho across the wall into a fortress, and its distance of flight is 500 or 600 steps…. Japanese rogues at first ran away in horror from the cannonball that had fallen from the air. When there seemed to be no danger about the ball they, out of curiosity, gathered back around it and vied one another to have a look at it. At the very moment a flame rose from inside the ball, and with a terrible explosion, lots of its splinters scattered, killing about 30 of the Japanese. Those who were out of the harm from the splinters fell backward startled at the explosion. After rising back to their feet, they trembled saying it was work of God.” This is part of the historical book Jingbirok describing what happened during the aforementioned battle.
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