In February 2015, South Korea's Constitutional Court issued a ruling that decriminalized adultery. Although rarely enforced or enforceable, there had been a law, passed just after the Korean War in 1953, that sentenced anyone found guilty of extramarital sexual relations to up to two years in jail. In its 2015 judgment, the court declared that such a law violated an individual's personal freedom, but not surprisingly there arose opposition from various interest groups that decried the potential harm to family life.

What became somewhat lost in the public debate, however, was the law's original intent, which was less about restricting liberties and more about enforcing greater gender equality. In fact, the larger motive was to overcome an institution hundreds, if not thousands, of years old: concubinage. For this historian of Korea, concubinage remains one of Korea's most interesting and long-standing historical problems. I would suggest, in fact, that most of the efforts to reform Korean family practices over the past century or so, including through legislation, have been related to the ingrained practices of concubinage.

Of course, Korea was hardly unique. Concubinage, the institutionalization of extramarital sexual relations between a privileged male and a subservient female, has been a universal phenomenon throughout world history. But the particular turns that this issue took in Korea illustrate some distinctive features of the country's history.

It is difficult to say when concubinage became such a normal aspect of Korean life, at least among the elites, but it probably dates back at least a thousand years, if not more. Indeed, so fixed was concubinage in Korean society that even the fervor of (Neo-)Confucianism, the comprehensive ideology behind the establishment and maintenance of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), could not weaken it. Like religio-ethical systems elsewhere after the ancient era, Confucianism appeared to favor the sanctity of marriage as central to the family system. In the early Joseon period, this meant that a privileged Korean man could no longer have more than one wife.

Instead, a woman who used to be considered a second or third wife became downgraded into the status of a concubine, and a concubine's children, who might be raised in their father's household, suffered legal and social discrimination.

In North Korea, history shapes just about everything. History refers here not only to the past, but also to people's historical views, or their interpretation of historical events and patterns. The orthodox North Korean perspective, the only one permitted, views most of Korean history as a series of struggles by the people. Internally, they fought cruel exploitation by the hereditary ruling elites and capitalists. The masses, including slaves, worked in the fields or engaged in other labor, but the fruits of their efforts were mostly stolen by the unproductive aristocrats, landlords and merchants. Government officials are also depicted as having squeezed the people by collecting burdensome taxes while offering few benefits in return. Skilled mostly in abstract and useless learning, such elites were too preoccupied with political intrigue to care for regular people or even to protect them from foreign invasions.

The magnitude of these external dangers is usually portrayed as threatening the very existence of the Korean nation. From the continent came attacks by the Chinese and by people of the northern Asian areas, stretching from Mongolia to Manchuria, who periodically controlled China. In the seventh century, the Chinese Sui dynasty tried to obliterate the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, and the Tang dynasty tried to grab the Korean peninsula from the Silla kingdom. In the Goryeo era of Korean history, various north Asian groups launched attacks, but the biggest force was the Mongols, who successfully conquered the country and ruled it indirectly for a century. Then in the Joseon era came the devastating Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century, followed quickly by the Manchu invasions, and then the Japanese again in the early twentieth century.

To North Koreans, throughout this long experience of suffering at the hands of both internal and external forces, the brave and virtuous common people, armed with their unshakable sense of patriotism and propriety, persisted and often resisted. Furthermore, they were sometimes led by great figures who rallied the people and guided them toward actions that saved the country.

This role of the great salvational hero is what makes the North Korean view of history so important to understanding North Korea.

It used to be said that unlike in most other democracies, in South Korea one's political identity depended on his or her opinion, ironically, of North Korea. Whether one was “conservative” or “liberal,” or something in between or beyond, reflected mostly one's stance regarding the North.

Of course, it was more complicated than this. The issues that shaped a South Korean citizen's political ideology and affiliation usually were numerous and worked in complex ways. Still, this somewhat conventional analysis seemed, at heart, correct. If so, it was easy to see where such a reality came from: the fierce state ideology of anti-communism during the decades of authoritarian rule.

The 2017 election of Moon Jae-in, however, raised further doubts about this picture of South Korean politics, because the presidential campaign took place amid high inter-Korean tensions, normally optimal electoral conditions for conservatives. As it turned out, one of the least anti-communist candidates won the presidency, and he did so convincingly. We could suggest that special circumstances—namely the process by which the previous president, Park Geun-hye, was removed from office—made this particular election an exception to the rule. That is, as long as national division stays in place, disagreements over North Korea will probably remain central to political alignment and behavior in South Korea.

I would argue, however, that the 2017 presidential election showed the rise of another major factor in South Koreans’ political identity and ideology: history. More specifically, since the turn of the twenty-first century, one's historical identification with the recent past, or one's sense of “ownership” over the nation's history, has become just as important. In short, historical views determine political views, and vice versa.

There is a generational aspect to this phenomenon. During the mass candlelight demonstrations beginning in the fall of 2016, for example, many middle-aged citizens expressed publicly their sense of ownership over the country's history, specifically the struggle for democracy. This was the notion that they must protect the democracy that they, as students and young adults, had sacrificed so much to gain. As the historical builders of democracy, they had to be its primary defenders.

In the summer of 2017, Koreans became upset because it appeared that China's President Xi Jinping might have told his American counterpart that their country “was once part of China.” But regardless of whether Xi actually said such an absurd thing, it's become apparent that the Chinese government, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has cultivated such a view to solve a fundamental problem with Chinese history itself. And the implications clearly extend to Korean history.

The common belief among Chinese, and many others, is that China boasts a long unbroken history as the Middle Kingdom that bestowed civilization to its neighbors while often ruling over them as well. But such a view is mostly just another modern nationalist myth, in this way similar to the idea that Korean history dates back five millennia.

Furthermore, much of Chinese history was not even Chinese. One of the fascinating features of “Chinese history” was that, throughout the cycles of dynastic rise and fall in political form, nearby peoples outside the kingdom's boundaries greatly influenced, and often controlled, the development of Chinese civilization. Following the primal, formative era, the earliest unified polity was the Qin dynasty of the third-century BCE, which militarily consolidated vast territories but quickly succumbed to the forces of what became the Han dynasty. Thereafter, for every “Chinese” dynastic order such as the Han, there was an extended period of fragmentation or rule by non-Chinese conquerors, such as the Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols and Manchus.

Even the famed Tang dynasty, which was contemporaneous with Korea's “Unified Silla” kingdom, was infused with a wide range of cultures, peoples and rulers, including from central Asia. Many of these smaller groups on the margins became absorbed into greater China, but others, such as those that formed what became Korea, were able to resist Chinese control, even as they were influenced by Chinese civilization. At the turn of the first millennium, the Han dynasty, which helped initiate the process of founding a coherent Chinese state, built scattered fortresses to anchor small colonies on parts of the Korean peninsula, but this was well before there was such a thing as Korea.

In Korea's dynastic era, natural disasters were treated as warnings and punishment for human behavior, which supported the general belief that people's lives were firmly tied to the heavens. This notion was especially convincing when calamities came in rapid succession, as nearly everyone, from the king and his ministers down to the masses, scrambled to figure out whose moral failings (usually the king and his ministers) or life difficulties (such as commoners’ hardships) might have been the cause. Clearly, heaven was expressing displeasure.

This brings to mind the droughts and locust swarms that appear as God's interventions in the Bible, but drawing such a connection between natural phenomena and a greater disturbance in the moral order was fairly standard in the premodern world. And as suggested by the biblical stories, in agricultural societies, the most feared consequence of heavenly punishment was crop failure. During the Joseon era in Korea, from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, meticulous government records noted countless instances of earthquakes (over a thousand, almost all minor), severe storms and flooding, and other natural disorders to which were assigned cosmological significance. But it was prolonged drought that raised the most alarm. In response, the Joseon government constructed ditches, levies and reservoirs to better prepare for the next emergency.

But for immediate relief, the king himself, along with officials around the country, undertook very public rituals to pray for rain. The state also released prisoners, rescinded tax and labor burdens, and took other measures to demonstrate remorse. The monarch's legitimacy, after all, was at stake: Given that his authority ultimately emanated from heaven, his personal shortcomings could be the reason for such suffering visited upon his people. As we now know, those natural disasters in the past had nothing to do with human activity. The irony, of course, is that today people indeed are a cause, for human-induced climate change has increased the severity of storms, floods and droughts. But the point is that people back then drew a false connection between the human and natural worlds.

A larger lesson to derive from this point is that the great wisdom of the past often was not very wise. The most influential social actors in the glorified past, such as royalty, the aristocracy, scholars, clerics and philosophers, were usually the same people who believed and taught that eclipses were omens of revolutions and typhoons signaled God's anger.

It has now been well over a century since Korea was last ruled by a single, native political system, and well over seven decades since liberation from Japanese colonial rule, which was declared on August 15, 1945. But did Korea truly gain liberation? This has been a nagging question since nearly the beginning, for it quickly became clear, after the initial euphoria, that one foreign ruler would be replaced by another.

The partition of the peninsula by the occupying Allied armies in the summer of 1945 would eventually lead to the eruption of the Korean War five summers later in June 1950. After millions of deaths, the armistice of July 1953 halted the fighting and solidified the national division that we still have today. This painful summer symmetry has always dampened a bit the annual observance of Liberation Day, or the “restoration of light” holiday (Gwangbokjeol). The connections between these events, after all, are inescapable. But in what way?

If Koreans had known back in 1945 that liberation would result in permanent national division, would they still have welcomed it? This is not a fair or realistic question, of course, but I would think that yes, most would have preferred such an outcome over the continuation of Japanese rule. Furthermore, while citizens of North Korea today might not share this view (one can never know), many if not most South Koreans see little room for uncertainty here. For them, the Korean War and national division were tragedies, to be sure, but over the long term, the “restoration of light” nourished the growth of a modern, free society, at least in the south.

To those who subscribe to this “brighter” view of liberation, August 15 should invite a double celebration, not only of freedom from Japanese rule in 1945, but also of the founding (geonguk) of the Republic of Korea, or South Korea, on the same date in 1948. In a ceremony filled with irony, on that day the government of South Korea was formally established in front of the huge building that had served as the headquarters of the Japanese colonial regime and the subsequent American military government. Symbolically, then, South Korea was being launched as the successor to those earlier states more than as a clean break from them.

Ongoing attempts by the People's Republic of China to smoothen relations with both South and North Korea remind us how complex and problematic these ties have been over the past several decades. But this relationship between the peninsula and the mainland extends back nearly two millennia, to an era when the modern notions of “China” and especially “Korea” did not necessarily apply.

Since then, Korea's relationship with China has been one of “love–hate,” oscillating from close alliance and peaceful cultural exchange to confrontation and bitter rivalry. Indeed, that Korea is still in existence is somewhat of a miracle, given the pressures that eventually extinguished the independent standing of most other smaller civilizations on China's periphery. But this survival, so central to Koreans’ sense of national identity, also depended at times on Chinese assistance, which reinforces the difficulty of passing judgment on China's historical impact on the peninsula.

Without China, there might not have been a need for early polities on the peninsula to cohere into a single state. Korea itself formed, and continually developed thereafter, in opposition to China—a quest to distinguish the peninsula's people and governing order from that of the Middle Kingdom—as much as in emulation. Without question, since earliest times Korea's elites and rulers drew inspiration, models and other cultural features from China, the fount of high civilization. But Chinese attempts to conquer or absorb the peoples of the peninsula generated a fierce resistance that gave birth to Korea itself.

This happened twice in the seventh century, which can be considered the originating era of Korea as a nation-state, or at least as a distinctive civilization and coherent polity. Goguryeo, which began centuries earlier on territory that encompassed today's Manchuria and northern Korea, had to fend off waves of Chinese attempts to pacify and conquer it. The largest such campaign took place, it appears, in 612, by China's Sui dynasty.

Goguryeo successfully beat back the Chinese that time, but it had to endure several more such attacks, and finally it succumbed not to China but rather to an alliance between China and a peninsular rival, Silla. In the mid-seventh century, Silla finally brought resolution to centuries of confrontation between the peninsular states.

In January 1896, the Korean government skipped over the final months of 1895 in order to adopt the Western solar calendar. It even took a new reign name for the monarchy, Geonyang (“Establishing the solar [calendar]”), to mark this occasion, as if to signal the rebirth of the country in the modern world. But when was Korea really born? In other words, when did Korean history begin?

As South Koreans continue to wrestle with competing interpretations of their history, it seems a good time to consider this basic question, even though it actually receives little attention. Perhaps this is because most Koreans do not believe there is any question about Korea's origins, or because of the opposite, that this issue is too contentious and controversial. But it is indeed worth exploring because it makes us think about how to conceive of “Korean history” itself. So below are some candidate dates for the beginning of Korean history, as well as the pros and cons regarding their historical validity:

2333 BCE. The fallback, conventional date, when the mythical founder of the Korean people, Dangun, was said to have been born on Mount Baekdu to establish the ancient kingdom of Joseon.

Pro: It is a good story that emphasizes Koreans’ common ancestry, an ancestry with ties to the heavens and dating back nearly 4,500 years, which makes it easy to just round up Korea's age to a convenient 5,000 years. With no evidence, the tale leaves little room for countering claims.

Con: There is no evidence. This story first appears in a book of supernatural tales from the thirteenth century, 3,500 years after the supposed event. It is also a bit embarrassing that any nation would consider this kind of account as anything but a fairy tale.

37 BCE. This was when the Goguryeo kingdom, one of the earliest polities on the peninsula with support from actual historical records, supposedly began through the birth of its founder, Jumong, who is said to have emerged from an egg.

Pro: Goguryeo is a good candidate for status as the originating state in the territory that became Korea, since the earliest Chinese accounts of various “barbarians” on the peninsula specifically describe Goguryeo as one of the most impressive (and colorful) groups.