TheLelang Commandery was acommandery of theHan dynasty established after it had conqueredWiman Joseon in 108 BC and lasted untilGoguryeo conquered it in 313.^[1] The Lelang Commandery extended the rule of theFour Commanderies of Han as far south as theHan River in present-daySouth Korea.^[2][3] South Korean scholars have described its administrative areas as being limited to thePyongan andHwanghae regions, whose southern bounds lie roughly 75 miles north of the Han River.^[4]

In 108 BC,Emperor Wu of theHan dynasty conquered the area underKing Ugeo, a grandson ofKing Wiman. The Emperor set up Lelang,Lintun,Xuantu andZhenfan, known as theFour Commanderies of Han in the northernKorean peninsula andLiaodong peninsula. TheBook of Han records Lelang belonged toYouzhou, located in northwesternGojoseon consisted of 25prefectures, 62,812 houses, and the population was 406,748.^[5][6] Its capital, then the prefecture of Joseon (朝鮮縣, 조선현), was located at modernP'yŏngyang. (Rakrang 樂浪/락랑, a district in central P'yŏngyang today, is named after Lelang.)^[7]

After Emperor Wu's death, Zhenfan and Lintun were abolished and Xuantu was moved toLiaodong. Some prefectures of the abolished commanderies were incorporated into Lelang. Lelang after the consolidation is sometimes called "Greater Lelang commandery". Since Lelang became too large, the Defender of the Southern Section (南部都尉) was set up to rule the seven prefectures which formerly belonged to Zhenfan. Before that, the Defender of the Eastern Section (東部都尉) was set up to rule former Lintun's seven prefectures.

Immigrants mainly fromYan andQi settled in the formerGojoseon lands and brought with themChinese culture. Among them, the Wang clan, whose ancestor is said to have fled there from Qi in the 2nd century BC, became powerful.

While the Han dynasty was taken over byWang Mang, Wang Tiao (王調) started a rebellion and tried to secede from China. In 30 AD, the rebellion was stopped by Wang Zun (王遵), whomEmperor Guangwu appointed as governor. The Han dynasty reasserted its authority over Lelang in the late 1st and 2nd centuries.^[6] However, the shortage of human resources caused by the turmoil resulted in the abolishment of the seven eastern prefectures. The administration was left to theDongye natives, whose chiefs were conferred as marquises.

At the end of theEastern Han dynasty,Gongsun Du, appointed as the Governor ofLiaodong in 184, extended his semi-independent domain to the Lelang and Xuantu commanderies. His sonGongsun Kang separated the southern half from the Lelang commandery and established theDaifang commandery sometime between 204 and 220.^[6] As a result, the Lelang commandery reverted to its original size.

In 236, under the order ofEmperor Ming ofCao Wei,Sima Yicrushed the Gongsun family and annexed Liaodong, Lelang and Daifang to Wei. Sima Yi did not encourage frontier settlers to continue their livelihoods in the Chinese northeast and instead ordered households who wished to return to coastal and central China to do so, evacuating the region of Chinese settlers. TheJin Shu records the number of households in the Korean commanderies of Lelang and Daifeng as 8,600 households, less than a sixth of the figures given in theHou Han Shu for Lelang (which included Daifeng). Liaodong would be out of Chinese hands for centuries due to the lack of Chinese presence there as a result of the policies the Wei court adopted for the commanderies after the fall of the Gongsun family.^[8]

Lelang was then inherited by the Jin dynasty. Due to bitter civil wars, Jin was unable to control its holdings within the northern section of the Korean peninsula at the beginning of the 4th century and was no longer able to dispatch officials to the frontier commanderies, which were maintained by the dwindling local population of remaining Han Chinese residents. TheZizhi Tongjian states that Zhang Tong (張統) of Liaodong, Wang Zun (王遵) of Lelang and over one thousand households decided to break away from Jin and submit to theXianbei warlord ofFormer YanMurong Hui. Murong Hui relocated the remnants of the commandery to the west within Liaodong.Goguryeo annexed the former territory of Lelang in 313. Goguryeo ended Chinese rule over any part of the Korean peninsula by conqueringLelang in 313. After Lelang's fall, some commandery residents may have fled south to the indigenous Han polities there, bringing with them their culture that spread to the southern part of the Korean peninsula. With the collapse of the commanderies after four centuries of Chinese rule, Goguryeo and the native polities in the south that becameBaekje andSilla began to grow and develop rapidly, heavily influenced by the culture of theFour Commanderies of Han.^[9][10]

Goguryeo absorbed much of what was left of Lelang through its infrastructure, economy, local inhabitants, and advanced culture. Unable to govern the region directly and form a new political center immediately, Goguryeo began to consolidate authority by replacing previous government administrators with its own appointed officials, mostly refugees and exiles from China, the most famous being Dong Shou (冬壽) who was entombed atAnak Tomb No. 3, overtly retaining the previous administrative system of Lelang. In 334 Goguryeo established the fortress and city of Pyongyang-song within the center of the former commandery. Towards the end of the 4th century, in order to focus on the growing threat ofBaekje and having checked the power ofFormer Yan in Liaodong, Goguryeo began to actively strengthen and govern the city. In 427 Goguryeo moved its capital toPyongyang from its former capital ofJi'an as the new political center of the kingdom in order to administer its territories more effectively.^[11]

In theNorth Korean academic community and some parts of theSouth Korean academic community, theHan dynasty's rule in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula have been denied. Proponents of this revisionist theory claim that the Lelang Commandery actually existed outside of the Korean Peninsula, and place them somewhere on theLiaodong Peninsula instead.^[12]

The characterization of Japanese historical and archaeological findings in Korea as imperialist forgeries owes in part to those scholars' discovery of the Lelang Commandery—by which the Han dynasty administered territory near Pyongyang—and insistence that this Chinese commandery had a major impact on the development of Korean culture.^[13] Until the North Korean challenge, it was universally accepted that Lelang was a commandery established byEmperor Wu of Han after hedefeated Gojoseon in 108 BCE.^[14] To deal with the Han dynasty tombs, North Korean scholars have reinterpreted them as the remains of Gojoseon or Goguryeo.^[13] For those artifacts that bear undeniable similarities to those found in Han China, they propose that they were introduced through trade and international contact, or were forgeries, and "should not by any means be construed as a basis to deny the Korean characteristics of the artifacts".^[15] The North Koreans also say that there were two Lelangs, and that the Han actually administered a Lelang on theLiao River on theLiaodong peninsula, while Pyongyang was an "independent Korean state" of Lelang, which existed between the 2nd century BCE until the 3rd century CE.^[14][16] The traditional view of Lelang, according to them, was expanded by Chinese chauvinists and Japanese imperialists.^[14]

These hypotheses are considered authoritative in the North Korean academic community, which is supported by some historians in South Korea, but this theory is not recognized at all in the academic circles of theUnited States,China andJapan.^{[note 1]} The majority of Korean scholars from theGoryeo andJoseon dynasties considered the location of Lelang county somewhere around today's Pyongyang area based on the Korean history recordSamguk sagi which referred to the Chinese records on the Han commandries. However,Bak Jiwon (born 1737), aSilhak scholar who visitedQing dynasty in 1780, claimed that the location of commandries were inLiaodong area in hisThe Jehol Diary.^{[17][better source needed]} Ri Ji Rin (Lee Ji Rin), a North Korean historian who obtained his Ph.D. in history fromPeking University in China, suggests inResearch on Ancient Korea that based on the initial records of Chinese texts and archaeological findings inLiaodong area, the Han Commanderies were located inLiaodong Peninsula.^[18] South Korea Historian Yoon, Nae-Hyun also suggests that the Han commanderies were not in Korean peninsula, claiming that there is no archaeological evidence.^[19]

•  
  Four Commanderies of Han withJin in 106 BCE
•  
  Four Commanderies of Han in 3 CE

• Daifang commandery
• Canghai Commandery
• Nakrang Kingdom
• Protectorate General to Pacify the East

• Barnes, Gina L. (2001),State Formation in Korea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives, Routledge