Lelang Commandery

[2][3] South Korean scholars have described its administrative areas as being limited to the Pyongan and Hwanghae regions, whose southern bounds lie roughly 75 miles north of the Han River.

At the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, Gongsun Du, appointed as the Governor of Liaodong in 184, extended his semi-independent domain to the Lelang and Xuantu commanderies.

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.

The Zizhi 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 the Xianbei warlord of Former Yan Murong Hui.

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.

Towards the end of the 4th century, in order to focus on the growing threat of Baekje and having checked the power of Former Yan in Liaodong, Goguryeo began to actively strengthen and govern the city.

[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 by Emperor Wu of Han after he defeated Gojoseon in 108 BCE.

However, Bak Jiwon (born 1737), a Silhak scholar who visited Qing dynasty in 1780, claimed that the location of commandries were in Liaodong area in his The Jehol Diary.

[17][better source needed] Ri Ji Rin (Lee Ji Rin), a North Korean historian who obtained his Ph.D. in history from Peking University in China, suggests in Research on Ancient Korea that based on the initial records of Chinese texts and archaeological findings in Liaodong area, the Han Commanderies were located in Liaodong 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.