Torches lit the riverbank as a column of people shuffled toward foreign banners. A local chief walked up and offered his people to the Han army like a commander signing over a town.
Wiman Joseon (위만조선) looked like a fortress, but it was a messy mix of settlers, local clans, and migrant elites. King Ugeo (우거) had crossed the Han court and Han envoys were killed, so an imperial army came in force. The fighting mattered, but the book that records this, the Book of Han (한서), keeps pointing at one moment that changed everything.
A commander called Nan Lü (남려) broke ranks and "surrendered" a mass of people to Han. The record says twenty eight wan, which readers later put as 280,000 souls. That number likely bundles whole villages, servants, and families. It reads like a mass protest by exit, people choosing the stability and pay of a big empire over the same local bosses who ruled them harshly.
Han took the offer. They carved the peninsula into commanderies, including Lelang Commandery (낙랑군), and set up new officials, coins, and law. The story in the Han text treats Nan Lü as a defector who got rewards and titles. For the ordinary people who moved, it meant new overlords, new taxes, and a sudden place in an imperial register—proof that surrender could buy safety, or at least a new kind of order.
People then walked into an empire to escape their king, which sounds like a modern protest where people vote with their feet. Text that to someone who thinks migration is a new idea.