As to the date of the invasion, however, it must have remained obscure: the Kojiki's narrative furnishes one clue. According to Korean history, an apparently unimportant descent upon Sinra (Shiragi) took place in A.D. 219; a more serious one in 233, when the Japanese ships were burned and their crews massacred, and a still more formidable one in 249, when a Sinra statesman who had brought on the invasion by using insulting language towards the sovereign of Japan in presence of a Japanese ambassador, gave himself up to the Japanese in the hope of appeasing their anger. They burnt him, and proceeded to besiege Keumsyong, the Sinra capital, but were ultimately beaten off. "No less than twenty-five descents by Japanese on the Sinra coast are mentioned in Korean history in the first five centuries of the Christian era, but it is impossible to identify any one of them with Jingo's expedition." [Aston.] Nevertheless, modern Japanese historians are disposed to assign the Jingo invasion to the year 364, when Nai-mul ruled Shiragi, from which monarch's era tribute seems to have been regularly sent to Yamato. Indeed the pages of the Nihongi which deal with the last sixty years of Jingo's reign are devoted almost entirely to descriptions of incidents connected with the receipt of tribute and the advent or despatch of envoys. The chronology is certainly erroneous. In no less than four several cases events obviously the same are attributed by the Korean annals to dates differing from those of the Nihongi by exactly two cycles; and in one important instance the Japanese work assigns to A.D. 205 an occurrence which the Tongkan* puts in the year 418. *Korean history. Its full title is Tong-kuk-lhong-kan.