Seismicity and stress state in the Korean peninsula are studied using the catalogue of historical earthquakes and that from the seismological observations before the 1960s, with the aid of instrumental catalogue up to 1995. It seems that the completeness of the historical catalogue has a significant enhancement during the first two hundred years of the Yi dynasty, i.e., from the 1400s to the 1600s. From then on the catalogue may be regarded as near to complete for strong earthquakes in an overall sense. From the distribution of strong earthquakes, three seismic zones may be identified. From the south to the north, those are the southern seismic zone (남부지진대), the Seoul-Pyongyang seismic zone (서울-평양지진대), and the northern seismic zone (북부지진대). The mechanisms of some earthquakes obtained using first motion read- ings are reevaluated with a grid testing method. The results indicate that the compressional axis is nearly horizontal along the EW direction.