Category: Publications

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Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China

Book Cover
Wang, Sixiang. 2023. Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China. New York: Columbia University Press.
 

For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.

Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea’s rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/boundless-winds-of-empire/9780231556019

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Chosŏn’s Office of Interpreters: The Apt Response and the Knowledge Culture of Diplomacy

2020 “Chosŏn’s Office of Interpreters: The Apt Response and the Knowledge Culture of Diplomacy.” The Journal for the History of Knowledge.

https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/11164

Abstract:

From 1392 until its dissolution in 1894, Chosŏn Korea’s Office of Interpreters managed diplomatic relations with its vastly more powerful Ming and Qing neighbors. The Office was originally conceived out of a bureaucratic strategy to formalize the training of its interpreters and manage the volatile knowledge they possessed. This bureaucratizing of diplomacy created a distinct socio-economic niche for these interpreters, facilitating their social reproduction. This paper argues that a distinct culture of knowledge also emerged in this process. Beyond language, interpreters also translated between multiple domains of knowledge. As experts of diplomatic protocol, they served as informants to their social and administrative superiors. As scholars, they produced compendia and handbooks that made their office legible to outsiders. As specialists, they asserted the dignity of their craft. And as diplomats, they were tasked with furnishing the “apt response” that moved between local exigency and the demands of state ideology. Herein lies the central dilemma of bureaucratic knowledge: the skill to do so required both cultivated erudition as well as accumulated experience, but its timely execution could not be legislated through bureaucratic rules—a tension between the desire to control and the need to preserve agency. The paper deliberately locates bureaucracy in a domain (diplomacy), place (East Asia), and a time (premodern) that was not supposed to ‘have’ bureaucracy in order to dispute the casual conflation of bureaucratization with modernization that has obscured the Korean Office of Interpreters in the global history of diplomacy.

 

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Compiling diplomacy: record-keeping and archival practices in Chosŏn Korea

2019 “Compiling diplomacy: record-keeping and archival practices in Chosŏn Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies (2019) 24 (2): 255–287

The Chosŏn court kept meticulous records of its interactions with their Ming, and later, their Qing neighbors. These materials, especially those that predate the nineteenth century, survive not in the form of original materials but rather as entries in court-sponsored compilations. For instance, the monumental Tongmun hwigo, published in 1788, categorizes diplomatic activity according to areas of policy concern. Its organizational scheme, handy for a Chosŏn official searching for relevant precedents, has also provided ready material for historical case studies. What has been less appreciated, however, are how such records came into being in the first place. By interrogating the status of these compilations as “archives,” this article follows how diplomatic documents were produced, used, and compiled as both products and instruments of diplomatic practice. In reading these materials as instruments of knowledge, rather than mere sources of historical documentation, this essay also makes the case for going beyond diplomatic history as interstate relations and towards a cultural and epistemic history of Korean diplomatic practice.

https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-7686588

Errata

  • pg. 262 "chinch’ŏngp’yo 陳請表 –> "chinjŏngp’yo 陳情表
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Korean Eunuchs as Imperial Envoys: Relations with Chosŏn through the Zhengde Reign

2019 “Korean Eunuchs as Imperial Envoys: Relations with Chosŏn through the Zhengde Reign.” Chapter 23 in The Ming World, edited by Kenneth Swope

Introduction excerpt:

The usual way to describe Ming relations with Korea is through the notion of the “tributary system.” The Ming emperor, with the moral and cultural authority as a universal ruler of “all-under-heaven,” enforces a China-centered world order by investing foreign rulers as vassal-kings, with the expectation that they render obeisance through regular tribute missions. This formula for understanding pre-nineteenth century diplomacy in East Asia has received its fair share of criticism since its influential scholarly articulation in the work of John King Fairbank.[1] But for being overly general, anachronistic, Sinocentric, reductively functionalist, and culturally essentialist, its hold on Ming-Korea relations nevertheless remains tenacious. Its tenacity reflects in part the utility of the “tributary system” as an analytical framework for scholars and the malleability of tributary practices and institutions, which were used in flexible ways by both parties for domestic legitimation and foreign relations..[2]

Korean embassies were also notable for the frequency, regularity, and intensity of participation in Ming tributary practices. They arrived in the Ming capital at least three times a year. Unlike most other groups along the Ming’s maritime and land frontier, the Korean court also professed (at least in the context of these embassies) shared cultural values and an ideological commitment to Ming claims of universal sovereignty. Both countries were administered by a Confucian elite who could communicate with one another through literary Chinese (also referred to as classical Chinese or literary Sinitic). In other words, whatever the faults of the “tributary system” as a descriptor in general, the Ming-Korea case seems to fit the bill as a “paradigmatic”, if one-of-a-kind, example of tributary relations, with Korea stereotyped as imperial China’s most loyal vassal.[3]

This stereotype has its origins in historical Chinese perceptions of what Korea meant to for the imperial project. The primary narrative of Ming relations with Korea that could be gleaned official imperial historiography concerns precisely matters of imperial legitimacy. When Korea appears in the laconic entries of the Ming Veritable Records, it is usually in the context of routine tribute embassies, especially those who arrived to participate in the New Year’s rituals. On the other hand, the detail regarding the few years of the Imjin War of 1592–1598, when the Ming defended the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) of Korea against the invasion launched by the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) contrasts starkly with the terse coverage of the preceding two centuries.[4] The considerable attention devoted to the war is unsurprising, considering the Ming’s outlay of blood and treasure, though as scholars have argued the expedition to rescue Chosŏn also sought to reaffirm a “Ming-centered world order.”[5] These concerns are reproduced in the official Qing-compiled Ming History, which devotes an entire fascicle to the history of Ming relations with Korea. It largely reproduces the contours of Ming official sources, with a shared concern with imperial legitimacy extending into detailed coverage of how the Qing managed to replace the Ming as Korea’s tributary overlord.[6]

The prominence of these topics—dynastic transition, imperial legitimacy, and the Ming defense of Korea—reflect the historiographical concerns of the late imperial Chinese state, and revolve around the issue of Korea’s status as a tributary vassal. But it takes two to tango. Korea too played a part in shaping this relationship. As Ji-Young Lee has recently argued, the resilience of the Ming tributary institutions and practices have as much to do with the domestic interests of the states and rulers who participated in it as it does with Ming imperial ambitions and cannot simply be reduced to a function of Ming imposition or the logical consequence of shared Confucian culture.[7] While it is hard to gainsay the importance relations with the Ming for Korea, the view from Chinese official historiography is a pale reflection of the total picture. The preoccupation with tribute as a function of Ming legitimacy occludes whole swaths of the diplomatic experience: practices of envoy poetry,[8] cultural competition,[9] Korean realpolitik,[10] the importance of language interpreters,[11] the impact on Korean domestic politics,[12] and Korea’s lateral relations with the Ming’s other northeast Asian “tributaries”: the Jurchens, Japanese, and Ryūkyūans.[13] All in all, a much more in-depth and nuanced understanding of Ming-Korea relations have developed to not only challenge the once dominant, stereotypical view, but also broaden our understanding of how interstate relations operated in East Asia during the Ming period. Given the limitations of space, this chapter cannot provide a comprehensive discussion of the ramifications of these insights.. What it will offer instead are snapshots of two facets of Ming-Korean interactions before the cataclysmic Imjin War, the value of envoy travel for the Korean court as a vehicle for information gathering and the role of Korean-born eunuchs as mediators between the Ming and Korean courts that will both complement and challenge the usual diplomatic history of this period.

  1. John King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order; Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1968).  ↩
  2. Morris Rossabi, ed., China among Equals : The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Saeyoung Park, “Long Live the Tributary System! The Future of Studying East Asian Foreign Relations,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1 (July, 2017), 1–20; Peter C. Perdue, “The Tenacious Tributary System,” Journal of Contemporary China 24.96 (Nov., 2015), 1002–14; David C. Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).  ↩
  3. For overview of Sino-Korean relations during the Ming, see Donald N. Clark, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations under the Ming,” in The Ming Dynasty, 1398–1644, Part 2, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); For critique, Cha Hyewon [Ch‘a Hyewŏn] “Was Joseon a Model or an Exception? Reconsidering the Tributary Relations during Ming China,” Korea Journal 51.4 (Winter 2011), 33–58.  ↩
  4. See Liu Qinghua, Xu Qingyu, and Hu Xianhui, eds., Ming shilu Chaoxian ziliao jilu (Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 2005).  ↩
  5. Kenneth Swope, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail : Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). See also Masato Hasegawa’s chapter in this volume.  ↩
  6. Zhang Tingyu, Ming shi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 8302–8307.  ↩
  7. Ji-Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).  ↩
  8. Dane Alston, “Emperor and Emissary: The Hongwu Emperor, Kwŏn Kŭn, and the Poetry of Late Fourteenth Century Diplomacy,” Korean Studies 32 (2008), 101–47.  ↩
  9. Sixiang Wang, “Co-Constructing Empire in Early Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Production and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1392–1592” (Columbia University, 2015); Sixiang Wang, “The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan: Finger Severing, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early Chosŏn,” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 25.2 (Dec. 2012), 175–212.  ↩
  10. Peter Yun, “Confucian Ideology and the Tribute System in Chosŏn-Ming Relations,” Sach’ong 55..9 (2002).  ↩
  11. Sixiang Wang, “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea (1392–1592),” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, ed. Benjamin A. Elman (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 58–95.  ↩
  12. Seung B. Kye, “Huddling under the Imperial Umbrella: A Korean Approach to Ming China in the Early 1500s,” Journal of Korean Studies 15. 1 (2010), 41–66; Seung B. Kye, “In the Shadow of the Father: Court Opposition and the Reign of King Kwanghae in Early Seventeenth-Century Choson Korea” (University of Washington, 2006).  ↩
  13. Kenneth R. Robinson, “Centering the King of Chosŏn,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59.1 (2000), 33–54; Kenneth R. Robinson, “Organizing Japanese and Jurchens in Tribute Systems in Early Chosŏn Korea,” Journal of East Asian Studies 13.2 (May 2013), 337–60.  ↩

Errata

  • pg. 427: "… which unbeknownst to them was the Korean eunuch mission…" –> "…was the last Korean eunuch mission…"
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What Tang Taizong Could Not Do: The Koryŏ Surrender of 1259 and the Imperial Tradition

2018 “What Tang Taizong Could Not Do: The Koryŏ Surrender of 1259 and the Imperial Tradition” T’oung Pao 104:3-4 (October).

Abstract

English

The surrender of the Koryŏ crown prince to Khubilai Khan in 1259 heralded a century of Mongol domination in Korea. According to the Koryŏ sa, the official Korean dynastic history, Khubilai saw the timely Korean capitulation as demonstrating his superiority over the Tang emperor Taizong, who had failed to subjugate Korea by force. Although the account certainly embellished certain details, notably the voluntary nature of the surrender, this paper argues that it nonetheless captures an important dynamic between Korean diplomatic strategy and the political and ideological goals of Khubilai and his advisers. The Koryŏ court, hoping to ensure the kingship’s institutional survival, portrayed Korea as representing the cultural and political legacies of the imperial past to make common cause with Khubilai’s officials who sought to recast the Mongol empire in the image of China’s past imperial dynasties. The convergence of Korean diplomatic missives, accounts in Chinese and Korean historiography, and writings by Khubilai’s closest Chinese advisers on the themes of imperial restoration and cultural revival result in part from these interactions. Moreover, these interactions helped interpolate Korea into the repertoire of political legitimation, in which Korea’s role was redefined from an object of irredentist desire, to a component in the construction of imperial authority.

 

Français

La soumission du prince héritier de Koryŏ à Khubilai Khan en 1259 inaugura un siècle de domination mongole en Corée. Selon le Koryŏ sa, l’histoire dynastique officielle de Corée, Khubilai appréhenda la capitulation comme une preuve de sa propre supériorité sur l’empereur Taizong des Tang, qui jadis avait échoué à subjuguer la Corée par la force. Bien que ce récit embellisse sans aucun doute certains détails, notamment la nature volontaire de la capitulation, l’article montre qu’il éclaire néanmoins l’articulation entre la stratégie diplomatique coréenne et les objectifs politiques et idéologiques de Khubilai et ses conseillers. La cour de Koryŏ, dans le but d’assurer la survie institutionnelle de la royauté, représenta la Corée comme héritière des traditions culturelles et politiques d’un passé impérial, et partageant une cause commune avec les fonctionnaires de Khubilai qui cherchaient à réinventer l’empire mongol à l’image des dynasties chinoises précédentes. Cette convergence idéologique se reflète dans les lettres diplomatiques coréennes, dans l’historiographie chinoise et coréenne, ainsi que dans les écrits des proches conseillers chinois de Khubilai sur le thème de la restauration impériale et du renouveau culturel. De plus, ces interactions ont contribué à insérer la Corée dans le répertoire discursif de la légitimité politique : son rôle s’y est trouvé redéfini non comme un pays irrédentiste objet de désir impérial mais comme un élément de la construction de l’autorité impériale.

中文

高麗世子於1259年向忽必烈的投降宣告了蒙古帝國對朝鮮半島長達一個世紀的統治。根據高麗正史《高麗史》的記載,忽必烈將高麗王朝的適時順服視為自己超越唐太宗的表現,因為唐太宗沒有能夠成功地武力征服朝鮮半島。本文認為,雖然該記載細節處顯有渲染之嫌,尤其是對於投降的自願性的描述,但它還是準確捕捉到了存在于當時高麗外交策略與忽必烈及其謀士的政治意識形態意圖之間的重要動態關係。為了保證王權的制度性延續,高麗朝廷將朝鮮半島描述為中原帝統的文化和政治遺績,以迎合忽必烈臣下將蒙古帝國重塑為中原帝王的正統繼承者。高麗的外交信函,中國與高麗的歷史記載,以及忽必烈的漢人親信在關於帝統復辟和文化中興問題上的趨同一定程度上正是這種互動的結果。此外,這種互動也促成了朝鮮半島被納入政治合法性的話語體系,使得朝鮮的角色從統一天下的征服對象轉變成塑造帝國正統性以及權威的一個構成部分。

Keywords

Koryŏ History, Hao Jing, tributary relations, Yelü Chucai, Mongol empire, Yuan
dynasty, Koryŏ dynasty

Acknowledgments

This project, which began as an idea for a Master’s thesis at Columbia University, has benefited from the insights of many critical readers across its various iterations over the years. I thank especially Theodore Hughes, Gray Tuttle, the late JaHyun Kim Haboush, Robert Hymes, Sun Joo Kim, Dorothy Ko, Jungwon Kim, the three anonymous reviewers from T’oung pao for their critiques and suggestions, as well as the University of Pennsylvania’s James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies for its support.

https://brill.com/view/journals/tpao/104/3-4/article-p338_4.xml#container-12256-item-12257

 

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Loyalty, History, and Empire: Qian Qianyi and His Korean Biographies

2018 “Loyalty, History, and Empire: Qian Qianyi and His Korean Biographies” to be included in Representing Lives in East Asia, China and Korea 1400–1900, Cornell East Asia Series

The life of Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582–1664) straddled the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition. Though a self-identified Ming loyalist, Qian did not, as some of his contemporaries did, die as a martyr. Instead, he honored the Ming’s legacy through literary and historiographical projects. Many of his critics saw his literary commemoration as an attempt to make up for questionable loyalist credentials, permanently tarnished by his surrender to the Qing and his brief service as a Qing official. One of Qian’s literary projects was the massive anthology of Ming poetry, the Collected Poetry of the Successive Reigns (Liechao shiji列朝詩集). In this compilation, Qian wrote short biographies of the poets he included. The compilation included not only the works of Ming scholars and officials, but also a significant number of pieces by Korean poets. Most of the Korean writers, however, did not receive biographical treatment. Among the exceptions were the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) loyalists, Chŏng Mongju 鄭夢周, Yi Saek 李穡, and Yi Sung’in 李崇仁. The inclusion of their biographies raises several questions. What motivated Qian Qianyi to include them? How did he understand, in particular, the martyrdom of the Koryŏ loyalist Chŏng Mongju, vis-à-vis his own position as a self-identified Ming loyalist? And finally, how did Qian gain access to biographical information about these figures in the first place? The answers to these questions reveal numerous intriguing parallels that revolve around several key issues. What emerges from these Korean loyalist biographies are issues of moral and political authority, the purpose of historical writing, and how Korea fit into late Ming and post Ming imaginations of empire. The biographies of these historical figures were closely coordinated texts, and resonated across space and time, spurring discussion of a wide range of issues.

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The Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn

“The Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn” Journal of Korean Studies 24, no.1 (March)

 

When we think of writing in premodern Korea, we usually think of them as being in either literary Chinese (hanmun) or vernacular Korean (hangŭl), a linguistic situation often described as “diglossic.” But what do we with a text that is in neither? The late Chosŏn play script, titled the Story of the Eastern Chamber (Tongsanggi) is one such text. Written entirely in Chinese characters, its language hearkens back to the vernacular of late imperial Chinese fiction, employs song suites in the manner of Yuan drama (further reinforced by its titular allusion to the Chinese Story of the Western Chamber), and integrates colloquial Korean words and idioms. This combination defies our conventions of thinking of Chosŏn linguistic as diglossic. It was a linguistic experiment that sought to collapse the distance between Korean vernacular and contemporary Chinese vernacular. While this move seems counterintuitive, if we think of vernacular language in distinctly “national” terms, this essay shows it makes eminent sense when the text is placed in its Chosŏn period context. The Eastern Chamber spoke to a number of anxieties that occupied the Chosŏn elite and the Korean court, namely how cultural continuity with the past and compatibility with universal cultural aspirations could be reconciled with linguistic difference and change over time.

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The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea (1392–1592)

2014 “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea (1392–1592).” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919. Leiden: Brill.

In the frequent envoy exchange between Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) and Ming China (1368-1644), Korean court interpreters who mastered spoken Chinese played indispensable roles as mediators of spoken language. Although the two courts communicated via classical Chinese, a literary language they shared, they could not dispense with the need for oral communication. In the course of their service to the Chosŏn court, interpreters also produced an extensive body of language manuals, many of which made use of the Korean alphabet in phonological glosses. Invented and promulgated in the mid-15th century, the ability of the new script to systematically represent the phonology of Sino-Korean made it readily adaptable to notating the phonology of spoken Chinese as well. The extensive use of the script by court interpreters demonstrated the importance of the script as a technology of mediation between two very different spoken languages: Korean and Chinese.

The role of court interpreters thus revealed the centrality of this connection in the politics of language in the Chosŏn court. A consideration of this connection helps in the reexamination of the linguistic landscape of the period. On one hand, the invention of the alphabet, seen too often as either solely a prerequisite stage in the eventual elevation of the Korean “vernacular” over classical Chinese or a gesture of cleavage from the Ming, was in fact intimately connected to the Chosŏn court’s efforts to maintain cultural and political ties with the Ming court. On the other, the importance of spoken language was overshadowed by a graphocentrism that marginalized the essential roles played by interpreters as mediators of linguistic difference.

http://www.brill.com/products/book/rethinking-east-asian-languages-vernaculars-and-literacies-1000-1919-0

 

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The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan: Finger Severing, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early Chosŏn

2012 “The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan- Finger Severing, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early Chosŏn.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 25, no. 2 (December): 175–212.

Among the three cardinal human relations in Confucian morality, filiality stands out as the only one with the potential of being universally applicable. While chastity fell upon women and loyalty was meaningful for elite men, all human beings were children of some parents. This paper will investigate filiality in early Chosŏn Korea through one relatively obscure figure, Kim Sawŏl. Severing her finger and feeding it to her ailing mother, Kim’s remarkable act of filial devotion earned the recognition of the Chosŏn court. Though not the only finger severer in Chosŏn, a fact of geography propelled her to renown among the generations of Ming envoys who passed by her hometown, many of whom left poems in her honor. Both the Ming envoys and the Chosŏn court, however, had to grapple with the potentially heterodox implications of her cannibalistic filial act. Not only did finger severing have resonances with Buddhist notions, local religious traditions, and fringe medical lore, but it directly contradicted classical Confucian injunctions against “self-harm.” The resolution of this problem, in both the envoy poetry and the Chosŏn social context, involved reinterpretations and rewritings that converted a problematic category of behavior into symbols of a Confucian civilizing project by emphasizing the affective power of sincere filial emotion. This mechanism of conversion and accommodation may partly explain how local differences and alternative cosmologies persisted in the context of Confucian hegemony in Chosŏn Korea.

http://www.dbpia.co.kr/Journal/ArticleDetail/3078369

Errata

  • pg. 176, n3 "Ming distinguished between lie and jie"–> "between jie and lie

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