Category: Articles

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.

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

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

“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.