Books by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
Columbia University Press, 2023
For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjo... more 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,
Publications by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2020
Open Access: https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/articles/10.5334/jhk.17/
From 1392 until its di... more Open Access: https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/articles/10.5334/jhk.17/
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 article 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 enabled them to move 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 article 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.
This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Journal of Korean Studies 24 (2):255-287, 2019
The Chosŏn court kept meticulous records of its interactions with their Ming, and later, their Qi... more 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.
The Ming World, 2019
T he usual way to describe Ming relations with Korea is through the notion of the "tributary syst... more T he 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 "tribu-tary 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 for the imperial project. The primary narrative of Ming relations with Korea that could be gleaned from 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,
Journal of Korean Studies, 2019
The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to c... more The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to celebrate a wedding arranged by King Chŏngjo. Called Story of the Eastern Chamber, the play evokes not only the Chinese Story of the Western Chamber through titular reference but also the Chinese vernacular tradition as a whole. Written entirely in Chinese characters, the text weaves vernacular Korean words into the syntax of Chinese baihua vernacular, an unusual form which upsets the conventional diglossic binary of literary Chinese (hanmun) and vernacular Korean (hangŭl). This essay situates the text in a late Chosŏn discourse of linguistic difference marked by pronounced anxieties about the temporal and spatial contingency of language. Some late Chosŏn writers, including the text’s putative author, Yi Ok, embraced difference to carve out a localized literary space in Chosŏn Korea. For King Chŏngjo, it threatened the textual foundation of royal authority. Eastern Chamber spoke to these dilemmas by imagining a linguistic space where vernacular Korean usage could be represented as a literary language in the Chinese script, reconciling kingly authority with local specificity.
Representing Lives in China: Forms of Biography in the Ming-Qing Period, 2018
The famous literatus and Ming loyalist, Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 compiled an anthology of poems written by... more The famous literatus and Ming loyalist, Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 compiled an anthology of poems written by the major literary figures of his old dynasty. In this anthology, Qian not only included Ming scholars and officials, but included a significant number of poems written by individuals from Korea. For each of these individuals, all significant figures in Korea’s literary history including the minister Chŏng To-jŏn, the woman poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, the tragic Yi Sung’in, and the Koryŏ loyalists Yi Saek and Chŏng Mongju, Qian wrote biographies to accompany the anthology. Qian Qianyi’s inclusion of these Korean figures into his anthology commemorating the fallen Ming dynasty raises several questions. For one, how did Qian gain access to biographical information to these figures— what does that tell us about the circulation of information about Korea during the Ming-Qing transition? What motivated Qian Qianyi to include these particular figures? And, finally, as a self-identified Ming loyalist, but one who chose to surrender to the Qing than dying as a martyr, as did some of contemporaries, how did Qian understand the lives of Koryŏ loyalists such as Yi Saek and Chŏng Monju vis-a-vis his own positionality as a “yimin” of a fallen dynasty? In addressing these questions through the examination and contextualization of Qian’s Korean biographies, this paper aim to understand some of the ways ideas about Korea and its relationship to China figured into late Ming and early Qing literati consciousness.
T'oung Pao, 2018
The surrender of the Koryŏ crown prince to Khubilai Khan in 1259 heralded a century of Mongol dom... more 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.
Political, military, and economic power alone cannot explain how empires work, for empire-making ... more Political, military, and economic power alone cannot explain how empires work, for empire-making is also a matter of theories, narratives, ideas and institutions. To sustain themselves, empires both coerce and persuade. Tools of persuasion, however, were seldom the monopoly of those who sought to dominate, for they could also be contested and appropriated by those who sought to resist. This dissertation on Chosŏn Korea’s (1392–1910) interactions with Ming China (1368–1644) offers a cultural history of interstate orders and diplomatic institutions in early modern Korea and East Asia. I illustrate how Chosŏn appropriated the persuasive technologies that sustained Ming empire as a political imaginary to contest Ming imperial claims and ultimately reshape imperial ideology.
Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process.
Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire
Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, Sep 14, 2014
Chapter in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, Edited by Ben... more Chapter in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, Edited by Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
Book abstract:
The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy of Latin versus vernaculars. This discussion has encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections.
Contributors include: Benjamin Elman; Peter Kornicki; John Phan; Wei Shang; Haruo Shirane; Mårten Söderblom Saarela; Daniel Trambaiolo; Atsuko Ueda; Sixiang Wang.
Seoul Journal of Korean Studies Vol. 25 no. 2, Dec 2012
Among the three cardinal human relations in Confucian morality, filiality stands out as the only ... more 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.
Conference Presentations by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
In the two and a half centuries of Chosŏn-Ming diplomacy, envoys revisited a number of literary t... more In the two and a half centuries of Chosŏn-Ming diplomacy, envoys revisited a number of literary themes in their poetic exchanges. Moral virtue was one of these themes. In poetry, these envoys constructed notions of virtue, both embodied in their personal action and manifested in the moral rule of their respective rulers, through the display of proper ritual and literary accomplishment. In this effort to construct and manifest virtuous behavior, the question of “female entertainment,” 女樂 emerged as a point of contention. Ming literati envoys in the 15th and 16th centuries had made it a point to turn away “female entertainers,” whether hired courtesans, court-employed female musicians, or simply female attendants. Poems written on these occasions, titled “Refusing the Courtesan” 卻妓詩 appear frequently not only in the travel records of Ming envoys, but also the Chosŏn court compilations of Ming envoy poetry, the Collection of Brilliant Flowers 皇華集. Fears that the Korean court might use female entertainment to “enchant the imperial envoy” and Ming prohibitions against the use of courtesans in official functions may have motivated caution on the part of these Ming ambassadors. For these Ming literati, the employment of female entertainers in the Chosŏn court or along the road from Ŭiju to Hanyang materialized as a threat to their moral integrity. On the other hand, these moments provided them with an opportunity to demonstrate their personal virtue through its public rejection. Both these ideas rested on the notion that “female entertainment” was a potential source of moral corruption, an illegitimate interpolation of the erotic into the political.
What is curious about these intersections of the gendered discourse of virtue, the exercise of politics and literary practice were the ways in which contradictions among them unfolded. While Ming envoys repeatedly refused female entertainment from 1401 to the 16th century, the Chosŏn court made it a point to insist on their use: the performance of music by courtesans was local custom, and was an expression of Korea’s distinctiveness from the Ming. Even as refusal became customary and expected, the Chosŏn court continued to present women entertainers to Ming envoys through at least the 16th century. In this proscribed diplomatic space, the presentation and refusal of courtesans through the writing of poetry became an informally ritualized exchange that provided a platform for the performance of moral virtue. Along with refusing gifts and writing good poetry, the maintenance of “proper” gender boundaries came to be incorporated within a Ming discourse of moral empire. The virtuous envoy, thus constructed, coalesced in commemorative and funeral texts as model agents of imperial will and the embodiment of classical ideals of empire.
Nevertheless, not all Ming envoys behaved as the paragons of austere Confucian virtue their poetry represented them to be. Even as the 1460 envoy Zhang Ning maintained his distance from entreaties to enjoy music performed by female musicians, he permitted his assistant Wu Zhong to indulge in the company of courtesans. By 1537, however, when the envoy Gong Yongqing accepted and even requested the attendance of female entertainers, he elicited the severe censure of Chosŏn officials. The anecdotes suggest several problems for our understanding of these affairs. For one, what accounted for the persistent offering of female musicians despite continual Ming refusal? And, why did Gong elicit disapproval from the Chosŏn court?
The questions above do not address an isolated set of niceties exclusive to the realm of diplomacy, but touch on broader political concerns and found their context in other historical processes. As Martina Deuchler and other scholars who have investigated the efforts with which the early Chosŏn state tried to propagate its vision of Confucian society have shown, the politics of gender lay at the very center of social engineering. By the mid-sixteenth century, court bureaucrats began to leverage the issue of “female entertainment,” citing the disapproval of Ming envoys, as a way to check royal power and promote institutional reform inspired by Neo-Confucian ideals. The issue of “female entertainment” coming to the forefront of these issues: diplomacy, court politics, and Korea’s social transformation, illustrates of the intricate relationships formed between gender and politics at this time.
By revealing this interplay between various issues surrounding this question of “female entertainment,” this paper will show how the construction of moral virtue through the manipulation of gendered space came to be connected with two distinct, but interrelated, processes: the Chosŏn’s institutionalized diplomacy with the Ming, and the state-centered efforts at moral and social transformation—the Confucianization of Korea. Against the Chosŏn court’s insistence on employing female entertainers as an expression of Korea’s cultural distinctiveness and even a symbol of royal authority, especially at diplomatic occasions, a significant countervailing force emerged from the Chosŏn bureaucracy. Arguing from the authority of classical precedent, these officials censured the court and cited the disapproval of Ming envoys to eliminate the institutional use of “female music” at the court. For these officials, the purgation of what they saw to be benighted local customs was, on the one hand, part of a concerted effort to reform social norms according to “Confucian” ideals and, on the other hand, an attempt to limit royal authority. Institutional and cultural parity with Ming China became one of their expressed goals. These two processes placed different demands upon the employment of “female entertainment” at court, leading to divergent attitudes, contradictory demands, and incoherent expectations on the part of both the Ming envoys and the Chosŏn officials responsible for orchestrating their diplomatic interaction.
A Game of Thrones: Knowledge, Diplomacy, and Dynastic Crisis in Chosŏn-Ming Relations (1449-1468)... more A Game of Thrones: Knowledge, Diplomacy, and Dynastic Crisis in Chosŏn-Ming Relations (1449-1468)
Emphasis on the rhetoric of the “tributary” system and its ideology, especially in early modern Chosŏn Korea and Ming China, leads to a static image of fixed hierarchies and predictable regularity. But, attention to the practice of diplomacy evinced in the Chosŏn and Ming Veritable Records, envoy poetry compilations, journals, and diplomatic reports, reveals a dynamic relationship maintained by sustained institutional investment and numerous, microscopic mutual interventions. This paper will examine Chosŏn-Ming diplomacy from 1449 to 1468, a period of dynastic crisis in both states. The Tumu crisis of 1449 led to an irregular Ming imperial succession, which had to be carefully represented to neighboring states. These years also saw Chosŏn’s own succession crisis: the gradual rise of Prince Suyang and his usurpation of the throne to reign as King Sejo (r. 1455-1468). Extraordinary though these events were, their management required the deployment of existing networks and of tried-and-true practices cultivated over many decades, all the while fostering important institutional shifts and innovations in diplomatic practice. This paper argues that in the management of these crises, the Chosŏn court shaped Ming knowledge of Chosŏn through assiduous self-representation. Chosŏn manipulated interactions with Ming envoys and officials and used Ming envoy poetry compilations and extensive intelligence networks to not only deflect Ming suspicion regarding the Sejo court’s legitimacy, but also assert an image of Chosŏn as a loyal and virtuous vassal, at the same time concealing the violence that accompanied the consolidation of royal power in Korea itself. "
Both the Chosŏn state and the Ming empire expanded its territorial and cultural influence during ... more Both the Chosŏn state and the Ming empire expanded its territorial and cultural influence during the 15th and 16th centuries. Chosŏn brought the northern frontiers of the peninsula under its control through settlement and assimilation. Occuring along with this
transformation of the territorial state was a concomitant transformation and enforcement of elite social mores. While Chosŏn was “transforming” both its “barbarians” and its own customs, the
Ming empire was expanding its own frontiers. Policies of encouraging Han settlement, building Confucian schools, and engaging in military intervention converged to expand and then transform the empire’s southern frontiers. For both Chosŏn and the Ming, the notion of “transformation through civilization” 教化 was central to their discourses of expansion. Incidentally, this notion of“transformation through civilization” was also a prevalent theme in the poetic exchanges between Korean and Chinese envoys. Although both the Ming and the Chosŏn shared many of the conceptual categories and notions of “barbarity” and “civilization” that figured into the idea of
“transformation through civilization,” finer distinctions and evaluations implied by these terms were points of contestation.
The view that the Korean peninsula was a place of civilization was not shared by all. Ming envoys, for example, were not always readily
convinced of Chosŏn's claim to civilization, and some expressed surprise at the literary talents, ritual observance, and classical erudition possessed by their Chosŏn counterparts. For Chosŏn,
mastery of a canonical tradition and the classical language buttressed its claim to “civilization,” but was not enough to guarantee it. Instead, this claim had to be continually reinforced through ritual diplomacy and literary exchange. For this paper I will examine envoy records and poetic exchanges to examine the how the notion of “transformation through civilization” figured into the diplomacy
of the two countries. How did Chosŏn’s engagement with the idea of “transformation” through “civilization” define Chosŏn political role within the Ming conceptualization of Empire? What were the convergences and dissonances among Chosŏn’s own internal civilizing project, Ming perception of Korea as a place of “civilization” outside its bounds, and the Ming Empire’s own enterprise in
the south? In what ways did the notion of “civilization through transformation” tie together these disparate phenomena and what do those connections tell us about Chosŏn’s relationship with the Ming?
Papers by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
The Journal of Asian Studies
Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2020
From 1392 until its dissolution in 1894, Chosŏn Korea's Office of Interpreters managed diplomatic... more 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 socioeconomic niche for these interpreters, facilitating their social reproduction. This article 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 enabled them to move 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 article 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. This article is part of a special issue entitled "Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge," edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Journal of Korean Studies, 2019
The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to c... more The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to celebrate a wedding arranged by King Chŏngjo. Called Story of the Eastern Chamber, the play evokes not only the Chinese Story of the Western Chamber through titular reference but also the Chinese vernacular tradition as a whole. Written entirely in Chinese characters, the text weaves vernacular Korean words into the syntax of Chinese baihua vernacular, an unusual form which upsets the conventional diglossic binary of literary Chinese (hanmun) and vernacular Korean (hangŭl). This essay situates the text in a late Chosŏn discourse of linguistic difference marked by pronounced anxieties about the temporal and spatial contingency of language. Some late Chosŏn writers, including the text’s putative author, Yi Ok, embraced difference to carve out a localized literary space in Chosŏn Korea. For King Chŏngjo, it threatened the textual foundation of royal authority. Eastern Chamber spoke to these ...
BOOK REVIEW BY SIXIANG WANG S cholars of premodern and early modern East Asia have in recent year... more BOOK REVIEW BY SIXIANG WANG S cholars of premodern and early modern East Asia have in recent years renewed their attention to cultural practices that endow the region with its analytical and historical coherence. A cosmopolitan intellectual effort, Rethinking the Sinopshere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation addresses these shared practices from the tenth to the nineteenth century, with contributions from leading scholars in the United States, China, Korea, Singapore, and the Netherlands. This is the second volume in a two-volume series edited by Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang. Whereas the first volume covers questions of circulation, the intersections of gender, class, and religion, and the evolution of these practices in the twentieth century, this second volume is devoted to literary interactions, historical motifs (both also covered in part 1 of this volume), and the evolution of aesthetic and poetic forms (the focus of part 2). The "Sinosphere," as conceived throughout this book, denotes the "cultural sphere of Chinese written characters" sustained by circulations of people, books, ideas, and, most importantly, texts. Rejecting the center-periphery model that inevitably defaults to Sinocentrism, the volume focuses on the productive transformations that occur when texts move beyond "local, regional, and 'national' boundaries" (p. xx). For instance, in the Japanese narrative histories that com
This talk will examine relations between Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) and the Ming (1368– 1644) empir... more This talk will examine relations between Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) and the Ming (1368– 1644) empire through the envoy poetry of the 15th and 16th centuries, a period of sustained peace between the two states. Their envoys, who shared a common Confucian heritage and literary tradition, celebrated this time of tranquility with verse paeans to imperial rule. Compiled in the Anthology of Brilliant Flowers (Hwanghwa chip 皇華集), these poems, often written at elegant gatherings during diplomatic functions, portrayed a world where imperial power, virtuous governance, literary efflorescence, and natural beauty resonated harmoniously. Chosŏn poet-officials, in particular, envisioned an idealized imperial order in which Chosŏn occupied a pivotal place. A considerable number of the Brilliant Flowers poems dealt with Korea and imperial China’s shared history. Even as Ming and Chosŏn envoys celebrated the grand peace they enjoyed, they also had to contend with their fractious history. Attitudes tow...
In Anglophone historiography, transnational and comparative perspectives have enriched our unders... more In Anglophone historiography, transnational and comparative perspectives have enriched our understanding of interstate relations, displacing the position of traditional diplomatic history. A comprehensive and authoritative of discussion these trends’ implications for the historiography of East Asia is desirable, but the considerable scholarly output of the last decade far exceeds what can be responsibly addressed in the scope of one essay. This discussion, then, will focus on several key issues relevant to the history and historiography of Korea and its place in early modern East Asia. It will consider once prevailing historiographical approaches to interstate relations, such as “the tributary system” and “the Chinese World Order,” in light of recent approaches in transnational and comparative history. These approaches, with their emphasis on “connectivity” and “co-construction,” can highlight the roles of material and knowledge exchange, and of cultural, literary, and ritual practi...
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Books by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
Publications by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
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 article 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 enabled them to move 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 article 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.
This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process.
Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire
Book abstract:
The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy of Latin versus vernaculars. This discussion has encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections.
Contributors include: Benjamin Elman; Peter Kornicki; John Phan; Wei Shang; Haruo Shirane; Mårten Söderblom Saarela; Daniel Trambaiolo; Atsuko Ueda; Sixiang Wang.
Conference Presentations by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
What is curious about these intersections of the gendered discourse of virtue, the exercise of politics and literary practice were the ways in which contradictions among them unfolded. While Ming envoys repeatedly refused female entertainment from 1401 to the 16th century, the Chosŏn court made it a point to insist on their use: the performance of music by courtesans was local custom, and was an expression of Korea’s distinctiveness from the Ming. Even as refusal became customary and expected, the Chosŏn court continued to present women entertainers to Ming envoys through at least the 16th century. In this proscribed diplomatic space, the presentation and refusal of courtesans through the writing of poetry became an informally ritualized exchange that provided a platform for the performance of moral virtue. Along with refusing gifts and writing good poetry, the maintenance of “proper” gender boundaries came to be incorporated within a Ming discourse of moral empire. The virtuous envoy, thus constructed, coalesced in commemorative and funeral texts as model agents of imperial will and the embodiment of classical ideals of empire.
Nevertheless, not all Ming envoys behaved as the paragons of austere Confucian virtue their poetry represented them to be. Even as the 1460 envoy Zhang Ning maintained his distance from entreaties to enjoy music performed by female musicians, he permitted his assistant Wu Zhong to indulge in the company of courtesans. By 1537, however, when the envoy Gong Yongqing accepted and even requested the attendance of female entertainers, he elicited the severe censure of Chosŏn officials. The anecdotes suggest several problems for our understanding of these affairs. For one, what accounted for the persistent offering of female musicians despite continual Ming refusal? And, why did Gong elicit disapproval from the Chosŏn court?
The questions above do not address an isolated set of niceties exclusive to the realm of diplomacy, but touch on broader political concerns and found their context in other historical processes. As Martina Deuchler and other scholars who have investigated the efforts with which the early Chosŏn state tried to propagate its vision of Confucian society have shown, the politics of gender lay at the very center of social engineering. By the mid-sixteenth century, court bureaucrats began to leverage the issue of “female entertainment,” citing the disapproval of Ming envoys, as a way to check royal power and promote institutional reform inspired by Neo-Confucian ideals. The issue of “female entertainment” coming to the forefront of these issues: diplomacy, court politics, and Korea’s social transformation, illustrates of the intricate relationships formed between gender and politics at this time.
By revealing this interplay between various issues surrounding this question of “female entertainment,” this paper will show how the construction of moral virtue through the manipulation of gendered space came to be connected with two distinct, but interrelated, processes: the Chosŏn’s institutionalized diplomacy with the Ming, and the state-centered efforts at moral and social transformation—the Confucianization of Korea. Against the Chosŏn court’s insistence on employing female entertainers as an expression of Korea’s cultural distinctiveness and even a symbol of royal authority, especially at diplomatic occasions, a significant countervailing force emerged from the Chosŏn bureaucracy. Arguing from the authority of classical precedent, these officials censured the court and cited the disapproval of Ming envoys to eliminate the institutional use of “female music” at the court. For these officials, the purgation of what they saw to be benighted local customs was, on the one hand, part of a concerted effort to reform social norms according to “Confucian” ideals and, on the other hand, an attempt to limit royal authority. Institutional and cultural parity with Ming China became one of their expressed goals. These two processes placed different demands upon the employment of “female entertainment” at court, leading to divergent attitudes, contradictory demands, and incoherent expectations on the part of both the Ming envoys and the Chosŏn officials responsible for orchestrating their diplomatic interaction.
Emphasis on the rhetoric of the “tributary” system and its ideology, especially in early modern Chosŏn Korea and Ming China, leads to a static image of fixed hierarchies and predictable regularity. But, attention to the practice of diplomacy evinced in the Chosŏn and Ming Veritable Records, envoy poetry compilations, journals, and diplomatic reports, reveals a dynamic relationship maintained by sustained institutional investment and numerous, microscopic mutual interventions. This paper will examine Chosŏn-Ming diplomacy from 1449 to 1468, a period of dynastic crisis in both states. The Tumu crisis of 1449 led to an irregular Ming imperial succession, which had to be carefully represented to neighboring states. These years also saw Chosŏn’s own succession crisis: the gradual rise of Prince Suyang and his usurpation of the throne to reign as King Sejo (r. 1455-1468). Extraordinary though these events were, their management required the deployment of existing networks and of tried-and-true practices cultivated over many decades, all the while fostering important institutional shifts and innovations in diplomatic practice. This paper argues that in the management of these crises, the Chosŏn court shaped Ming knowledge of Chosŏn through assiduous self-representation. Chosŏn manipulated interactions with Ming envoys and officials and used Ming envoy poetry compilations and extensive intelligence networks to not only deflect Ming suspicion regarding the Sejo court’s legitimacy, but also assert an image of Chosŏn as a loyal and virtuous vassal, at the same time concealing the violence that accompanied the consolidation of royal power in Korea itself. "
transformation of the territorial state was a concomitant transformation and enforcement of elite social mores. While Chosŏn was “transforming” both its “barbarians” and its own customs, the
Ming empire was expanding its own frontiers. Policies of encouraging Han settlement, building Confucian schools, and engaging in military intervention converged to expand and then transform the empire’s southern frontiers. For both Chosŏn and the Ming, the notion of “transformation through civilization” 教化 was central to their discourses of expansion. Incidentally, this notion of“transformation through civilization” was also a prevalent theme in the poetic exchanges between Korean and Chinese envoys. Although both the Ming and the Chosŏn shared many of the conceptual categories and notions of “barbarity” and “civilization” that figured into the idea of
“transformation through civilization,” finer distinctions and evaluations implied by these terms were points of contestation.
The view that the Korean peninsula was a place of civilization was not shared by all. Ming envoys, for example, were not always readily
convinced of Chosŏn's claim to civilization, and some expressed surprise at the literary talents, ritual observance, and classical erudition possessed by their Chosŏn counterparts. For Chosŏn,
mastery of a canonical tradition and the classical language buttressed its claim to “civilization,” but was not enough to guarantee it. Instead, this claim had to be continually reinforced through ritual diplomacy and literary exchange. For this paper I will examine envoy records and poetic exchanges to examine the how the notion of “transformation through civilization” figured into the diplomacy
of the two countries. How did Chosŏn’s engagement with the idea of “transformation” through “civilization” define Chosŏn political role within the Ming conceptualization of Empire? What were the convergences and dissonances among Chosŏn’s own internal civilizing project, Ming perception of Korea as a place of “civilization” outside its bounds, and the Ming Empire’s own enterprise in
the south? In what ways did the notion of “civilization through transformation” tie together these disparate phenomena and what do those connections tell us about Chosŏn’s relationship with the Ming?
Papers by Sixiang Wang (王思翔)
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 article 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 enabled them to move 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 article 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.
This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process.
Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire
Book abstract:
The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy of Latin versus vernaculars. This discussion has encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections.
Contributors include: Benjamin Elman; Peter Kornicki; John Phan; Wei Shang; Haruo Shirane; Mårten Söderblom Saarela; Daniel Trambaiolo; Atsuko Ueda; Sixiang Wang.
What is curious about these intersections of the gendered discourse of virtue, the exercise of politics and literary practice were the ways in which contradictions among them unfolded. While Ming envoys repeatedly refused female entertainment from 1401 to the 16th century, the Chosŏn court made it a point to insist on their use: the performance of music by courtesans was local custom, and was an expression of Korea’s distinctiveness from the Ming. Even as refusal became customary and expected, the Chosŏn court continued to present women entertainers to Ming envoys through at least the 16th century. In this proscribed diplomatic space, the presentation and refusal of courtesans through the writing of poetry became an informally ritualized exchange that provided a platform for the performance of moral virtue. Along with refusing gifts and writing good poetry, the maintenance of “proper” gender boundaries came to be incorporated within a Ming discourse of moral empire. The virtuous envoy, thus constructed, coalesced in commemorative and funeral texts as model agents of imperial will and the embodiment of classical ideals of empire.
Nevertheless, not all Ming envoys behaved as the paragons of austere Confucian virtue their poetry represented them to be. Even as the 1460 envoy Zhang Ning maintained his distance from entreaties to enjoy music performed by female musicians, he permitted his assistant Wu Zhong to indulge in the company of courtesans. By 1537, however, when the envoy Gong Yongqing accepted and even requested the attendance of female entertainers, he elicited the severe censure of Chosŏn officials. The anecdotes suggest several problems for our understanding of these affairs. For one, what accounted for the persistent offering of female musicians despite continual Ming refusal? And, why did Gong elicit disapproval from the Chosŏn court?
The questions above do not address an isolated set of niceties exclusive to the realm of diplomacy, but touch on broader political concerns and found their context in other historical processes. As Martina Deuchler and other scholars who have investigated the efforts with which the early Chosŏn state tried to propagate its vision of Confucian society have shown, the politics of gender lay at the very center of social engineering. By the mid-sixteenth century, court bureaucrats began to leverage the issue of “female entertainment,” citing the disapproval of Ming envoys, as a way to check royal power and promote institutional reform inspired by Neo-Confucian ideals. The issue of “female entertainment” coming to the forefront of these issues: diplomacy, court politics, and Korea’s social transformation, illustrates of the intricate relationships formed between gender and politics at this time.
By revealing this interplay between various issues surrounding this question of “female entertainment,” this paper will show how the construction of moral virtue through the manipulation of gendered space came to be connected with two distinct, but interrelated, processes: the Chosŏn’s institutionalized diplomacy with the Ming, and the state-centered efforts at moral and social transformation—the Confucianization of Korea. Against the Chosŏn court’s insistence on employing female entertainers as an expression of Korea’s cultural distinctiveness and even a symbol of royal authority, especially at diplomatic occasions, a significant countervailing force emerged from the Chosŏn bureaucracy. Arguing from the authority of classical precedent, these officials censured the court and cited the disapproval of Ming envoys to eliminate the institutional use of “female music” at the court. For these officials, the purgation of what they saw to be benighted local customs was, on the one hand, part of a concerted effort to reform social norms according to “Confucian” ideals and, on the other hand, an attempt to limit royal authority. Institutional and cultural parity with Ming China became one of their expressed goals. These two processes placed different demands upon the employment of “female entertainment” at court, leading to divergent attitudes, contradictory demands, and incoherent expectations on the part of both the Ming envoys and the Chosŏn officials responsible for orchestrating their diplomatic interaction.
Emphasis on the rhetoric of the “tributary” system and its ideology, especially in early modern Chosŏn Korea and Ming China, leads to a static image of fixed hierarchies and predictable regularity. But, attention to the practice of diplomacy evinced in the Chosŏn and Ming Veritable Records, envoy poetry compilations, journals, and diplomatic reports, reveals a dynamic relationship maintained by sustained institutional investment and numerous, microscopic mutual interventions. This paper will examine Chosŏn-Ming diplomacy from 1449 to 1468, a period of dynastic crisis in both states. The Tumu crisis of 1449 led to an irregular Ming imperial succession, which had to be carefully represented to neighboring states. These years also saw Chosŏn’s own succession crisis: the gradual rise of Prince Suyang and his usurpation of the throne to reign as King Sejo (r. 1455-1468). Extraordinary though these events were, their management required the deployment of existing networks and of tried-and-true practices cultivated over many decades, all the while fostering important institutional shifts and innovations in diplomatic practice. This paper argues that in the management of these crises, the Chosŏn court shaped Ming knowledge of Chosŏn through assiduous self-representation. Chosŏn manipulated interactions with Ming envoys and officials and used Ming envoy poetry compilations and extensive intelligence networks to not only deflect Ming suspicion regarding the Sejo court’s legitimacy, but also assert an image of Chosŏn as a loyal and virtuous vassal, at the same time concealing the violence that accompanied the consolidation of royal power in Korea itself. "
transformation of the territorial state was a concomitant transformation and enforcement of elite social mores. While Chosŏn was “transforming” both its “barbarians” and its own customs, the
Ming empire was expanding its own frontiers. Policies of encouraging Han settlement, building Confucian schools, and engaging in military intervention converged to expand and then transform the empire’s southern frontiers. For both Chosŏn and the Ming, the notion of “transformation through civilization” 教化 was central to their discourses of expansion. Incidentally, this notion of“transformation through civilization” was also a prevalent theme in the poetic exchanges between Korean and Chinese envoys. Although both the Ming and the Chosŏn shared many of the conceptual categories and notions of “barbarity” and “civilization” that figured into the idea of
“transformation through civilization,” finer distinctions and evaluations implied by these terms were points of contestation.
The view that the Korean peninsula was a place of civilization was not shared by all. Ming envoys, for example, were not always readily
convinced of Chosŏn's claim to civilization, and some expressed surprise at the literary talents, ritual observance, and classical erudition possessed by their Chosŏn counterparts. For Chosŏn,
mastery of a canonical tradition and the classical language buttressed its claim to “civilization,” but was not enough to guarantee it. Instead, this claim had to be continually reinforced through ritual diplomacy and literary exchange. For this paper I will examine envoy records and poetic exchanges to examine the how the notion of “transformation through civilization” figured into the diplomacy
of the two countries. How did Chosŏn’s engagement with the idea of “transformation” through “civilization” define Chosŏn political role within the Ming conceptualization of Empire? What were the convergences and dissonances among Chosŏn’s own internal civilizing project, Ming perception of Korea as a place of “civilization” outside its bounds, and the Ming Empire’s own enterprise in
the south? In what ways did the notion of “civilization through transformation” tie together these disparate phenomena and what do those connections tell us about Chosŏn’s relationship with the Ming?