Turning toward Edification

Front matter

Turning toward Edification

Foreigners in Chosón Korea

ii) UNIVERSITY of HAWAII PRESS

CHAPTER I Foreign Communities in Early Chosón 24

CHAPTER 2 Civilizing Barbarians and Rebellious Allies: Japanese Defectors and Ming Deserters during the Imjin War 54

CHAPTER 3 Border Peoples and Flexible Loyalties in Chosón during the Seventeenth Century 74

CHAPTER 4 Administration of Foreign Communities after the Wars 104

CHAPTER 5

Ritual Transformation of Foreign Communities 133

CHAPTER 6 New Narratives 164

Notes 199

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, and the research underlying this book, took many years, during which time I received help from a great many people and institutions. It is hard to know where to begin, and I am certain to miss many people.

The topic of this book originated with my doctorial work at the University of Toronto, and it owes much to my advisor, Andre Schmid, who shepherded me through the process and who continued to provide advice throughout the process. Bob Binnick taught me Manchu, and Timothy Brook kindly allowed me to participate in his Classical Chinese seminars. They, along with Pamela Kyle Crossley of Dartmouth and the late Vincent Shen, provided me with excellent advice, which has contributed greatly to this book. I pursued my initial research as a Korea Foundation field research fellow at Sogang University, at which time I was greatly aided by Kim Han-kyu and Chong Du-hee, who allowed me to sit in on their classes, and Chung In-chai, who gave me great support during my fellowship. Jung Jiyoung and Kenneth Robinson were generous with both their friendship and their knowledge. I also received great assistance from numerous fellow graduate students (who have now gone on to greater things), at Sogang, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere, including Desmond Cheung, Merose Hwang, Kim Sungjo, Ko Sunho, Jeong Myeon, Lee Kyungsoon, Ihor Pidhainy, Darryl Sterk, Joshua Van Lieu, and Lidu Yi.

I began writing this book in 2010-2011 as a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and in 2011-2012 as Humanities Korea research professor at the Research Institute for Korean Studies (RIKS), Korea University. I turned my full effort toward writing, however, thanks to the financial support ofan Academy Korean Studies grant during 2013-2018. I owe enormous thanks to Nam-lin Hur, the director of this grant, for his hard work in managing the grant and his patience in puttingup with my frequent tardiness, and I should acknowledge that he was the initial guardian angel who brought me to UBC in 2009. Also at UBC, I was greatly aided by Ross King, who sponsored my postdoctoral fellowship. At RIKS, I owe thanks to countless scholars, including Kim Seonmin, Lee Hun, Lee Sun-ae, and Yoon Wook, who invited me to their Manchu Studies seminar;

x Acknowledgments

Kang Sangsoon, Kim Jeong Suk, and Koh Youngnan, who explored Chosón literature with me; and also Cho Sungtaek, Hong Yunhee, Jin Tae-won, Jong Byung-wook, Kim Moon-yong, Kwon Naehyun, Park Heon-ho, Park Yu-hee, Shim Tae-shik, Woo Eungsoon, and many others who helped me during my period as Humanities Korea research professor. I continued to benefit from my connection to RIKS after I took up my position at King's University College, when they frequently offered me a place to study during summer research trips to Seoul. I finished the writing of my book during my stay at the Kyujanggak Institute, in 2018-2019. I thank especially Sem Vermeersch and Kum Heekyung for their help and assistance.

Other scholars who have provided me with vital feedback during conferences and other occasions include Javier Cha, Ksenia Chizhova, John Duncan, Marion Eggert, Han Myung-gi, Han Seunghyun, Sun Joo Kim, James Lewis, Saeyoung Park, Evelyn Rawski, Pierre-Emmanuel Roux, Isabelle Sancho, Sarah Schneewind, Kenneth Swope, Sixiang Wang, Yuanchong Wang, and Barbara Wall.

I could not have written this book without the librarians at the University of Toronto East Asian Studies Library, UBC Asian Studies Library, the RIKS Library and the Hanjókshil Library of Korea University, the National Library of Korea, the Kyujanggak Library, and indeed the Cardinal Carter Library at King’s University College. I must also acknowledge that I previously discussed key aspects of my argument in the Jourzal of Early Modern History, he Review of Korean Studies, Korean Studies, and Korean Histories. Little verbal overlap remains from those articles (except where I quote them specifically), but I do acknowledge that I benefited greatly from the process of publishing them.

I thank employees and associates of the University of Hawai'i Press for their help in bringing this book to publication. I thank especially my acquisitions editor at Hawai'i, Masako Ikeda; my copyeditor, Jessica Ryan; and Ihsan Taylor at Longleaf for their aid in shaping this manuscript into a publishable text. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit as I finished my book, I have never had the pleasure of meeting them personally, and our communications have often been disrupted, but it was always such a pleasure communicating with them over email.

At Kings University College at the University of Western Ontario, both students and professors have had to deal with my gloomy outlook whenever my writing went badly. I thank especially my department colleagues Stephanie Bangarth, Graham Broad, Renée Soulodre-LaFrance, Eric Jarvis, Alison Meek, Jeffery Temple, Roberto Ventresca, Nicholas Virtue, and Paul Webb, as well as colleagues in other departments, including Carl Young, Jacquetta Neuman, Therese Khimasia, and Chris Roney. I also must thank members of the finance

Acknowledgments xi department who administered my grants, especially Vishal Kothari. Also invaluable for me was the help of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, on my campus and elsewhere, including Hua Huang (now at the United International College in Zhuhai) and Lu Wang, who both provided their valuable services as research assistants; Thomas Quartermain, who drafted the maps used in this book; and Jang Jeong-soo of Korea University, whose work on Chosón Jurchens during the seventeenth century I found very informative indeed.

It was during my master’s work in the Department of Philosophy at Kangwon National University that I gained many of the key skills, not least linguistic, that I have used for preparing this book. I thank of course my advisor Lee Kwang-lae; Lee Ai-hi and Kim Cheol-un, who taught me Classical Chinese; Nam Sang-ho, whose generous teaching style comes to mind whenever I prepare to teach my own classes; and Ch'oe Heebong, Park Haesun, and Yu Sungsun, who provided me with so much emotional and intellectual support during this productive but challenging time.

This work was supported by the Laboratory for the Globalization of Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2013- LAB-2250001). I also benefited from a Korea Foundation field research fellowship during my initial research, a Korea Foundation postdoc as I started my research up again postgraduation between 2010-2011, support from the Northeast Asia History Foundation during one summer in Seoul, a Kyujanggak research fellowship as I completed my writing between 2018-2019, and numerous internal grants from King's University College.

I was attracted to this project initially by Kang Shijue, a Liaodongese refugee in northern Korea during the late seventeenth century, who was culturally flexible, geographically marginal, and likely held a falsified genealogy that he used to improve his position within the social hierarchies of the late Chosón. Above all he reminded me of my father’s family—multilingual Swabians from the Russian empire who adapted their ethnic affiliation and political loyalties according to the changing circumstances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The long period of my writing was hard on my family. But they supported me in so many ways by providing a potential refuge during the precarious period after my doctoral work was completed and as a source of strength and support after I obtained stable employment. I owe a huge debt to my parents, Artur and Sarah Bohnet, who have been a great source of support, emotionally and intellectually. My parents-in-law, Hong Seunggeol and Kim Chunja, have provided me with vital support and kindness whenever I am in Seoul. Above all, I thank my wife, xii Acknowledgments

Young-hwa Hong, who survived this educational journey with me when I was looking for work from one end of the world to the other and during my period as a newly hired professor at King’s. I couldn't have finished it without her love and support, and I dedicate this book to her.

REIGNS OF CHOSÓN KINGS

xiii

Tsushima

Japan

Map ofthe Korean Peninsula with Chosón Provinces. (Drafted by Thomas Quartermain.)

Introduction

N THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, shortly after invading Japanese | soldiers had been expelled from Chosón Korea, Chóng Inhong (1535-1623),

a leader ofa righteous militia, was called to account for his relationship with several Ming Chinese soldiers, deserters from the armies sent by the Ming to help fight the Japanese. Perhaps the most controversial relationship was one he had with Shi Wenyong, a geomancer to whom, it was said, Chóng had forced into marrying the daughter of a woman who had been raped by the Japanese. Those who were hostile to Chóng Inhong pointed to the shamefulness of marrying "someone from a foreign state, while those who supported Chóng alluded to Chöng's own ancestry. Chong, as it happens, claimed descent from a Song merchant from Zhejiang who had settled in Korea during the Koryó dynasty (918-1392). Chong Inhong’s actions, they declared, were thus in accord with a fully understandable desire on his part to support “hometown friends,” for the Chinese soldiers who he helped were without exception from Zhejiang.

Such support gave Shi Wenyong influence during the reign of Kwanghae-gun (r. 1608-1623), when Chong Inhong' faction was dominant, but after Injo's (r. 1623-1649) coup d'état of 1623, Shi Wenyong was executed along with his former protector Chóng Inhong. However, Shi Wenyong's execution was not the last word for him, for during the eighteenth century his memory was revived and his descendants raised in status, from the disreputable ranks of descendants of deserting Ming troops to ritual representatives of the glorious Ming and of Chosón's undying loyalty to the Ming and to the Sinitic/Confucian tradition. Thus, the late Chosón monarchs, all heirs of Injo, had the descendants of one of Injo's victims appear as ritual representatives of Chosón's loyalty to the Ming, in rites practiced in the presence of the monarch himself.

In this book I seek to understand the process underlying the transformation of foreigners and people of foreign ancestry in Chosón Korea in order to explore the changing nature of the collective identity and worldview of Chosón's sajok aristocracy. I analyze these changes in relation to the greater bureaucratization and centralization of late Chosón Korea, and indeed of Eurasia as a whole, during the eighteenth century. Shi Wenyong was one of many foreigners who made their home in Chosón. From the very foundation of the Chosón dynasty, people whose origins lay outside of the Korean peninsula played a variety of roles within it, as technical specialists, soldiers, and diplomats. Indeed, the early Chosón (which for convenience I date from 1392 to 1592) had been the center of an extensive network of Jurchens and Japanese, with varying degrees of affiliation with the Chosón state, both inside and outside Chosón's borders. These networks were disrupted and transformed with the large-scale entrance of foreigners during the Imjin War (1592-1598), which brought both Ming Chinese and Japanese soldiers onto Chosón soil and the Ming-Manchu wars of early seventeenth century Liaodong, which drove both Jurchen and Sinophone Liaodongese refugees south into Chosón. After the wars, armies retreated and refugees were expelled and repatriated, but some soldiers deserted and some refugees evaded detection to become part of the population of the Chosón state.

How were these foreigners treated? A common assumption, reflected in much scholarship, is that the Chosón state would have treated Chinese migrants much better than Jurchens and Japanese.! This view fits in well with our understanding of Chosón as a Sinocentric state, loyal to the Ming Chinese hegemon. It is true that the Chosón monarchy was assiduous in sending envoys to offer submission to the Ming court, indeed dispatching at least three diplomatic missions a year. In return the Chosón monarch received from the Ming monarch the Ming calendar and the investiture of the Chosón monarch with the title of * king" or “prince of state" (K. kugwang, Ch. guowang) to which the Chosón monarch responded by referring to himself as “subject” (K. sín, Ch. chen) in official communications to the Ming emperor and accepting the Chosón state's status as

fan (vassal) of the Ming empire. Having accepted Chosón's subordination, the Ming monarch respected the autonomy of the Chosón monarch in domestic matters and indeed interfered only rarely in Chosón's relationships with other neighboring states.” This was no mere pro forma submission, however, for as Pae Usóng has discussed, Chosón elites also internalized the centrality of Chinese/ Confucian traditions) —which I will term, following South Korean scholarship, Chunghwa, the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese Zhonghua. With this I do not refer to the modern concept of a Chinese nation-state, although that is the current meaning of Zhonghua, but rather to Zhonghua as “central efflorescence,” a term with a range of overlapping “civilizational” meanings encompassing the broad corpus of rituals, writings, and “Confucian” philosophical ideas that originated in China; a universal standard of civilization; Chinese political formations; and the geographic space of the north Chinese plain.*

Although they were frequently less enthusiastic about individual emperors

and Ming officials, Chosón sajok aristocrats fully accepted the vital civilizational role of idealized emperors centered in China, acting peacefully, in the manner of Mencian sage kings, across the divide between the civilized and barbarians (Ch. hua-yi zhi bian, K. hwa-yi chi pyén) and bringing barbarians to pay tribute and receive the transforming edification of civilization. By the early Chosón, Korea had also obtained for itself the sobriquet Lesser Chunghwa (Sojunghwa), which might be translated, following Sixiang Wang, as "small central efflorescence.? Most of the government documents produced by the Koryó and Chosón courts were composed in Literary Sinitic, and most literary and historiographic texts were not only written in Literary Sinitic but followed Chinese literary and historiographic genres. The dominant philosophical tradition during much of the Chosón period was Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) interpretation of the Chinese Confucian tradition, which Chosón sajok aristocrats made their own, with most rejecting as heretical the Ming enthusiasm for Wang Shouren’s (1472-1529) philosophy.ó Moreover, such was the devotion of Chosón's sajok elites to the Ming that after the fall of the Ming to the Manchu Qing, the Chosón court continued to fulfil its status as Lesser Chunghwa by engaging in ritual commemoration of the Ming emperors. Despite outwardly submitting to the Qing, the Chosón court maintained a continued connection to the Ming in the form of an altar within the palace complex at which Chosón monarchs offered sacrifice in person. Additionally, Chosón sajok aristocrats expressed their rejection of Qing hegemony by dating documents according to the reign ofthe last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen emperor, who committed suicide in 1644. By the eighteenth century, Chosón sajok aristocrats considered themselves to be the last remnant of Chunghwa culture and political order, continuing a tradition that the Qing empire, as a barbarian Manchu dynasty, could not possibly represent.

Yet, as I show in this book, despite the enthusiastic participation of Chosón's sajok aristocracy in Chunghwa cultural and political norms, they did not extend this enthusiasm to individual Chinese people or Chinese migrants in Chosón— the hostile reception of Shi Wenyong by some sajok was not an exceptional case. During the large-scale entrance of foreigners during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Chosón state did not welcome Chinese over Jurchens and Japanese, but, if anything, showed a notable preference for its established subjects, the Jurchens. Even after Chosón submitted to the Manchu Qing empire in 1637, the Chosón court continued to administer all three groups according to the same tax category of submitting-foreigners (Pyangbwain), which granted them protection from most personal taxes but which otherwise provided them with very little prestige. It was only following the mid-eighteenth century that the Chosón court actively sponsored those who, like Shi Wenyong’s descendants, d Introduction could claim Ming origins. This gave the descendants of Ming migrants higher status, better access to low-ranked positions in the bureaucracy, and the privilege of participation in court-sponsored Ming loyalist rituals.

What caused this change in attitudes toward Chinese migrants? The purpose of this book is to explain this transition—to explore why Jurchens, Japanese, and Chinese were categorized together as submitting-foreigners until the mid-eighteenth century, after which Chinese descendants were clearly distinguished from other people with foreign ancestors. This shift cannot be understood as driven by “Sinocentrism” or “Confucianization,” for the mid-eighteenth century is two centuries after the rise of activist Neo-Confucianism during the sixteenth century, and well after the growth of Neo-Confucian ritualism during the seventeenth. The reason for these changes, and how they relate to cultural, political, and ideological shifts in Chosón, must thus be explained in some other manner.

Nationalism and Sinocentrism in Korean History

The presence of foreigners in Chosón, and the response of Chosón to those foreigners, has interesting implications for understanding the nature of the imagined community of late Chosón Korea. A major (although by no means universal) thread in twentieth-century Korean historiography has been to read the sense of a unified, homogenous Korean nation backward into the distant past, to the supposed reign of the mythical king Tan'gun. Such nationalist historiography is dominant in North Korea,’ although it is increasingly marginalized among academic historians in South Korea. Even in South Korea, until recently grade-school students were taught that they were part of a homogeneous race, the descendants of Tan’gun, who had preserved their homogeneity through the supposed 5,000 years of Korean history.* The presence of foreigners as a constituent part of the late Chosón state cannot but be a challenge to what was once the orthodoxy of South Korean public education and forces a reconsideration of the imagined community of Chosón Korea.

South Korea itselfhas become, since the early 1990s, an increasingly multicultural society, with people of diverse origins, especially from other regions in East and Southeast Asia, making their homes in South Korea, intermarrying with South Korean citizens, and indeed becoming South Korean citizens themselves. This has spurred academic interest in uncovering a multicultural past for Korea. The foreign presence in late Chosón has certainly been part of this trend. Quite a number of scholars, writing in Korean and English, have noted the acceptance of foreigners in Koryó and early Chosón as clear evidence that claims of “pure blood” are an anachronistic obsession of twentieth-century historians, and that in pre-modern Korea, people had no such concern.” This interest in multicultural pasts, indeed, has extended beyond purely academic publications to works directed toward the broader reading public." The emergence of imperial subjects such as Shi Wenyong’s descendants—court-honored representatives of the Ming dynasty—has generally been explained as an example of Chosón's Sinocentrism, with anthropologist Kyung-koo Han arguing that Jurchens and Japanese were still discriminated against by a Sinocentric Chosón state that was positively inclined toward Koreans and Chinese. Consequently, the Chosón state, Han argues, may not have been nationalist or racist in the modern sense, and it may even have been multicultural, but it was nevertheless characterized by ethnic discrimination." John B. Duncan, by contrast, argues that the shift toward imperial subject status reveals the development of a “proto-national consciousness” in late Chosón Korea. As he imagines that submitting-foreigner (hyanghwain) status had been primarily concerned with assimilation, he sees what he believes to be the disappearance of this status, and its replacement with an ethnicized imperial subject status, to signal the end of assimilationism in Chosón Korea, and perhaps the emergence of an idea of “pure blood-lines."?

Such scholarship, emerging in the 1990s, was reacting against a considerable accumulation of scholarship that, since 1894, had sought to naturalize the concepts of race and nation within Korean history. Beginning with the intellectual ferment that followed the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), and continuing through much of the twentieth century, many historians viewed Korean history as characterized by the struggle of the Korean ethnic nation under pressure from outside powers and evaluated figures according to how well they protected the autonomy, the native culture, and the territorial integrity of Korea. Above all else, Chosón's cultural engagement with Chinese civilization, and political subordination to various Chinese dynasties, has often been considered shameful, with many (following the trend of Japanese historians of Korea) seeing it as a sign of a flaw in the Korean character and a tendency toward toadyism (sadae-

»]4 judi) or “serving the great." For the pioneering modern historian Sin Ch'aeho (1880-1936), who believed that the subject of history was the ethnic-nation (minjok), this shameful toadyism and betrayal of its national identity had been imposed upon Chosón by Sinophilic elites at key points in Korean history. For Sin Ch'aeho, as well as for other nationalist historians influenced by Social Darwinism, it was self-evidently the case that an ethnic nation, understood in almost biological or racial terms, was in constant competition with other ethnic nations. Chosón's acceptance of Chinese culture was thus an abandonment of naturallaw and the extinction of the self (understood to mean the ethnic nation as a whole) in favor of the other or non-self (pia).

Such attempts to downplay the significance of foreign influence, and especially Chinese influence, has been a frequent aspect of much later South Korean scholarship and has attracted considerable attention from scholars working in the English language, who often treat the matter unproductively as an either-or between admiration for China and a sense of national identity. Studies of diplomatic relations with later Chinese states have often been at pains to assert the pro-forma nature of the submission of Korean states, to treat it as simply a diplomatic strategy, for the weak to manipulate the strong.“ Han Yóngu, for instance, in his study of the early Chosón official Yang Sóngji (1415-1482), argues that when Yang used the term "serve the great" (sadae) in the context of Chosón's relationship to the Ming emperor, he was thinking exclusively in terms of practical diplomacy, with no implication of cultural or political subservience to the Ming, and in the context of the full assertion of Chosón's "sel£-determination and independence” (chaju tongnip)." Such scholarship, of course, has not been without its critics, and in English, a substantial body of work has specifically attempted to take Korean scholarship to task for its nationalism, and to argue, with reference to Benedict Anderson, for a strong rupture in identities between “pre-modern Korea,” on the one hand, and twentieth-century nationalism, on the other. Such scholars have frequently opposed the "Sinocentrism" of pre-modern Korean elites to twentieth-century nationalism, arguing that sajok aristocrats of the Chosón period had no Korean identity but rather an attachment to “a cosmopolitan civilization centered in China."

This unhelpful binary between the Sinocentric past and the nationalist present distorts the reality of Sino-Korean relations during the Chosón period. To be sure, officials in the Ming and Qing both referred often to the Chosón model when constructing their relationships with other fan (vassal states). As Hyewon Chae, however, has argued, such was the diversity of relations with smaller countries pursued by the Ming and Qing that it is nearly impossible to identify any standard or model “tribute practices,” including those pursued by Chosón—especially as key aspects of Chosón's tribute practices, such as its three diplomatic missions a year, were in fact asserted despite the initial opposition of the Ming empire. In general, Chos6n’s relationship with China was often tumultuous and characterized by controversy and ill-faith.?? As discussed in chapter 1, Chosón pursued relations with Japanese and Jurchens not only in violation of Ming demands but sometimes in open rivalry with the Ming. As is discussed in chapter 5, during the late Chosón, the Chosón court developed ritual practices that denied the Qing empire's right to rule even as they also sent diplomatic missions to the Qing capital formally accepting Qing hegemony.

Recent South Korean scholarship, especially, has transformed our understanding of Chunghwa ideology. Ch'oe Chongsók has pointed out that the period of Mongol hegemony saw the beginning ofa general acceptance by Koryós sajok aristocrats of the right to rule an empire based in China, even while they in no way abandoned their own prerogatives and rights as members ofthe ruling class of Korea.?' This ideological shift continued into the period of Ming hegemony, during which, as Kim Sunja has argued, civil bureaucrats had begun to speak of China as having an exclusive right to empire that was not available to peoples such as the Mongols who originated from outside of Chinese territory.” Ultimately, the concept of China as civilization, or Chunghwa, was in part geography, but also included rites, manners, clothing, hierarchical political organization, and association with a body of literature that might be called Confucian.

Moreover, subject kingdoms, including Chosón, could and did claim mastery over cultural symbols of Chunghwa. As Don Baker points out, the fifteenth century in Chosón was ideologically complex, and monarchs could appeal to a mix of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist justifications for their rule and could even allow for language that implied that the Chosón royal house had received a separate mandate of heaven.? As Pae Usóng argues, Chosón sajok aristocrats and intellectuals envisioned Chosón as both an autonomous state and part of the broad realm of Chunghwa culture and politics. Even as Chosón's ruling elites saw themselves as participants within a broader Chunghwa sphere, they by no means lacked particularist identities or loyalties, nor were their identities entirely subsumed into the Sinocentric cosmopolis. Rather, Chosón sajok aristocrats clearly defined themselves as having membership within a Korean historical entity, seen as having existed since early times in the constant geographic location ofthe Korean peninsula, which thus naturally possessed cultural and linguistic differences with China.“ They referred to this historical and geographic entity with such names as Haedong (East of the Sea), Tongguk (Eastern Kingdom), Chwahae (Left the Sea), or Samhan (Three Han)— which certainly represented Korea by using its geographic relation to China but which also were terms that referred to Korea without regard to individual dynasties.”

In fact, many contentious issues during the Chosón period, which are now seen as revealing a divide between nativists and Sinocentric understandings, can in fact be shown to have been concerned with topics that do not fit clearly with present-day obsessions or fall neatly alongside current fault lines. Debates during the early Chosön— for instance, concerning whether or not to offer sacrifices to heaven directly or concerning the use of the vernacular alphabet hunmin chéngiim—which are often interpreted now as debates over dependence on China versus autonomous culture and politics, were actually debates on subjects that now seem obscure and hard to fit into modern categories, and in contexts that assumed both the existence of an independent Chosón culture (in part determined by geographic difference) and the cultural and political preeminence of Ming China.?“ Late Chosón intellectuals, like twentieth-century intellectuals, made revanchist claims on the Liaodong region of the Qing empire, asserting that it was properly Chosón territory—but unlike the twentieth-century nationalist intellectuals, they did so because the Qing conquest had broken the Chunghwa unity that they imagined had linked early Chosón with Ming Liaodong.” For that matter, as Hó T’aeyong has argued, late Chosón intellectuals explored not only symbols related to China but also such Korean heroes as the Koguryó general Ulchi Mundók who was known for defeating the Chinese Sui dynasty in 612 C.E. In the twentieth century, Ulchi Mundók became a national symbol of nativist resistance to China. In this, modern historians were building on the work of late Chosón historians, who also admired Ülchi Mundók, but who saw him as a symbol of military strength and loyalty that needed to be revived in an East Asia in which the barbarous Qing had conquered China. In other words, late Chosón intellectuals remembered Ülchi Mundók as both a source of pride as a Korean military hero and as a paragon of Chunghwa and Confucian civilization.??

My purpose here is not to wade into the debate between those who Anthony D. Smith calls primordialists and modernists,” or indeed to continue the debate on whether Chosón can properly be called a “nation” or a “proto-nation.” Rather than trying to read twentieth-century nationalism back to the Chosón period, I intend to define the changing nature of collective identities during the Chosón period. If the Chosón monarchy was different from the states of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe, it was also organized very differently from prenationalist medieval and early modern Europe. As Jahyun Kim Haboush says, much of the discussion of nations and nationalism is irreducibly Eurocentric and applies poorly to the circumstances of East Asian states.” A similar point is made by Nicholas Tackett, who makes use of Benedict Anderson's concept of an imagined community?! to compare Song self-identity to modern nationalism. Tackett points out that the Song had abandoned the universalistic goals of the Tang and was content to govern only those regions inhabited by Sinophone Huaxia (Chinese). Songs governing elite, the shidafu, were, unlike the capital-based ruling class of the Tang, from all ends of Song territory and were bound together, in part through meritocratic exam competition, to each other by horizontal bonds. In this they resembled the colonial bureaucrats and creole elites of nineteenth-century European colonies, whose identities, following Anderson, were in part determined by the colonial territory to which their careers were restricted. During the Song, educated people who did not pass, or even write, the exams were nevertheless linked as part ofa broad imaginary community via commercial printing—in much the same manner as, following Anderson, the new European and American nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were formed by print media. As Tackett argues, although the resulting society was notably different from the national communities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Song should not be understood as either pre-nationalist or proto-nationalist, but rather on its own terms, as a different form of imagined national community.”