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This paper explores the potentially scandalous truce between the front-line Ming and Japanese commanders in the last days of the sixteenth-century Korea War. Mao Guoke, a Ming officer, was "dressed up" as the younger brother of his senior commander Mao Guoqi and sent to Japan as a hostage. He returned after almost two years (1598–1600) expecting to be received as a hero but was dismissed as more of a "self-made hero." This was because the Ming court preferred the "correct" version of the war: that it was ended not by negotiation but by the military victory of the Ming and Chosŏn Korea. Mao Guoke's odyssey is an illuminating case of the interflow and mixture of information, true and false, amid the fog of war. The case also highlights the unique pattern of war and diplomacy in premodern times wherein front-line agents enjoyed and exercised autonomy to an extent that is unthinkable to modern minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Numerous Ming Chinese took refuge in Choson Korea during the early seventeenth century. Despite the supposed sinocentrism of Choso's elites, refugees from China were treated as belonging to the category of submitting-foreigner (hyanghwain), a protected but distinctly humble social status that had been used primarily as a tool for settling Japanese and Jurchen from Choson's frontiers. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Choson court considered it incongruous to include Ming Chinese descendants in that category. Chinese lineages were thus distinguished from other submitting-foreigners and reclassified according to the considerably more prestigious category of imperial subjects. This paper explores this change, seeing it as part of a trend in the Qing Empire and indeed in Eurasia as a whole in which identity and subjecthood became increasingly bureaucratized, and loyalties treated as absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wealthiest guilds of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) capital, Seoul, formed part of the government's provisioning system, providing mainly luxury goods for royal palaces, government offices and tribute gifts to China and Japan. The guild merchants were also expected to provide corvée labour to the government on a regular basis, although by the late nineteenth century much of this labour was commuted to cash payments. Using a collection of surviving documents from the guildhall of the Myonjujon (Guild of Domestic Silk Merchants), this paper looks in detail at the burden of corvée labour, particularly during the politically and economically tumultuous years between 1884 and 1894. It finds that the merchants' corvée reflected the close relationship between guilds and government and also the two-sided nature of this relationship for the merchants. Thus, while they received certain protections and privileges from the government, the guild merchants were also particularly vulnerable to official corruption, which found a damaging outlet in the corvée system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Riben dao ge" is a well-known poem in the history of East Asian literary exchanges. The poem was written by Sima Guang during his appointment at the Palace Library, expressing his cultural expectations as well as some satirical remarks about Qian Gongfu. The earliest proponent of the theory that the "Riben dao ge" was written by Sima Guang was the Japanese Meiji-era scholar Kusaka Hiroshi, who influenced Yang Shoujing. From the standpoint of cultural history, the "Riben dao ge" is intimately connected to the Edo-era concept of lost and surviving books; Chosŏn's goodwill missions, moreover, played a vital role in the dissemination of the poem in Japan. The "Riben dao ge's" many influences across Japan and Chosŏn demonstrated an interest in the Chinese cultural issue of "searching for lost rituals among the people." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines A. G. Frank's views about 15th-19th Korea (Joseon Dynasty) in his Reorient. A. G. Frank recognized that Korea might have played a great role in the international relations of East Asia, but he did not write systematically about it and he did not treat Korea as an independent player in the history of East Asia. I think the greatest limitation to his reinterpretation of East Asia is in that he depends too much on China's and Japan's perspective. In order to overcome Frank's shortcomings regarding the history of Korea, first I examine what Frank recognized about the Joseon dynasty between 1400 and 1800. Next I compare Joseon's development to that of China and Japan between 1400 and 1800. Frank compared Europe and East Asia (mainly China and Japan) from three aspects of quantities (population, production, productivity, and trade), qualities (science and technology), and mechanism (economic and financial institutions). With this research we insist that Joseon should not be dismissed in 15th-19th East Asia. The reasons are as follows. First, Joseon between 1400 and 1800 had developed economically as much as China and Japan. Second, Joseon had played a great role in connecting China and Japan and had a positive influence on the development of Japan. So we need to reappraise Reorient's view about East Asia. Only when role of Joseon can be correctly estimated, the dynamics and diversity of East Asia can be properly understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at building a part-of-speech tagged corpus for all the drifting conversation records from Pibyŏnsa Tŭngnok , which is the official record of the daily affairs of the Border Defense Council of the Chosŏn dynasty, and conducting a quantitative analysis of the statistically salient place names and common nouns therein. The author also establishes a methodological framework and demonstrates how to conduct quantitative analysis when extrapolating patterned information in a vast corpus by using techniques like a word frequency table and co-occurrence analysis to uncover hidden patterns and correlations in a large dataset. Our results show that Fujian was the major source of the crew members and passengers of these sailboats, while some crew members were hired in Thailand. Beijing is the most frequently observed non-native place in the conversation records, since the officials were deeply interested in the distance between Beijing and other places in China. The Chosŏn officials appeared to grasp every opportunity to inquire about the physical geography, political institutions, military power, current maritime situation, newsworthy events, and the recent development of Qing China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi (Daily Records of the Royal Secretariat) is one of the major chronicles of the events of the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910). Although the records prior to the year 1622 are no longer extant, the remaining records from the years 1623 to 1910 meticulously recount the daily activities of the reigning Chosŏn kings, including copious information on their physical and mental status. Because the king's health was considered as important as other official affairs in many respects, detailed records were kept of royal ailments and how court doctors treated them. This article surveys the state of Korean-language scholarship on the medical content of the Daily Records and presents selected translations to demonstrate how this valuable historical source can shed light on both the social history of Chosŏn medicine and the political importance of kingly health at the Chosŏn court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Akedun's 1725 album Fengshi tu [Diplomatic Paintings] is an extraordinary example of the diplomatic painting genre popular during the High Qing era (1661-1796) that represents imperial delegations through the commissioners' eye-witness experiences. Created after his four journeys to Chosŏn Korea, this album constructs a narrative in which Akedun carries out the role of an imperial ambassador while it captures ethnographic details of the lived places, curious customs, and courteous peoples of Korea. By rendering an imperial image of the Manchu Qing court, the album commemorates the amelioration of the Qing-Chosŏn relations after they had fraught confrontations during the Manchu's post-conquest period. I argue that the Manchu ambassador Akedun keenly established his persona as an orthodox Confucian scholar in order to justify his position as a civil court-official whose missions were to negotiate for a mutual respect between the two regimes in the process of reaffirming an overarching Qing imperial order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]