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A country immersed in war and international crisis might not seem the most likely place to look for Confucianism in action. While armies are on the march and pillage and rapine stalk the land, where is the ambience for stately and respectful ceremonies? When men are killing each other and women shriek their grief, where does one look for evidence of the goodness of human nature? As Chinese and Japanese armies pushed their way up and down the Korean peninsula throughout the 1590s, leaving behind burning towns, desecrated graves, and scattered families, many Koreans might have found good reason to

In an earlier article I discussed some of the general features of a special body of literature that developed from the Chinese-Korean relationship: the diplomatic travel diary.1 In this article I would like to analyze more fully a particular example of that literature, the Peking Memoir (Tamhon yongi), and the life and thought of its unusual author, Hong Taeyong (ho Tamhon, 1731-1783). Hong was the nephew of Hong Ok (1722-1809), who was the secretary of the solstitial embassy of 1765-1766. Solstitial embassies, so named because they left each year around the time of the winter solstice, were ceremonially the most important of the formal ex changes between Korea and China. They normally arrived in Peking a few days before the lunar New Year, when the emperor held a grand for mal audience attended by thousands of officials and by ambassadors from the various tributary states. The Korean embassies usually stayed in Peking for about two months. The solstitial embassy left Seoul on De cember 13, 1765, and reached Peking on February 6, 1766. After the cus tomary stay, it left Peking on April 9 and was back in Seoul on May 28. Hong Taeyong, then aged thirty-five, was not a regular officer on this embassy, but went in the fictive capacity of military aide to his uncle. Each of the three ranking officers of the embassy was allowed to take such aides (the ambassador four, the deputy ambassador two, and the secretary one), and they were invariably younger relatives who had intel ligence and literary talent. Such positions were once-in-a-lifetime oppor tunities, and the people lucky enough to be appointed to them could not expect to, and rarely ever did, receive another chance to visit China. These young aides had little in the way of formal duties; in fact, they were privileged tourists. The chief record of Hong's trip is the Peking