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Epistolary Korea: Letters in The Communicative Space of the Choson, 1392-1910
Epistolary Korea: Letters in The Communicative Space of the Choson, 1392-1910
Epistolary Korea: Letters in The Communicative Space of the Choson, 1392-1910
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Epistolary Korea: Letters in The Communicative Space of the Choson, 1392-1910

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By expanding the definition of "epistle" to include any writing that addresses the intended receiver directly, JaHyun Kim Haboush introduces readers to the rich epistolary practice of Chos?n Korea. The Chos?n dynasty (1392-1910) produced an abundance of epistles, writings that mirror the genres of neighboring countries (especially China) while retaining their own specific historical trajectory. Written in both literary Chinese and vernacular Korean, the writings collected here range from royal public edicts to private letters, a fascinating array that blurs the line between classical and everyday language and the divisions between men and women. Haboush's selections also recast the relationship between epistolography and the concept of public and private space.

Haboush groups her epistles according to where they were written and read: public letters, letters to colleagues and friends, social letters, and family letters. Then she arranges them according to occasion: letters on leaving home, deathbed letters, letters of fiction, and letters to the dead. She examines the mechanics of epistles, their communicative space, and their cultural and political meaning. With its wholly unique collection of materials, Epistolary Korea produces more than a vivid chronicle of pre- and early modern Korean life. It breaks new ground in establishing the terms of a distinct, non-European form of epistolography.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 5, 2009
ISBN9780231519595
Epistolary Korea: Letters in The Communicative Space of the Choson, 1392-1910

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    Epistolary Korea - Columbia University Press

    Introduction

    The Epistolary Genre and the Scriptural Economy of the Chosŏn

    JAHYUN KIM HABOUSH

    This book is about the epistles and epistolography of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Applying a broad definition to epistles—writings in which the writer directly addresses the (intended) receiver—the book outlines epistolary genres, presents a body of epistles in these genres, and maps the space that these epistles create. The project has several goals: by means of individual letters, to in-quire into epistolary practice, that is, the literary production of each epistle and its ingredients; and by means of the collective body of epistles, to trace the epistolary space produced by them and its cultural and political meaning. I have defined epistles rather inclusively in order to construct a suitable frame that can accommodate the extraordinarily diverse and active epistlary practice of the Chosŏn. This frame also facilitates a new conceptualization of epistles applied to genre and space. It is hoped that this will suggest a useful and different way of thinking about epistles as cultural products. That the epistolary practice of the Chosŏn seems to have diverged substantially from that of the West while it shared many genres with neighboring countries, particularly China, but followed a particular trajectory of epistolary history, makes the epistolary body of the Chosŏn interesting for comparative study.

    A letter is, literarily speaking, produced through negotiation between what Michel de Certeau has termed the scriptural economy, the tendency of script to dominate, totalizing writing toward the standard form,¹ and the resourcefulness of the practitioner in appropriating and personalizing the form to tailor it to his/her needs.² True, this tension is not limited to letters, but the epistles of the Chosŏn seem well suited for observing the way in which this tension is negotiated: on the one hand, the Chosŏn subscribed to an unshakable belief in the power of writing, with a resulting concern for strategies to dominate and totalize writing with standard forms; on the other hand, it maintained an active epistolary practice in everyday life with a wide array of participants.

    There is also a spatial dimension to epistolary practice. A letter is, as Bakhtin said, half someone else’s,³ and it creates a connective space between the sender and the receiver. An epistolary space in a given culture defines the boundaries, either imagined or actual, of its communicative space. The Chosŏn produced epistolary activity over an unusually wide space: letter writing was practiced in all spaces ranging from the public to the private and anywhere in between; the practitioners included nearly everyone, from the king to the barely literate regardless of gender; and epistles were composed both in literary Chinese and vernacular Korean. The communicative space of the Chosŏn, consisting of epistles in multilayered discursive spaces interacting with one another, followed a historical trajectory that was fluid and complex. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to provide a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, we present a body of epistles as models by which a vibrant socio-textual community was shaped and produced.⁴

    In selecting epistles, several issues were considered: genre and the space it produced, the script in which epistles were written, the gender of the writer, and the relationships of these to one another.

    SPACE AND GENRE

    Space and genre are intimately connected in epistolary practice: an epistolary space is produced by a genre, whereas an epistolary genre is engendered by the epistolary space. In East Asia, the epistolary mode appeared early and, consistent with the belief in the primacy of the public function of writing, first in public space. Mark Edward Lewis has noted that writing was not merely an integral part, but the main medium of such public projects as the construction of polity, the ordering of the world, and the imagining of history.⁵ Within this frame, epistolary modes of writing, insofar as they speak directly to their intended audience, must have seemed an effective manner of persuasion, one of writing’s primary functions. The Announcement by Tang (Tang gao) chapter of the Book of History (Shujing), which can arguably be viewed as the first recorded epistle, is a royal pronouncement. Famous for delineating the Confucian concept of kingship, it is a public performative act in which King Tang, the founder of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–ca. 1100 B.C.E.), takes possession of dynastic legitimacy: he addresses the people, declaring that he has received the Mandate of Heaven⁶ and pledging that he will obey Heaven’s charge by toiling on their behalf. What marks this pronouncement from a generic point of view is that he speaks in the first person singular and spatially projects his address to all living people in his domain—the masses of the realm (manbang yujung) and myriad families of the realm (manbang paeksŏng)—in the present tense.⁷ Projected were an epistolary space encompassing the entire polity and a temporal immediacy. Appropriating and personalizing the trope of a concerned ruler working for the people of his country, later rulers of Confucian states including those of Korea and China sent out missives to the people, reproducing the communicative space spanning the polity.

    Whereas royal announcements remained the most visible and widely projected of communications during the dynastic era in Korea and China, their epistolary space was also inhabited by missives in the opposite direction: memorials to the throne that could be sent by officials and scholars. These missives, however, occupied merely the top layer of epistolary space. There were other epistolary genres that connected various points in the polity, linking the ruler, ordinary people, high ministers of the state, lower and provincial officials, and scholars. Moreover, the writing of epistles was also eagerly practiced every day and in other, nonpublic spaces—in social circles of all kinds and in the domestic space of the family. Many epistolary genres were practiced in ambiguous spaces that defy the distinction between public and private.

    In speaking of epistolary space, two issues need to be addressed. The first is that the public epistolary space of the Chosŏn was different in nature from a national space of temporal simultaneity, a homogeneous and empty time, in Benedict Anderson’s words, that is produced by print capitalism.⁸ The Chosŏn epistolary space was multidirectional, multilayered, crisscrossed, and temporally nonsimultaneous and nonhomogeneous. Yet, it mapped out an imagined communicative space spanning the entire polity. Another point is that the concept of public and private space used here does not coincide with that proposed by Habermas⁹ but is embedded in the literary history and scriptural practice of the Chosŏn. Insofar as the Habermasian concept of the public sphere in relation to the emergence of civil society in Europe has been so influential, it would be worthwhile to consider this issue in Chosŏn discursive space at some future point, but not in this volume.

    LANGUAGE AND GENDER

    What complicated and enriched the epistolography of the Choson was that it was practiced in a diglossic literary field, made possible by the invention of the Korean alphabet (hunmin chŏngŭm, or han’gŭl) in 1443.¹⁰ Literary Chinese, the sacred and scriptural, but unspoken, language of East Asia, was continuously used in inscriptional and official space, but the additional availability of the Korean alphabet opened writing to groups that had been excluded and also to new experiments and genres. With more participants, literary, especially epistolary, fields expanded, resulting in a much more diverse written culture. The linguistic relationship between literary Chinese and vernacular Korean has often been described as a binary opposition: public versus private, official versus domestic, male versus female, and cosmopolitan versus local. In epistolary practice, which was embedded in everyday life, this division was often transgressed. Through subversion of the expected, in relation to genre, language, and gender, new spaces and new meanings were generated.

    THE DISSEMINATION AND MATERIALITY OF EPISTLES

    A study of epistolary practice must discuss the materiality of the epistles and their method of dissemination and delivery. Only with this knowledge can we envision the way in which the imagined epistolary space was transformed into an actual one and locate epistles in everyday life. One of the interesting aspects of Chosŏn scriptural culture was the coexistence of different prints. The most commonly used medium for individual epistles was handwritten text. At the opposite end of the spectrum was movable metal print. Woodblock prints were also produced. It appears that metal movable print was used mostly by the government. When the central government needed to disseminate an important document, it would produce metal imprints, which would be sent to provincial offices, where woodblocks based on the metal imprint would be carved, and wood-block print copies would be disseminated.

    The dissemination and delivery of epistles had two different routes. One class was for official use, and it had an extensive network of postal stations with postal workers and horses. Daily government newsletters (chobo) were sent to provincial officials by this route, and they were, in turn, disseminated to scholars and others in local communities. Royal announcements, addressed to everyone in the kingdom, used additional methods of delivery: copies were posted on streets and at gates bearing heavy foot traffic, and they were also read at appointed places in metropolitan and provincial cities. Private epistles were usually sent through a different route, one of private networks including slaves, servants, and hired messengers. It is possible that there was overlap between the two routes. Judging by the prevalence of letters preserved in scholars’ collected writings, the private postal network seems to have been quite efficient.

    EPISTLES AND EPISTOLOGRAPHY OF THE CHOSŎN

    This book consists of thirty-nine chapters, divided into eight parts. Each chapter has an introduction and, in most cases, several letters, but sometimes as few as one or as many as ten. Parts are arranged by form and then function. From the first to the fourth, they are arranged according to the spaces for which the epistles were produced; the direction is from public to ambiguous to private spaces. From the fifth to the seventh parts, epistles are grouped by the occasions on which they were written, and, lastly, the eighth part focuses on fictional letters. What guided the order and the choice of epistles was an attempt to illuminate the relationship between generic evolution and historical and functional meaning. Thus, the epistles are balanced between generic representativeness and exploratory and transgressive qualities that expanded and changed genre and space.

    The first part, Public Letters, presents epistles ranging from royal edicts to letters to editors, genres that were practiced in and shaped the public epistolary space. The Chosŏn rulers used the trope of a virtuous and concerned ruler already present in the Announcement by Tang, personalizing the language to the farthest extent possible. The personalization of rhetoric is apparent in the most routine announcements, and the ruler’s inventive use of this rather impersonal medium, particularly in times of crisis, is noteworthy. During the Imjin War (Imjin waeran, 1592–1598), King Sŏnjo (r. 1567–1608) employed the Korean script in his messages to specifically targeted groups. In fact, we begin the volume with Sŏnjo’s edict in the Korean alphabet addressed to Koreans held captive by the Japanese army. This edict represents a clear break with convention in that not only did it depart from the customary use of literary Chinese in the inscriptional space, it is also directed to a much smaller target group than was the norm. Though Sŏnjo’s mode of personalizing this most public of epistles was not immediately emulated, other rulers also sought to explore the potential of expressive epistles directed to specific groups. For example, the last piece in the chapter, by King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), arguably the most capable and accomplished of late Chosŏn rulers, aimed for inclusive closeness. Addressed to the residents of six provinces suffering famine, it masterfully adopts the affective language of the Confucian ruler-father. What is even more interesting is that this edict was disseminated simultaneously in both literary Chinese and the Korean script.

    It was in the hands of female rulers (yŏgun), queen dowagers who, as regents, ruled in the king’s name, or nonregent mothers who brokered for their ruler-kings, that edicts were most inventively used. Placed in an ambiguous position with respect to power, these female surrogates’ access to and use of the accoutrements of power was complicated by the suspicious scrutiny of male officials. Straddling between the Korean script and literary Chinese, the supposed scripts of their gender and their public roles, respectively,¹¹ and between the rhetoric of humility and that of situational urgency, female rulers pronounced upon major events and announced epochal policies that transformed the political scene. Queen Dowager Chŏngsun’s (1745–1805) edict ordering the persecution of Catholics in 1801 is a case in point. It detonated violent explosions in the political and cultural landscape, repercussions of which would reverberate throughout the nineteenth century. If one finds it incongruous that it was a female regent who, during her short, four-year regency, executed such a momentous act, one should only be reminded that shortly after producing this edict, the same female regent promulgated the abolition of public slavery, an even more decisive act. It is interesting to note, however, that the abolition of slavery was promulgated in the name of King Sunjo (r. 1800–1834),¹² whereas the persecution of Catholics was promulgated under the queen dowager’s name. Her mastery of the concerned ruler trope is only too well exhibited in her edict that was sent out in the Korean script on the occasion of great thunderclaps: she fully accepts her responsibility for Heaven’s displeasure and freely castigates herself for her lack of virtue. Producing this edict was an ultimate performative act, taking possession of rulership.

    It is the epistles that occupied and shaped the space below royal pronouncements that produce a particular meaning of public in the Chosŏn epistolary space. Some of the genres presented here, such as memorials to the throne and petitions or open letters, were familiar ones that had been in use for a long time. The manner in which they took shape and were practiced in the Chosŏn, however, is quite remarkable. Individual memorials and petitions became regular and frequent ingredients of political life. At times, they were transformed into joint memorials and petitions, signed by hundreds, or thousands, and thus functioned as tools for collective negotiation. The wide range of participants in public discourse should be stressed. No one was completely shut out from it. Even those groups of people who were disadvantaged by gender or class, women or slaves, were also permitted to send in petitions in their own names, and they often did. The government’s reluctant acceptance of petitions written in the Korean script helped to open this medium to a large group as well.

    Those genres that shaped the horizontal, rather than the hierarchical, communicative space, such as circular letters and open letters, also diversified epistolary discourse. Circular letters were channels through which the members of one private institution and those of another exchanged news and views on social and political issues. Sometimes, circular letters exchanged among private academies on political issues would lead to joint memorials. An open letter, however, was frequently employed by an individual to address a large group to rally its members to a specific cause or action. We present in this volume a number of open letters that the leaders of the Righteous Army, the civilian volunteer army of the Imjin War, sent out to recruit volunteers and to seek financial assistance during the war. These letters are addressed sometimes to the residents of certain provinces and sometimes to the whole country. The audience they called upon consisted of fellow ethnic Koreans of the imagined community of the Chosŏn state who they presumed shared a commitment to preserve and fight for it. The epistolary space created by these letters therefore encompassed the entire country. Unlike with the space created by royal edicts, however, the connective points on both ends in this case, the sender and the receivers, were private individuals; this fact rendered a different meaning to the national epistolary space thus created. Not all open letters were patriotic, however. The format also lends itself to subversive and even seditious purposes, and such epistles were so written. Rebels, in attempts to mobilize the populace to and persuade others of their cause, often sent out open letters.

    Letters to the Editor, the final chapter in the Public Letters part, offers a modern site that brings together diverse participants—individuals, government, and private organizations. With ingredients special to print capitalism, the newspapers created a space of homogeneous time. The public discourse that unfolded in the newspapers of the Chosŏn, however, was carried out in genres that had already been in use, such as petitions and circular letters. Gradually, however, these genres became depersonalized. Whereas the multidirectional public epistolary discourse of the Chosŏn can be characterized by each epistle’s personalization of an impersonal genre, the newspaper-focused discourse seems to have resulted in the depersonalization of these familiar genres.

    Letters exchanged between friends and colleagues, the subject of the second part, present problems of definition regarding space. Unlike public epistles, in which the sender and the receiver could be either singular or plural, and either specific or unspecified, epistles in this category were exchanged between and addressed to singular and specific persons. A huge quantity of correspondence between male friends and colleagues survives. In most collected works (munjip) of scholars, personal letters occupy the most space. Some writers were especially prolific. T’oegye Yi Hwang (1501–1570), for example, left thousands of letters.¹³ The topics of personal letters ranged from quotidian concerns to scholarly, social, and political issues. These letters were not meant to be private and read only by the addressee, but rather to be shared with others in his circle. They were often copied and circulated among friends. It is interesting to contemplate the meaning of the circulation of these letters and the in-between space between public and private that they created.

    Another notable aspect of this overlapping space is that it was not bounded by national borders. Quite a number of educated Chosŏn male scholars had opportunities to travel to China as members of ambassadorial missions that went to Beijing a few times a year. They would meet Chinese scholars, sometimes strike up friendships, and maintain correspondence. Since Korean and Chinese scholars shared literary Chinese as a written language, as well as the literary tradition associated with this language, such correspondence was possible. Perhaps I should add a few words of caution: This transnational space of correspondence between Korean and Chinese scholars was distinct in nature from what Ernest Gellner describes as a horizontal transnational ruling class that floated above the laterally insulated communities of peasants across premodern Europe.¹⁴ Unlike Gellner’s presentation of Europe or Anderson’s dynastic realm,¹⁵ since the beginning of the Chosŏn or perhaps even earlier, there has not been a transnational ruling elite in East Asia. Encounters between literati of neighboring countries, literati who could communicate only by writing in literary Chinese since they did not share a mutually comprehensible spoken language, could delight the participants. It was, however, these scholars’ awareness that they belonged to different states and communities that seems to have been the basis of their mutual fascination.

    Not all letters traveled so far or so widely. There were letters that correspondents preferred to keep secret. We present one here, a letter confirming a powerful minister’s secret and probably profitable patronage of an abbot. It is interesting that the letter, meant to be kept out of circulation, was written in the Korean script. Only letters of a public nature found their way into collected works, which were almost always in literary Chinese.

    Perhaps it is collegial discursive fields that reveal the way in which a person is situated by gender and class in social life. In contrast to the reams of fraternal letters between men, very few letters that women wrote to their friends survive. This could be the result of a problem of preservation—not many women’s letters were kept, never mind assembled and published in collected works. Still, one wonders about women’s social lives beyond their families. Whom did they consider friends? We present a friendly letter by a widowed queen to her husband’s concubine. It appears that, having shared a man and also having suffered the loss of this man together, the queen felt a particular closeness to her former rival.

    When it comes to using epistles to discharge the social role of being the mistress of a household, women were much more active. Whether they were merely exchanging social letters of greeting or sending out discreet notes asking for favors for members of their families, they were creating, expanding, and utilizing their own social networks through epistolary exchange. In this way, they became players in their own right. In the part titled Social Letters, we also present close and distant gazes on the social life of the Chosŏn through observations respectively by one of its engaged members and then by an outsider. Both offer insights into everyday life. The American naval attaché’s cryptic report on the prevalence of male concubinage in late-nineteenth-century Korea, a phenomenon that has not yet been observed, is quite striking.

    In the fourth part, on family letters, we move into domestic discursive fields. With the family, which involves the most complex and varied of relationships, we encounter a strategic problem of how to suggest the ordinariness and complexities of family dynamics through correspondence. We have decided to structure this part by first presenting letters involving the most basic of relationships, beginning with spouses and variations on parent-child relations. Since these letters were private, they were preserved in handwritten manuscripts in family archives or were placed in tombs, later to be excavated. Some of the letters presented in this part confirm our notions of Chosŏn life, such as married daughters’ longings for their natal parents and their lost childhoods, or, as in the letters of the Sunch’ŏn Kims, jealousy, squabbles, and concerns. More of the letters, however, contravene the expected, presenting a wife chastising a boastful husband in a letter written in literary Chinese; a wife residing in a rural location repeatedly urging her husband to apply himself harder in order to pass the civil service examination, again in literary Chinese; royal family members corresponding with their children in the Korean script; and a mother giving instructions to a daughter as well as to sons in literary Chinese. It is through epistolary practice that seems transgressive of literary and social norms that we wish to suggest the complexities of family.

    Beginning with the fifth part, we move from form to function. In the next three parts, we present letters prompted by specific situations and occasions. These epistles were written at critical moments in the writers’ lives, some brought on by historical forces, some by personal conviction, and still others by machinations of fate. Composing letters in the shadow of death, the writers reveal their loneliness, despair, grief, and resolution as solitary persons facing the final moments of their lives. In Letters Written Away from Home, the writers are away involuntarily, either exiled at some distant place within the Chosŏn or taken as prisoners of war or hostages abroad. During the Chosŏn, banishment to a remote and inhospitable place was one of the most common forms of punishment, and many officials at some point in their careers spent time in exile. Isolated and lonely, they attempted to remain connected to their families and friends through correspondence. Prisoners of war and hostages, however, were the products of international conflicts. Though Chosŏn Korea was relatively peaceful for long periods of time, it suffered two major wars: the Imjin War, from 1592 to 1598, which began with an invasion by Japan and expanded to a regional war with the participation of Ming Chinese troops, and the Manchu invasion from 1636 to 1637. These wars had a serious impact on East Asia, not least in changing constituents’ perception of themselves and the other. The letters in chapter 30 by the Korean civilian prisoners of war taken to Japan, for example, suggest an awakening sense of ethnic identity. These letters found their way into records by a circuitous path: they were first written by prisoners of war in the Korean script, then sent to Korean envoys on postwar repatriation missions to Japan, and finally summarized and recorded in literary Chinese in the envoys’ reports on their travels. Despite the indirectness of the voices of the original writers, their expressed desire to return to their homeland after many years as captives in another land is revealing.

    Deathbed Letters, which constitute the sixth part, are far more personal than all the letters that precede them in this book. Whether the deaths their writers were facing were to be by execution, martyrdom, or suicide, these letters were final performative acts. From an official who declares that I have no shame in my heart; hence, I will greet death with a smile, to a virgin Catholic martyr writing while awaiting death, I receive the Lord’s special grace to bear the fruit of martyrdom, to a widow who writes to her son that she cannot break my pledge to die on the same day and at the same time as my husband, these writers present their final testimony in the letters.

    It is, more usually, the death of a beloved that one faces and copes with, rather than one’s own passing, and one of the ways Chosŏn Koreans mourned the dead was by writing about and to the departed. These writings were not only personal but also cultural acts, since it was hoped that the texts would render social memory to the departed through generations, the most valued tribute to the dead in a Confucian society. The importance of this activity was redoubled if the writer was a scholar of fame whose collected works had a good chance of being published and the subject of the eulogy was someone whose life would fall into social oblivion without a trace but for the eulogy. Most collected works contain numerous eulogies, and, interestingly, a significant number of them are eulogies of women and young children who fit the description above. Though many different genres were used to write about the dead in the Chosŏn, we present only the kind of letter in which the living directly address the departed as you. The first two such epistles presented here are, though moving, somewhat predictable: a wife’s private whisper of grief and longing (in Korean) and a scholar’s formal sending off of his wife (in literary Chinese). Then, there comes a father’s lament over the loss of his daughter (in literary Chinese). Viscerally shaken by grief—he writes, it was as if half of my body was cut off—the father describes the daughter’s life: her goodness and learning, and how he treasured her as his intellectual companion. By writing to her, he inscribes her in his personal memory and also in social memory. This piece differs from the first two in that the great learning of this daughter, who offered intellectual partnership to Kim Ch’anghyŏp (1651–1708), one of the most distinguished scholars of seventeenth-century Korea, and the father’s continuing close relationship to her after her marriage, contravene one’s image of the gender and family dynamics of the time.

    The last piece, a mother’s letter sending off her infant daughter, written in literary Chinese, seems to be something of an anomaly. The two previous letters by male scholars were written in hopes of placing particular women’s lives into the inscriptional space of future transmission, and they indeed found their way into the scholars’ collected works. In this case, one wonders why the mother chose to write in a language more suitable to the inscriptional space than Korean. It is highly unlikely, the writer and the subject being humble and nameless females, that the letter would have been written with the expectation of extending social memory to include the departed. Nor it is likely that, despite the sophistication of the piece and the writer’s apparent erudition, literary Chinese would have been the most natural medium, or at least more natural than vernacular Korean, for the mother. This was not a social but a literary act, deliberately chosen: to render tribute to a daughter by offering her a beautiful letter and, in the process of composing it, to reach beyond the space of remembering and forgetting. Meaning was sought by the author not by lamenting the shortness of her daughter’s life or pledging to remember her, but by relativizing and accepting the vagaries of human life. It is ironic, and fortunate, that this letter, most private and trangressive of the norm, survives and renders literary immortality to the writer and the subject of the letter. This is yet one more historical twist.

    In the last part, we go into the fictional space. Though no epistolary novel emerged in the Chosŏn, letters often played an important literary function within novels. The love letters between the star-crossed lovers in The Tale of Unyŏng (Unyŏng-jŏn) are passionate and confessional. They are both the signposts and the machinations of tragic love. These letters stand in counterpoint to the real-life letters between spouses whose expressions of affection for each other are discreet and laconic. No passionate real-life love letters from the Chosŏn have come to light thus far. Suppressed yearning seems to have exploded only in fantasy.

    We hope that these epistles will give the reader some insight into the life of the Chosŏn and the world these writers experienced. Although we hope that our readers will read the entire volume, this is not a book that one would read from beginning to end in one sitting. Each chapter is designed as a self-contained unit, and some of the information given in the introductions to chapters may overlap. We ask the reader’s indulgence.

    NOTES

    1. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 131–53.

    2. See the discussion of this tension in Chartier, Introduction: An Ordinary Kind of Writing, 1–3.

    3. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293.

    4. Pollock, Literary Cultures in History, 27–30.

    5. For a discussion of writing as a means of creating the state, see Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China.

    6. This announcement also crystallizes the paradigms of the bad last king who loses his dynasty’s mandate by his lack of virtue and neglect of the people’s welfare (here, King Jie, the last ruler of Xia) and the virtuous first ruler of the new dynasty.

    7. Shu Ching, Book of History, 72–73.

    8. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.

    9. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

    10. The Korean alphabet is referred to as han’gŭl in the modern era. When it was devised and put forth for use in 1443, it was given the name hunmin chŏngŭm (correct sounds to instruct the people). It was also often referred to as ŏnmun (vulgar script) in unfavorable contrast to literary Chinese. For a discussion of this process, see Ledyard, The Korean Language Reform of 1446.

    11. Haboush, Gender and the Politics of Language in Chosŏn Korea.

    12. Sunjo sillok, 2:20b–21b.

    13. Yi, T’oegyejip, 9:1a–40:35a.

    14. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 8–13.

    15. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 19–20.

    GLOSSARY

    PART I

    Public Letters

    1

    Royal Edicts

    Constructing an Ethnopolitical Community

    JAHYUN KIM HABOUSH

    Royal edicts in which the ruler addressed the entire population of the country were arguably the most public and widely disseminated of missives in dynastic Korea. The practice of issuing royal pronouncements is recorded very early in China, as early as the era of the classics (the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E.). The states of the Korean peninsula adopted the practice sometime during the Three Kingdoms period (trad. first century B.C.E.–668 C.E.), and it continued until the end of the dynastic era. In earlier periods, the practice of promulgating royal edicts was mostly limited to such momentous occasions as royal accessions, the subjugation of rebellions, and so forth. King Sinmun of Silla’s proclamation of his accession,¹ King T’aejo of Koryŏ’s enthronement proclamation, and his royal edict issued just prior to Koryŏ’s (918–1392) annexation of Silla (trad. 75 B.C.E.–935 C.E.)² are some well-known early examples.

    During the Chosŏn, which was founded with the stated aim of realizing a Neo-Confucian state and society, royal edicts were employed as a mechanism through which this vision could be proclaimed and reaffirmed. The practice was already in place in King T’aejo’s founding edict of 1392, which proclaimed his receipt of the Mandate of Heaven and his pledge that, in obedience to Heaven’s charge, he would govern to benefit the people.³ During the course of the dynasty’s long reign, as the state increasingly turned to this genre to announce significant events and also as a means of communicating with the people to explain and justify policies, various subgenres were employed. Depending on the nature of the edict, these documents were known by different names: kyosŏ (royal letter of instruction), sent to the people of the country to transmit the ruler’s political views; chŏnji (transmitted decision), in which the ruler transmits decisions to concerned officials regarding rewards and punishments; chŏn’gyo (transmitted instruction), a decree issued by the ruler; and yunŭm (silken sound) in which the ruler expresses concern for the people. The first and last were the most widely circulated. The edict’s potential as a forum for persuasion and the display of personal concerns, akin to televised presidential addresses in modern polities, was not lost to Chosŏn rulers. The language of the edicts personalized and displayed the Confucian rhetoric of the concerned ruler-father who toils to carry out the dynastic mission of looking after the welfare of his people. This chapter contains three examples, two kyosŏ and one yunŭm, chosen for both special and representative features. Each edict shows the appropriation of the Confucian ideal of the concerned ruler-father and the use of affective language.

    The first edict that follows, dated the ninth month of 1593, was sent out under King Sŏnjo’s (r. 1567–1608) name during the Imjin War (1592–1598). This edict has two distinct features: it was one of a number of wartime edicts, produced during the first war after a period of two hundred years of peace that Korea had enjoyed, and it was one of a series of public missives in vernacular Korean script that the court sent out during this war; until then, all or nearly all public communications were written in literary Chinese, and this is the only vernacular edict that has been preserved in full. This edict is not found in the Veritable Record (Sillok), but Sŏnjo’s order to send out such an instruction is recorded.⁴ It is not clear whether the exclusion of the text itself from the Veritable Record was due to loss of the document, as happened to many official missives during wartime confusion, or to an editorial decision that had something to do with the fact that it was written in the Korean script. We have the edict now only because a copy has been preserved in a family’s private collection.

    The vernacular edicts that Sŏnjo sent out during the Imjin War were the first royal edicts written in that script since the invention of the Korean alphabet in 1443.⁵ The practice was initiated in the ninth month of 1592, when the Chosŏn court, having fled the invading Japanese army, was at the northernmost border town of ŭiju. Acutely imperiled, the court began to send out edicts in the Korean script in the hopes of reaching as wide a circle of Koreans as possible. Edicts in literary Chinese continued to be disseminated as well. Given an independent role, an importance equal to those in literary Chinese, the vernacular edicts impelled the Korean script from the shadow of literary Chinese into the public space.⁶

    The edict that is translated in the section of original texts was sent out seventeen months after the war began. By this time, the situation had improved for Korea. The Chinese assistance army had arrived in early 1593, and the allied troops of China and Korea had retaken P’yŏngyang and Seoul. The Japanese army had retreated to the south. Although the royal court had not yet returned to the capital, it began to take restorative steps. One of these was to gather the scattered population and to rally the people to rebuild the war-torn country. This edict was aimed at those who were held by the Japanese—many Koreans had been taken captive by the Japanese, and though some had been sent to Japan, some were still within Japanese military camps. Sŏnjo’s order, recorded in the Sillok, to take appropriate measures makes it clear that the government was intent on luring them back:

    Among our people who reside in the Pusan area, many have surrendered to and joined the Japanese army. There must be those who wish to return but hesitate because they fear punishment. We should put up posters for these people assuring them that if they were to leave the enemy camp not only will they be spared death, they will also be exempted from corvée labor for the remainder of their lives and they may even be rewarded with official posts. Let the Agency for Border Affairs (Pibyŏnsa) take care of this matter.

    Although it is not known how copies of the edict were disseminated to Koreans in the Japanese camps, the fact that it was written in the Korean script suggests a belief that the Korean script was accessible only to Koreans, unlike literary Chinese, which was the lingua franca of the educated throughout East Asia. It is also of note that the edict evokes the shared past and shared hopes for the future of Koreans.⁸ In this sense, the Korean script symbolizes as well as constructs the ethnolinguistic community.⁹

    The second edict, by King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–1776), was the announcement in 1749 of the establishment of the regency of Prince Sado (1735–1762). This regency ended on a tragic note in 1762, with Yŏngjo’s execution of Sado, the only known filicide in the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty. During the Chosŏn, a regency was installed when it was deemed that the king needed assistance in governing due to either his youth or poor health, most often stemming from advancing age. As is shown in the text following, Yŏngjo pleaded ill health in appointing his heir apparent regent. In his fifty-sixth year, however, he was neither too ill nor too old to rule. It is difficult to fathom Yŏngjo’s motivation for establishing the regency. Lady Hyegyŏng (1735–1815), Sado’s wife, in her famous memoir describing the father-son conflict that led to Sado’s death, attributes the regency to father-son conflicts and Yŏngjo’s desire to delegate aspects of governing that he found distasteful, such as presiding over criminal cases, to his son.¹⁰

    If Hyegyŏng’s explanation sounds teleological, aided as it was by hindsight, a regency of the prince when the king was still in his prime boded an inherently tense situation. For this reason, even when this arrangement was deemed desirable, officials rarely favored it, acquiescing only reluctantly. This was the case with Sado’s regency. Well aware of the bureaucratic resistance to it, Yŏngjo cleverly engineered his strategy: he announced his impending abdication in favor of his son, and as opposition by the bureaucracy and the prince mounted he offered regency as a compromise, then he acted on it swiftly.

    Sado’s regency did not mean that he was completely in charge of state affairs. Modeled after the regency of King Kyŏngjong (r. 1720–1724), that was installed in 1717 when King Sukchong (r. 1674–1720) was in ill health and suffering from poor eyesight, Sado’s regency presided over all matters except decisions on three crucial areas—appointments, punishments, and the use of troops. The regent was given the accoutrements of a ruler. He maintained a court complete with accompanying scribes and historians; in speaking to him, his officials would address themselves as your servants (sin), a form of address reserved for ministers when speaking to a ruler. Although the arrangement contained its share of potential complications, it also suggests an apprentice program for kingship.

    There is no reason to doubt Yŏngjo’s stated reasons for his son’s regency—his own exhaustion and his delight in and high expectations of his son, who had just reached his fifteenth year. Yŏngjo’s arrival on the throne and his early reign were punctuated by extremely volatile and contentious political events that included a mass purge of officials and a rebellion. He also had to live under suspicion of regicide of his older brother, whom he had succeeded. This unusual regency could be seen as stemming from his wish to bequeath to his son a throne less encumbered and to secure a smooth transition to the next reign and from his hopes that his son would render him support and comfort in governing.¹¹ Although couched in the rhetoric of dynastic mandate, this edict displays Yŏngjo’s hopes for and pride in his son, which ended in a cruel tragedy. It is interesting to note that establishing a regency is presented as beneficial to the dynastic mission, which is in turn posited as a common project for everyone in the state.

    The third edict presented here, known as a yunŭm, literally beneficent voice [of the ruler], is in a different category of royal pronouncement. Rather than announcements of specific events, yunŭm were utilized as a forum to persuade the people or to explain state policies in times of difficulty. Though this genre was practiced from the early Chosŏn, it was during the eighteenth century, especially during the reigns of Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), who were devotees of the Confucian politics of benevolent patriarchy, that it emerged as an important mode of royal communication with the people. It provided a suitable stage for the display of the ruler’s concern in his own voice.

    King Chŏngjo’s yunŭm that is translated in the original texts section was sent out in 1783 to the people of six provinces that had suffered a poor harvest. It contains a few ingredients worthy of note. First, it is one of numerous yunŭm that Chŏngjo sent out simultaneously in literary Chinese and vernacular Korean script. After Sŏnjo’s wartime edicts in vernacular Korean, public missives were again written in literary Chinese. During the reigns of Yŏngjo and, in particular, Chŏngjo, Korean script was again utilized to reach everyone. The affective language of the Confucian ruler-father that Chosŏn kings employed reached a certain apotheosis in this yunŭm. There is the notion of the ruler sharing joy and sorrow with his people: Magistrates be solemnly requested that this message be disseminated to every corner in every direction so that not even one man or one woman will fail to hear of my deeply felt wish to share this happy occasion with each and every one of my people. Then there is the emphasis on how the king is just as concerned with the humble as he is with the mighty: Whether you reside in a distant border area or live nearby in the capital area, all of you are my people. My thoughts are with you always, either with those in distant areas or with those nearby. The old saying about ten fingers [that damage to any one brings equal pain] can be compared to my feelings. If I hear that even one man or one woman becomes homeless and suffers from hunger, would I not be troubled and would I not suffer? In terms of the script and the language, the edict constructs a socio-textual community of a mutually concerned, all inclusive Chosŏn.

    ORIGINAL TEXTS

    1. King Sŏnjo’s Edict to the People of Pusan and Other Areas (1593)

    This text is based on one of the copies of the royal edict sent out in 1593. The copy is owned by a private family in Kyŏngju City in Kyŏngsang Province, the area in which the poster must have been circulated. See Kim, Sŏnjo taewang ŏn’gyo ko, 27–34.

    The King duly instructs the people. Since you were captured by the Japanese army, you have been following them against your will. Because you are afraid that were you to be caught escaping, you might be killed by them, and also because you are afraid that having joined the Japanese, you might be killed by our government, you are not returning from the enemy camp. Do not harbor such suspicion. Persuade one another and return. Not only will you not be punished, [but] anyone who renders meritorious service—returning with a captured Japanese, offering detailed information about enemy operations, returning with many of our captured people, or any other worthy deed—will be rewarded with an official post appropriate to his status. I urge you to overcome your suspicions and return at once. We have instructed every general and commandant about this order. Have no fear and return one and all.

    There are none among you who do not have a parent, a wife, or children. Would it not be wonderful to return to your old village to resume your old life? If you do not return now you will be killed by the Japanese. Consider your regret when peace and order are restored. The Chinese army has been rejuvenated; Pyŏngan Province is filled with them and they are also everywhere in Kyŏngsang and Chŏlla Provinces. The Japanese hurried in retreat to their land—our joint Korean and Chinese army will vanquish them in Pusan and Tongnae; the Chinese navy and the navy of our country will enter the sea side by side and will destroy and burn every single enemy ship. If you linger there, you will not avoid getting killed. Come out quickly before this happens.

    Ninth month, Wanli 21.

    2. King Yŏngjo’s Edict Proclaiming the Regency of the Crown Prince to the Eight Provinces (1749)

    Yŏngjo sillok, 69:9a.

    The King, after announcing the establishment of the crown prince’s regency to the Royal Temple, sent out the following proclamation to the eight provinces:

    The King declares: It is recorded in history that, for a very long time, the ruler established the crown prince as a regent to uphold the paramountcy of the Altar of Land and Grain and the Royal Ancestral Temple, to appease the military, and to oversee governance. This is a long tradition. That my late father, in 1717, long in poor health, consulting historical precedents of the distant past and observing the legal codes of our dynasty ordered a regency for my royal older brother was based on the same intention. This institution [of regency], either measured by [the cosmic law of] Heaven and Earth or measured against the three sage kings’ governance,¹² is entirely proper. It is perfectly suitable as law for our descendants for ten thousand generations. However, social customs have deteriorated of late, leaning toward stupidities on occasion, and hence the meaning of this law has not received its proper understanding. How lamentable!

    It has been twenty-five years since I, receiving the charge from my royal father and royal brother, acceded to the throne and have ruled over my officials and my people. Because of lack of virtue, I feared that I might not be able to serve Heaven and the gods and spirits. I felt as though I was standing at the edge of a deep pond or treading on shallow ice. Terrified day and night, I was not at ease for even one day or night. I encountered innumerable crises and difficulties, and lately I acquired a serious illness. High officials and scholars have not observed propriety in behavior and have displayed a predilection for forming and delighting in factions. I have admonished and disciplined them. Sometimes I experienced anger, sometimes joy, but I do not feel that I have fully enjoyed the blessings that Heaven awarded me. As a result, daily anxiety and tension have invaded me, and intelligence and energy have decreased, and so even though I tried to govern from early morning to late into the night, I could not accomplish what I wished.

    Fortunately, with the assistance of Heaven and Earth, and the godly blessing of royal ancestors, I had the joy of an heir in the ŭlmyo year [1735] and have eagerly awaited his maturity. Today, the crown prince reached the age that Confucius described as the time of setting one’s heart on learning,¹³ and he decidedly exhibits the appearance of a Heavenly being (ch’ŏnin): his intelligence and understanding grow sharper and clearer each day; his manners and habits, which are naturally formed, display benevolence, filiality, humility, and frugality; and he has exerted himself to study the classics and history. There is not one among the subjects of our country who does not wish to serve him. In him lies the boundless good fortune of our dynasty and our state! How can I adequately express my happiness?

    Anxiety and distress that have accumulated over the last thirty years while I was trying to withdraw from this position [as ruler] have led to this terrible illness. The other night, I sent down my order [to abdicate to the prince] in a sealed envelope. However, I could not but be moved by the prince’s tears and his heartfelt pleas to rescind it, nor could I ignore the deep consternation of my ministers.¹⁴ Hence, I rescinded the earlier order [of abdication] and instead ordered the concerned agency, in consultation with the precedent of the chŏngyu regency [1717],¹⁵ to install a regency for the crown prince on an auspicious day. You may make small changes to ritual paraphernalia and ceremonial details, but, as in the 1717 regency, the regent will be in charge of all matters except appointments, punishments, and the use of troops.

    This measure has already been reported to the Royal Ancestral Temple. Since the crown prince has been made regent, let the morning audience be carried out in accordance with the prescription. Ah! Truly this act yields three advantages: that it

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