Organizer: Donald L. Baker, University of British Columbia
Chair: Yunshik Chang, University of British Columbia
Discussants: Steven Lee, University of British Columbia; Mark Peterson, Brigham Young University
The diplomatic history of Choson Korea has been a neglected area of Choson dynasty history, at least among scholars writing in English. Political, economic, social, and cultural history have all attracted much more scholarly attention. That may be because of a common assumption that, except for periods of crisis such as the Hideyoshi invasions or the incursions of Japan and the West at the end of the nineteenth century, the Choson dynasty did not have much of a foreign policy, since China assumed responsibility for Korea’s relations with its neighbors in a Sino-centric world order.
The three papers in this panel challenge that assumption. Whether negotiating with China over the border between those two countries or meeting with its Japanese or Ryukyuan neighbors, the Choson dynasty acted to promote its own best interests. Choson Korea’s freedom of action was constrained by the tributary system, and by the lack of a strong independent military force. Nevertheless, the Choson dynasty realized that it could not rely on China to promote Korean interests and therefore it had to develop a foreign policy which would allow it to operate with the maximum autonomy those constraints would allow. The papers on this panel will examine three examples of Choson diplomacy in order to suggest an alternative to the traditional Sino-centric view of Korea’s place in the pre-modern East Asian world order.
Andre Schmid, University of Toronto
Much of the literature on the tribute system has been written from the perspective of China. In this literature, Korea generally functions as the paradigm for how the system worked: its envoys submissively kowtowing to the Beijing emperors on their missions of tribute. While the field of Chinese history has over the last twenty years shifted its focus away from central elite politics, the study of the tribute system has been remarkably unaffected by these recent changes. Documents produced by the Board of Rites continue to serve as the main source for information on this system.
This paper attempts to rethink the working of the tribute system by examining a specific case of interaction between a Manchu envoy and local Choson officials along the Sino-Korean frontier between 1711–1713. By examining documents produced by the Korean side, this paper argues that the tribute system was far more fluid than generally assumed in the historiographical literature. At the same time that Choson envoys to Beijing were paying tribute, other officials along the border with the full support of the Seoul court were using all methods at their disposal—procrastination, prevarication, deception and misdirection—to stymie the attempts of the Kangxi emperor’s envoy to gain information about the frontier region. This recalcitrant behavior—hardly that of a submissive vassal—never found its way into contemporary Chinese records of these interactions, however. The paper concludes by suggesting that the erasure of such actions and events which did not subscribe to Beijing’s expectations and ideological pretences should be understood as part of the tribute system’s mechanisms of reproduction. By examining these institutions from such external sources as Korean documents, not only can the subtleties and complexities of the tribute relationship be recovered, but so too can the reproduction of Sino-centric assumptions in our understanding of the tribute system be avoided.
Donald L. Baker, University of British Columbia
Korea’s first diplomatic contact with the Ryukyus came in 1389, when the king of one of the principalities which then occupied the territory we now call Okinawa sent his son to Koryo to return to Korean soil some sailors who had been captured by Japanese pilots. There was additional commercial and diplomatic contact off and on over the next two centuries. The last diplomatic exchange between those two kingdoms was in 1636, over a decade after the Kingdom of the Ryukyus had been conquered by samurai from the Japanese feudal domain of Satsuma.
These two centuries of diplomatic and commercial contact between Korea and the Ryukyus reveal much about how Korea operated within the constraints of the Sino-centric world order. Korea knew that, under the terms of its tributary relationship with China, it was not permitted to freely and openly establish diplomatic, cultural, and commercial ties with other nations. Nevertheless, Korea traded with the Ryukyus, and the king of Choson exchanged diplomatic documents with the king of the Ryukyus, despite concerns about what would happen if China found out about this unauthorized relationship. I will argue, therefore, that the diplomatic and commercial relationship between Choson Korea and the Kingdom of the Ryukyus shows that Choson Korea was a semi-state, not fully autonomous, but constantly straining to act in as autonomous a fashion as the tributary system would allow.