Miscellaneous Notes from a Journey to Beijing

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month of 1703, the Korean dignitary Seo Jong-tae takes leave of his king and sets out from Seoul at the head of the winter solstice embassy. Ahead of him lie weeks of road to Beijing.

At every halt, he writes a poem. Kaesong, the old capital, then Pyongyang and its banquets, the solstice day at Seoncheon, Uiju on the edge of the kingdom. Beyond the Yalu begins Manchu land: a night under the open sky in the ruins of Zhenjiang, snowy passes where tigers prowl, Shenyang, where King Hyojong lived as a hostage in his youth, a plain without a single hill for days on end.

Then come the Ming battlefields, Ningyuan and the memory of Yuan Chonghuan, the Shanhaiguan pass where the Great Wall meets the sea. In Beijing, the ambassador attends the New Year's Day audience in a court he regards as foreign, and spends his nights sleepless at the envoys' hostel.

With the vice-ambassador and the secretary, he trades verses on the same rhymes, the way people keep each other company in the cold. His 176 poems form a road journal where weariness, snow, mourning for a vanished dynasty and homesickness mingle.

It remains to be seen what the long road home holds for a man who counts the months without news of his family.