Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci (1615)
The Jesuit Matteo Ricci entered Beijing in 1601, after eighteen patient years in the southern provinces, and lived there until his death in 1610. His memoirs, put into Latin and published by Nicolas Trigault in 1615, revealed to Europe the China of the late Ming: examinations, bureaucracy, court rites, all-powerful eunuchs. Ricci knew the same Beijing as Gwon Beol sixty years earlier, the same administrative machine that could only be moved by petitions, visits and gifts. Both witnesses describe the same court from its margins, one as a tolerated missionary, the other as the envoy of a tributary kingdom come to seek redress.
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Hendrik Hamel, Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666 (1668)
A little more than a century after Gwon Beol, the Dutchman Hendrik Hamel discovered Korea from the other end. Shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653, he was taken to Seoul with his companions, then held for thirteen years in the provinces before escaping to Japan in 1666. His journal, published in 1668, is one of the very first European accounts of the Joseon kingdom. It shows the administration Gwon Beol passes through, provincial magistrates, relay stations and corvées, but from the standpoint of a detained foreigner. In 1655 two of the castaways even threw themselves before a Manchu envoy passing through Seoul, begging to be taken to China, in vain.
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Ferdinand Verbiest, Voyages de l'empereur de la Chine dans la Tartarie (1685)
Thirteen years after Min Jeong-jung, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest, astronomer at court, accompanied the Kangxi emperor on his great tour of Manchuria in 1682: Shenyang, the tombs of the Manchu ancestors, then the northern forests as far as Ula. His letter, published in French in 1685, describes the immense retinue, the imperial hunts and the lands emptied by the conquest. The fifteen-year-old whom Min had glimpsed in Beijing has become a self-assured sovereign returning on pilgrimage to the land of his fathers. The two texts complete each other: Manchuria seen by an anxious tributary, then by the emperor's guest.
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John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763)
A Scottish physician in the tsar's service, John Bell accompanied Lev Izmailov's Russian embassy, which reached Beijing at the end of 1720 after crossing Siberia and Mongolia. There he saw the aged Kangxi, who had then reigned for nearly sixty years. His account, published in 1763, describes audiences, imperial banquets and the inevitable question of the kowtow, to which the Russians eventually submitted. Half a century after Min Jeong-jung, the same emperor receives the same homage in the same halls, and the European envoy feels a discomfort that echoes that of the Korean ambassador still loyal to the Ming.
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Pak Chi-won, The Jehol Diary (1780)
Sixteen years after Kim Jong-jeong, the scholar Pak Chi-won passed through Shenyang in his turn with the Korean embassy of 1780, on the way to Beijing and Jehol. His Yeorha ilgi, translated into English as The Jehol Diary, devotes famous pages to the city: shops, signboards, night-time conversations with Chinese merchants. The contrast with Kim is striking. Where the investigator of 1764, humiliated and suspicious, sees in the Manchu capital nothing but barbarism and corruption, Pak Chi-won finds a prosperity and a technical skill from which, he argues, Korea should learn. The same city, two moods, and the beginning of a debate that would run through Korean scholarship.
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George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797)
In 1793 Lord Macartney led the first British embassy to China, to the court of the Qianlong emperor, and his secretary George Staunton published the official account in 1797. The quarrel that made it famous concerned the kowtow: Macartney refused to perform the prostration required of every tributary envoy, Koreans included. Read beside Gwon Beol's journal, the English narrative shows the other face of the same ceremonial. What the Korean ambassador performs without demur, as the price of an ancient relationship, appears to the Englishman as a humiliation to be negotiated, and the failure of his mission foreshadows a century of conflict between China and the West.
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Percival Lowell, Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm (1886)
Percival Lowell, later famous as the astronomer of Mars, spent the winter of 1883-1884 in Seoul, after accompanying the Korean diplomatic mission of 1883 to the United States. His book, published in 1886, describes the capital, its gates closed at nightfall, its palaces and its court life, just as the kingdom was beginning to open to Western treaties. The Seoul that Gwon Beol left in 1539 amid farewell cups is still, in essence, the one Lowell photographed: the same walls, the same rites, the same scholars. But the road to Beijing is no longer the kingdom's only door, and the world centred on the Chinese imperial court is beginning to come apart.
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Henry E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or, A Journey in Manchuria (1888)
In 1886 the British official Henry E. M. James travelled through Manchuria with the officer Francis Younghusband and the diplomat Harry Fulford, as far as the Changbai Mountains, the Long White Mountain sacred to the Manchus. His book, published in 1888, describes the Chinese settlers now moving onto formerly reserved lands, the inns, the markets and the cart roads. Min Jeong-jung had crossed a ruined Liaodong in 1669, emptied by the conquest; two centuries later James found a region resettled and cleared. The comparison measures how far this frontier had travelled, from military wasteland to pioneer country.
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Isabella Bird, Korea and Her Neighbours (1898)
During her Korean journeys of 1894 to 1897, the English traveller Isabella Bird pushed on as far as Mukden in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War. Her book, published in 1898, describes the city Kim Jong-jeong had known, now filled with soldiers, wounded men and missionaries. The comparison shows what a hundred and thirty years had changed: Manchuria, guarded by the Eight Banners and closed by the Palisade, had become a battlefield between empires, and Korea, which Kim had defended inch by inch before the Manchu judges, had ceased in 1895 to be China's vassal. The foreign eye records the end of an order the journal of 1764 believed eternal.
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Dugald Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden, 1883-1913 (1914)
A Scottish medical missionary, Dugald Christie settled in Mukden, the former Shenyang, in 1883 and stayed thirty years, founding a hospital and then a medical school. His memoirs, published in 1914, tell the story of the Manchu capital from within, through epidemics, the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer rising, the Russo-Japanese War and the plague of 1910-1911. We find again the city, its yamens and its courts, where Kim Jong-jeong watched his prisoners' confessions being rewritten, this time through the eyes of a foreigner who cared for its inhabitants and shared their trials for a generation.
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Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (1932)
After travelling through Manchuria in 1929 and 1930, among Chinese settlers, Mongols and forest peoples, Owen Lattimore published in 1932 a book drawn from his roads and encounters. He presents Manchuria as a succession of frontiers, where the Willow Palisade, which Kim Jong-jeong crossed in 1764, once separated the lands reserved for the Manchus from those open to Chinese farmers. The book appeared just as Japan was seizing the region. It sheds light, a century and a half later, on the logic of partition that the Korean investigator endured at every guard post without naming it.
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Peter Fleming, One's Company: A Journey to China (1934)
In 1933 the young journalist Peter Fleming reached China by the Trans-Siberian and crossed Manchukuo, the state created by Japan a year earlier, before heading south to the war zones between Nationalists and Communists. One's Company, published in 1934, is a funny and clear-sighted narrative. On the lands Min Jeong-jung crossed under the eye of the victorious Manchus, Fleming watches a new conqueror install his garrisons and his officials. Nearly three centuries after the fall of the Ming, Manchuria remains what it was for the Korean ambassador: a land of passage, held by force and by those who wield it.