Epistolary Korea

Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosôn, 1392-1910

JaHyun Kim Haboush

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231519595
• Sujet: Geschichte
• Sous-sujet: Koreanische Geschichte

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.

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.⁷

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 re...