The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture

1. Residence and Foreign Relations in the Peninsular Northeast During the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The Chosŏn government engaged in foreign relations with individuals living in Hamgyŏng Province into the late sixteenth century.1 Jurchens (K. Yŏjin, Yain) from several tribes, including the Odoli, Uryangkhad, and Hurhan Wudiha, concentrated in the peninsular northeast, particularly in Hoeryŏng and further to the north and east. Aware of the Ming China government’s approach to managing interaction with Jurchens based north of Chosŏn, many of whom belonged to tribes whose members also lived in the peninsular northeast, the Korean government similarly treated state-sponsored interaction as domestic administration. The peninsular northeast was a multicultural frontier, a zone of interaction where Koreans and Jurchens commingled, collided, and cooperated.2 The territorial and jurisdictional spaces named “Chosŏn” and “Hamgyŏng Province,” though, may not be the most appropriate locations for placing the interactions between the Chosŏn court and Jurchens who resided there.3 In “Hamgyŏng Province,” many Jurchens lived in communities that were not fully incorporated into the Korean state, and they were not subjects of the King of Chosŏn as Koreans were subjects of the King of Chosŏn. The concepts of territorial sovereignty and jurisdictional sovereignty borrowed here from Peter Sahlins’ study of the making of a state boundary between France and Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries help to draw more sharply the disjuncture in the King of Chosŏn’s rule in Hamgyŏng Province.4 As Korean kings and their officials did not treat all Jurchens residing in the northeastern province the same as the Koreans living 1 Residence and Foreign Relations in the peninsular Northeast During the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries kenneth r. robinson Residence and Foreign Relations 19 there, it seems clear that the court understood that the monarch’s authority did not fully extend into all Jurchen communities. Interaction illuminates complexities of administration in the peninsular northeast and Chosŏn. Seeking to encourage and maintain quiet in the northeast , from the mid-1420s the Chosŏn court appointed Jurchen elites to military posts and permitted them, but not Korean military officials holding the same posts, to trade in the capital. The Chosŏn court treated these Jurchens as both subjects and guests. Such Korean government policies suggest that Chosŏn was not a singular administrative space in the peninsula northeast from 1392 into the late sixteenth century.5 RESHApINg CHoSŏN Jurchens moved into the peninsula during the Koryŏ period, and more resettled there in the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth century. Their villages concentrated in the northeast corner, with different tribes generally residing in separate areas. Many of these Jurchens did not sever ties with communities north of the Yalu (K. Amnok) and Tumen (K. Tuman) rivers. Jurchens who resided in the peninsula in the late fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries may be broadly divided into two groups, immigrant (hyanghwa; t’uhwa; kwihwa) Jurchens and Jurchens who had not immigrated. The contours of the first group can not always be sharply defined, but, in general, these were people who had sought the Chosŏn court’s permission to immigrate into Korean society. Some Jurchen immigrants lived in the capital area, others in the northeast and elsewhere. The focus here will be on Jurchen elites who had not immigrated into Korean society and resided in the northeast area of the peninsula. Korean officials distinguished the area north of the Tumen and Yalu rivers from the area south of the two rivers. North of the rivers was the “kangoe,” or “the land beyond the river(s).” Jurchens lived there, and the Chosŏn court considered “there” to be China. For example, Korean officials referred to the kangoe area as “sangguk,” or “the superior country,” “the country to the north,” and “Ming China.”6 From Chosŏn, immigrant Jurchens with government permission could cross the Tumen River and visit their family (pon’ga) or their home village (pont’o). Crossing the river and going ashore constituted crossing a territorial boundary and a jurisdictional boundary, and the wish to do so Kenneth R. Robinson 20 triggered regulations that the Korean government expected to be followed. This imposition of state oversight offers an example of spatial socialization through the expression of state administration. Other immigrants, though, abandoned their residences and moved north across the river or elsewhere in the peninsula.7 Jurchens who had not immigrated also travelled north. Korean officials referred...