Offshore Asia: Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia before Steamships

7. Shaping Maritime East Asia in the 15th and 16th Centuries through Choson Korea

7 SHAPING MARITIME EAST ASIA IN THE 15TH AND 16TH CENTURIES THROUGH CHOSOÊN KOREA1 Kenneth R. ROBINSON In his 2005 book Umi to teikoku — Min-Shin jidai [The Sea and Empire: The Ming-Qing Period], Ueda Makoto writes, “By focusing on the relationship between empire and the sea we can continually pay attention to the contemporaneity of Japan and Southeast Asia, which were linked to China by the sea, and Europe, and to depict the history of Eurasia as a common history.”2 This approach prompts two observations. First, Ueda’s history is a case study of how the sea impacted the history of Ming China and Qing China and, more broadly, the histories of nearby countries and a larger region. Second, Chosŏn Korea is not included in this history of Ming and Qing China and the sea. That Ueda does not include Chosŏn is understandable. Save for the first several decades of the Ming period, when the capital was located in Nanjing and Korean embassies often travelled there by sea, these two Chinese governments and the Chosŏn government conducted their diplomatic relations through the dispatch overland of embassies to the other country. In addition, Koreans often traded with Chinese and Jurchens north 186 Kenneth R. Robinson of the Yalu River. Ueda’s project encourages the writing of the Chosŏn government and its engagements with the sea as another case study. Two themes will be discussed in this chapter. The first theme is the maritime space, divided into microregions, in which the Chosŏn government conducted trade from 1392 until 1592. The second is the Chosŏn court’s management of maritime trade. Trade in Southeast Asia, the transport of Southeast Asian goods northward to Ryukyu and then to Japan, and the Chosŏn government’s structure for managing maritime contact shaped a maritime trade region that continued to connect these areas from at least the late 14th century and the 15th century onward. That structure, a Korean tribute system, a “bureaucratic systematization of the management”3 of trade missions, arranged Japanese contacts into a hierarchical order of relations with the King of Chosŏn.4 The Chosŏn government sanctioned trade and accepted items conveyed from Southeast Asia through this structure for routine interaction. CONSTRUCTING REGIONS IN THE EAST ASIAN SEA Fernand Braudel suggested how the Mediterranean Sea in the 16th and 17th centuries not only connected peoples along its shores but also affected mountain communities and people further inland. He depicted “the unity and coherence of the Mediterranean Sea region”.5 Recently, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have broken down the unity and cohesion that Braudel saw. They find “the connectivity of microregions”, and are interested in “the various ways in which microregions cohere, both internally and also one with another — in aggregates that may range in size from small clusters to something approaching the entire Mediterranean”.6 The courage of Braudel and of Horden and Purcell to write of the Mediterranean Sea and of Anthony Reid to view maritime and insular SoutheastAsia7 as connected at multiple layers is daunting. The hope here is merely to offer a case study, one that treats selected features of the Chosŏn court’s connections with the sea and foreigners from the late 14th century into the late 16th century. Heather Sutherland has encouraged historians to concentrate on narrower spaces. In her view, they should seek: to identify relative densities of interaction which are relevant to the specific subject under consideration. This clustering would enable the researcher to define the geographic boundaries appropriate to the question, rather than operating within conventional but largely irrelevant and often misleading Shaping Maritime East Asia through Chosŏn Korea 187 frameworks. Such webs of connections, with their fluctuations, can be traced by mapping both the synchronic and diachronic distribution of any number of selected variables.8 Detailed examinations of forms of interaction in specific locations are already available in Japanese-language scholarship. In this research on the mid-14th century to the late 16th century, historians have identified numerous areas and forms of dense interaction, including trade routes, in maritime East Asia that involved Japanese and Ryukyuans. From such accumulated research, as well as research in Korean history, it is possible to view the waters from Southeast Asia to the north of today’s Japan, and from the coastal regions (in particular) on the continent to the archipelagic...