A Farce that Wounds Both High and Low: The Guan Yu Cult in Chosŏn-Ming Relations*

Scholarship on Chosŏn gratitude to the Ming in the wake of the Imjin Wars stresses Chosŏn loyalism and nostalgia for a lost civilizational order then only remnant as a final human outpost on the Korean peninsula standing firm before the tides of northern savagery. There was a very different undercurrent, however, in which the Chosŏn officialdom of the capital saw the Ming as irrational and even culturally alien, if not barbarous, violators of propriety. This paper examines these tensions and contradictions through the construction of Chosŏn state temples to Guan Yu, known in his deified form as Kwan Wang, at the close of the sixteenth century and the roles the cult and its temples played as a discursive space in which the Ming and Chosŏn governments negotiated the nature and dynamics of their relationship.