A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing's Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryŏ trans. by Sem Vermeersch (review)

Many of us teach in History departments and cannot expect foreign language skills of undergraduates. The goal is to entice them toward thoughtful engagement with Eastern Eurasia, which may occasionally elicit enough commitment to learn the language(s) and enter academia, but is mostly about producing graduates with wider horizons and better understanding of difference. When one has to teach even upper level courses with works in translation, there are never enough. Translations are no longer advisable as PhD projects, they do not readily facilitate rapid career advancement, and publishers have to be persuaded that they will sell. Accordingly, expansions of the range available are relatively infrequent and always welcome, especially when they concern an underrepresented region. This is all the more so when the work offers fresh insights, detailed information, a distinctive voice, or in this case, all three.

Perhaps understandably, literary works tend to attract more attention from translators, and translations of historical texts have tended toward those presenting views of the outside world. Hence Thomas Barfield, for example, was able to write his magnum opus, The Perilous Frontier, based largely on published translations of chapters on foreign people taken from dynastic histories and other works in Chinese. These works of court historiographical bureaus present an imperial view, whereas travelers' accounts, including envoy reports, offer a more individual perspective, albeit often still within a more or less official context.

All such works provide us with several layers of information. On the surface, we get descriptions of places, people, things, practices, and sometimes events for which we may have no other source, or which offer helpful corroboration or nuance. Not only are these accounts sometimes fascinatingly extraordinary, but we also see what our writer found unfamiliar or otherwise worthy of mention, and how the author reacted to those they encountered. We learn as much about the writer and their world as we do about what they are describing. In some cases more than others, we may also be able to see something of the reactions to the writer by those they met. The Illustrated Account is an example of one such work, where the translator has done an excellent job of drawing our attention to the complexities of the interactions conveyed.

The Illustrated Account is Xu Jing's record of his 1123 visit to Koryŏ (Goryeo, 918–1392) as an envoy from the Northern Song (960–1126) court. These circumstances make the Account a valuable corrective to the later, elite, internal Chosŏn (Joseon, 1392–1897) perspective of the 1451 Koryŏsa. For a China specialist it is slightly odd for a Song envoy report to be an "external" source like this, but that simply highlights the painful absence of envoy or traveler accounts offering external views of the Song, and reminds us of some of the hazards attendant upon dominance of the historical record. Despite having far less information overall about twelfth-century Koryŏ, the Illustrated Account allows us to see Koryŏ from more angles than those from which we can view the contemporary Song.

The Account was originally a collection of pictures with captions, but its early transmission appears to have been in numerous hand-copied manuscripts that omitted the images, the only copies of which were then lost in the Jin conquest of Northern Song just a couple of years after Xu Jing produced them. The accompanying text provides extensive and significant information in its own right, but there are places where the absence of the images leaves the meaning of the words opaque. Although some mysteries therefore remain, the forty chapters of wildly different lengths provide absorbing details that will be great primary material for History and other classes.

The Account is not the official envoy report but an extended, thematic description. Xu begins with cities, gates...