Archives, Archival Practices, and the Writing of History in Premodern Korea: An Introduction

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month in 1760, a magistrate of Yesan Lesser Prefecture (hyŏn 縣) submitted a report to the Provincial Governor's Office (sunyŏng 巡營) about a text titled Comprehensive Summary of Burial Days (Changil t'ongyo 葬日通要). The office forwarded an order from the Bureau of Astronomy (Kwansanggam 觀象監) to locate the text, and the Yesan magistrate replied as follows: "[Though we] thoroughly searched Buddhist temples, [local] Confucian academies, and some private houses within the area [under my supervision] by all means, it was not found."¹ Comprehensive Summary of Burial Days had been compiled at the order of King T'aejong (r. 1400–18), who wished to rectify existing misbelief and malpractice concerning the selection of auspicious funeral dates on the part of the Chosŏn populace. The project had been completed in the first year of King Sejong's reign (r. 1418–50), but it seems that the text was lost or forgotten for many years. Scarcely any information is available on this text in existing sources, save for a few entries in the Veritable Records of King Sejong (Sejong sillok 世宗實錄): neither the context in which the government reached out to the local magistrate's office to look for the text nor whether it was eventually retrieved from one of the other local repositories is known. Nevertheless, this short episode reveals various sites where records were kept in Chosŏn Korea outside of official repositories—such as Buddhist monasteries, Confucian and local academies, and private homes. It also prompts us to consider a number of intriguing points concerning both the perceptions about and practices of record-keeping in premodern Korea: how documents were produced and processed, where they were housed and preserved, and how they arrived in the current archives for scholarly access—the fundamental questions that are, in turn, intimately linked to the nature and use of primary sources in historical research.

As several authors of this special issue aptly note, the term archive as it was understood in nineteenth-century Europe does not fully describe the record-keeping practices in premodern Korea—either in the sense of lacking an organized state institute² or in the sense of the differing or divergent documents stored at central, local, or private sites. Although a sophisticated practice for preserving documents existed in premodern Korea, there were no archives that qualified as "the conceptual and procedural framework of what is considered to be 'true' archives" in modern construction, fulfilling instrumental principles such as provenance and the original order of the materials contained.³ As elucidated in the articles by Sem Vermeersch and Sixiang Wang in this issue, the vast collections of documents that have survived in contemporary libraries, institutions, and other repositories in Korea, such as the Kyujanggak and Jangseogak, are "processed records" rather than intact original ones, and hence are in a strict sense "secondary" documents—that is, products crafted through the rigorous processes of sorting, copying, editing, and compiling of original documents into a bound collection. In this sense, documents inherited and preserved in such locations are not always impartial and can hardly be recognized as "legitimate archival sources," which thus sets the premodern Korean practice of record-keeping apart from Western archival practice.

This nonexistence of European standards for "archives" in premodern Korea, however, does not mean that that there was no "archival practice" prior to the emergence of national archives in modern Korea, precisely because "the history of archiving can be studied as early as the written record itself."⁴ Thus, despite the fact that archives as the institutions in Ranke's definition never existed, compelling evidence testifies to a range of activities involving certain techniques, forms, rules, and regulations for managing and preserving records formally legislated during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910)⁵—the set of record-keeping procedures distinctively developed and deeply embedded in both existing and changing sociopolitical contexts of Chosŏn rule. Notwithstanding the elaborate steps involved in compiling official histories such as the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄)⁶ examined in...