Chaoxian chaoshichen yanzhongde Zhongguo xingxiang: Yi 'Yanxinglu' 'Chaotianlu' wei zhongxin (Images of China in the eyes of Chosŏn dynasty tribute envoys: focusing on the Yŏnhaengnok and the Choch'ŏnnok) by Xu Dongri (review)

Since the academic community in China began to examine how China was perceived by foreigners at the end of the last century, its focus has been on the West. From the translation and publication of a vast corpus of Western writings on China emerged an increasingly diverse field of research that featured a range of perspectives and methods. From case studies to macroscopic analyses, from summary descriptions to theoretical expositions, these works allowed a deeper understanding of the emergence and transformation of Western images of China in the context of social change in China, Sino-Western cultural interactions, and Western modernism.

By contrast, the Chinese academic community has largely overlooked how neighboring countries and regions, especially Korea, Japan and Vietnam, have viewed China. There are probably two major causes for this phenomenon. First, these countries and regions have had a long history of accommodating Chinese culture. They belong to the Sinitic cultural sphere, and share a common cultural heritage with China. For these reasons, the Chinese have for a long time not paid much attention to their writings. Second, the universalization of Western modernist perspectives and the hegemony of Western discourse have made Western perspectives seem more significant.

With the gradual discovery, collation, and publication of writings in literary Chinese from outside China, however, Chinese academia has come to realize that a comparative perspective on China and its neighbors cannot be overlooked. In light of the rather stark differences that emerge in comparisons between China and the West, the perspectives of China's neighbors offer another set of comparative lenses for understanding China. They can also provide deeper understanding of the distinctions and similarities among societies in East Asia and their transformations. As such, a group of scholars have begun to use these sources in literary Chinese from outside China to conduct research in these areas. Professor Xu Dongri's Images of China in the Eyes of Chosŏn Dynasty Tribute Envoys is a representative work in this category.

This work employs the analytic methods of imagology and comparative literature and uses the travel journals of official envoys from Chosŏn Korea to Ming and Qing China, known as the Choch'ŏnnok 朝天錄 and the Yŏnhaengnok 燕行錄, to study the perceptions by Chosŏn literati of Chinese people and culture, their cultural attitudes and values, and the general perception of China in Chosŏn society.¹ The author explains the dialectic relationship between these travel journals and Korean images of Chinese society. To do so, he sketches out in relative detail the images of Ming and Qing China in the writings of Korean envoys and how these images were transformed in the discourse of Chosŏn Korea, and analyzes the social and cultural factors behind the construction of these images.

The book is divided into six chapters. After giving a general introduction to Korean envoy travels and the major sources forming the basis of his study, the author devotes chapters 2 through 5, organized chronologically, to explaining the images of China in Chosŏn envoy writings in the Ming period, in late seventeenth century Qing, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in the latter half of the eighteenth century, respectively. In the process, the author pays attention to how relations between China and Korea affected how Korean envoys perceived the Ming and Qing dynasties. Representative pieces in the Choch'ŏnnnok and Yŏnhaengnok genres serve as the basis for his analyses and discussions. In contrast to the generalizing dichotomies of "prosperity" and "decline" that the study uses to explain the Ming period, its discussion of how Qing China was imagined in pre-nineteenth century Korean envoy writings is comparably deep and substantial. Taking how...