[KS] Charles Dallet

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

Charles Dallet's _Histoire de l'E'glise de Core'e_ is well known among
Koreanists but, sadly, seldom read.  Anyone who had read it would surely
know that Dallet never saw Korea.  His own preface, only a few pages long,
makes this perfectly clear.  Recent postings on this list mentioned it,
and stimulated me to write the following, as an introduction to the work
for those who would like to know more about it.

I first looked at Dallet's grand opus in the late 1950s, when I was
studying written French in anticipation of my graduate examinations at
Berkeley and looking around for something in French on Korea to read.  Of
course I couldn't read all of its more than 1300 pages, but I found it
interesting enough to promise myself to come back to it later.  In 1963, I
saw a copy of the original edition of Dallet advertised, and I bought it.  
The book was then 89 years old but in pristine condition, its pages never
even having been cut.  (It's not just in modern times that people have not
read this book!)  After my dissertation was finally finished in 1966, I
sat down and read both volumes from cover to cover.

It was fascinating, different from any other book I had ever read on
Korea.  It was not so much the turbulent history of Korean Catholicism
that kept my interest engaged, although that was a very absorbing story in
itself, but the endless fragments of 19th century Korean reality that kept
surfacing serendipitously as the story was told.  It is this dimension
which is so valuable to a historian of Korea, whether he or she is
interested in the Catholic saga or not.

Dallet's history encompasses the whole country, although its geographical
focus is mostly on Seoul and the Kiho and northern Honam area where
Catholicism first took root.  Across its pages run kings, princesses and
regents, prime ministers and royal censors, district magistrates and army
commanders, and numerous policemen and "satellites" relentlessly hunting
down thousands of Christians.  Every class is represented: royalty and
prominent members of elite sataypu lineages (for email accuracy and
convenience the Yale system is used here); the interpreters, musicians,
pharmacists and other specialists that made up the small but important
professional (Cwungin) class; country yangpan, merchants, and commoners
from many different locales; the ever present _acen_, who were the
hereditary policemen, tax collectors, bailifs, secretaries, runners, etc.,
in the local administration; the servants and slaves, humble potters,
despised butchers.  And in all these groups, many women, some playing key
roles in Church administration, others risking their lives to hide a
priest smuggled in from China, these and still others defiantly putting
their heads on the martyr's block; others trying to talk their husbands
and sons out of Catholicism and certain death, but still following after
them to bring the body home from the execution ground.  I know of no other
historical text on Korea which covers the society in such a thorough yet
completely natural and unselfconscious way.  Casually scattered mentions
of various social and economic facets, local government, practices of the
police and courts, factional struggles at the heart of government, food
and clothing, popular amusements--all pop up here and there without
fanfare or warning, simply as part of the seamless web of Korean life.

Quite apart from the socio-historical nuggets embedded in Dallet's text,
there are the stories of many remarkable people.  On the one hand we have
those of the tiny Catholic minority who in following an alien religion
boldly challenged some of Korea's most fundamental beliefs and
institutions, and who individually and collectively manifested enormous
courage and determination in their chosen course.  Then there were the
Confucian faithful, appalled that the "cultists" could put their bizarre
foreign religion before filial piety and the king, either striving to
convert their wayward countrymen back to Confucianism or taking after them
with the total power of the state.  Between these two relentless forces
hung thousands, converting today, apostasizing tomorrow, some of them then
changing their mind and giving up their heads the day after that.  Then
there were those French missionaries, of the Societe' des Missions
E'trange`res.  They did not get to Korea until the Korean church already
had fifty-two years of history and hundreds of martyrs, but they made up
for lost time.  None of them, when they first set foot in the country
beginning in 1836, had any expectation of ever leaving it alive. Twenty-
one French priests were assigned to Korea between 1831 and 1866.  The
first one died before getting there, though he made three attempts to
penetrate the Amnok frontier; five died of various illnesses after
arrival; twelve were martyred; three escaped to China in 1866.  One might
or might not be in agreement with their goals, but their commitment was
impressive.  Their life in Korea was unbelievably hard.  Most of their
time was spent hiding.  That they could live safely for protracted periods
of time--successfully for the most part--is a testimonial to the trust and
support of the Korean Christian community, who risked their lives to
protect them.

Charles Dallet wrote this book, as he very clearly spells out in his
preface, on the basis of letters and other communications received in
Paris between 1836 and 1863 from the missionaries in Korea.  In what must
have been an intricately planned operation, Korean Catholic fishermen took
the mail out to sea and passed it to Chinese Catholic fishermen who took
it to Shanghai, whence it was dispatched to Hong Kong, where the Societe'
des Missions E'trange`res had an agent, who posted it to Paris.  This
route was apparently pioneered and developed by Kim Tayken, Korea's first
Catholic priest, who studied and was ordained in China.  From 1836 on, all
French priests who entered Korea, or in 1866 those who fled it, did so by
sea.  The Korean authorities had long since established virtually
impenetrable security at the northern frontier, at least in so far as
Europeans were concerned.

Dallet explains how he compiled the general introduction--itself a
comprehensive monograph on Korea, on which I will have some further
comments later.  Given the queries in recent postings, it would seem
worthwhile to give in his own words the substance of his statements
relating to compilation.  The translation from French is mine, as are
the occasional comments in parentheses.  In the very first sentence,
Dallet, single-mindedly certain that, among Europeans, only French
missionaries had ever penetrated Korea, seems to indicate that he was
unaware of the Dutch sources (and even those in French translation) on
Weltevree, Hamel and others.  But elsewhere in the book, he does take note
of the short stay in Korea of Gregorio de Cespedes and his companion in
1593.  This latter, however, does not clash with the thrust of the first
sentence below:

	"[T]he missionaries are the only Europeans who have ever sojourned
in Korea, who have spoken the language, and who have been able, in living
many years with its people, to seriously know their laws, their character,
their prejudices, and their daily life...  

	"Passing from the introduction to the history proper, it has been
written using the letters of the missionaries, together with Korean
accounts which they translated and sent to France. There are no other
possible materials.  For the period that preceded the arrival of European
priests, a great number of documents had been collected by Msgr. Daveluy
(on whom more later).  Before him, concerning the first persecutions, we
had only fragments of letters or isolated narratives.  In 1857, he was
charged by another missionary, Msgr. Berneux, to search out all the
documents existing in Chinese or Korean, to translate them into French,
and to complete them to the extent possible by interrogating, under oath,
the eye witnesses.  It was already very late, for there were very few eye-
witnesses from the first period still living, and most of the written
narratives had disappeared in various persecutions.  We will see, in the
course of this history, with what difficulties Msgr. Daveluy succeeded in
accomplishing this task. 

	"...There will be no other history of these witnesses of Jesus
Christ because there are no other documents.  The original documents
collected by Msgr. Daveluy perished in a fire in 1863.  The copies of
these narratives that existed in various Korean Christian communities were
destroyed in the last persecution.  The translations sent to Europe, as
well as the correspondence of the missionaries, exist only in the archives
of the Se'minaire des Missions E'trange`res, and if an accident were to
make them disappear, the history of the origins of the Korean Church would
be irremediably lost.  It was necessary then, to insure the knowledge of
these facts, which belong to the general history of the Catholic Church;
and it was especially necessary to preserve, for the Christians of Korea,
these glorious narratives of the faith and suffering of their fathers,*
and to indicate to the degree possible the name, family, and particular
story of each of the martyrs, so that these names, deeds, and details
might be known some day by their descendants, for whom they will be the
most beautiful title of nobility.

	"In the course of this work, I have generally quoted the letters
of the missionaries rather than analyse them. This results sometimes in
overlengthiness or repetition, but this small inconvenience has seemed to
me to be counterbalanced by the interest which attaches to the letters
themselves.  Most of those who wrote them sealed their faith with their
blood not too long ago, and Christian readers will prefer to hear the
martyrs tell their own story or that of other martyrs. Nor do I make any
note of the numerous faults in style, composition, etc., which are found
in this book.  It is impossible for a missionary to pass his life in
catechizing idolaters without forgetting in some degree his mother tongue,
and I beg the reader not to be too severe on the inevitable lapses in such
a situation."

Thus the substance, in the words of his own preface, of how Dallet
compiled his book.  His insistence on the exclusivity of his sources, and
upon the Societe' as their sole holder, and himself as their sole
transmitter, arose no doubt from his conviction, in the late 1860s and
early 1870s, that the Catholic Church in Korea had been thoroughly
destroyed and that all the sources held by it no longer existed at the
time he wrote.  In that view he was unfortunately more correct than not.
But he seems also to have assumed that the Korean government and others in
Korea who kept records either had nothing to say about Catholic church
history in Korea, or, if they did, their testimony was worthless because
of their irreconcilable opposition to the church and their impugned
credibility.  In this he was very wrong, and he allowed his hubris to
show.  The Korean government's persecution of the Catholics is very well
documented in its own source materials and in its own terms.  Likewise,
there are many Korean writings by anti-Catholic polemicists.  And there
are writings by Catholics that actually did survive the persecutions.  
All of these are extremely valuable and cannot be ignored, and are
certainly proof against Dallet's exclusive claims.  Still these claims and
his particular state of mind are understandable, and once taken account
of, do not detract from the many merits of his book.
 
At this point it will be useful to sum up what is known of Dallet's own
life.  His missionary and writing career may be sketched as follows, based
on a short notice in the _Dictionnaire de biographie franc,ais_ (Paris,
1960):

Claude-Charles Dallet was born in Langres, France, 18 October 1829.  He
entered the Se'minaire des Missions E'trange`res in 1850, and was ordained
5 June 1852.  He was evidently a poet of some skill, and is celebrated for
his "Chant pour le de'part des missionnaires," which was set to music by
the famous opera composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893). Shortly after his
ordination, the young priest took leave of France for his mission
destination, Mysore, in southern India.  He was named Apostolic Vicar in
Bangalore in 1857.  In 1859, he published there, in English, a work
entitled _Controversial Catechism_, a polemic against "Protestant
propaganda."  He spent the years 1860 to 1863 in France, recuperating from
epilepsy.  During this period, he supervised, at the Imprimerie nationale,
the casting of type fonts for the Telagu and Kanara languages, which he
took with him when he returned to Bangalore in 1863, applying them to a
number of publications in vernacular languages under his editorship.  In
1867, again ill, he returned to France.  In 1870 he was sent to America
(probably meaning Que'bec), on a speaking tour.  He stayed for a time at
Laval University in Que'bec, and it is there that, in the words of the
source of this sketch, "he classified Korean manuscripts which provided
the material for his _Histoire de l'E'glise de Core'e_, 1874, 2 vols.,
which was in reality the work of Msgr. Daveluy."  In 1877, Dallet again
departed for India, this time going by way of Russia, Manchuria, China,
and Japan.  From Japan he stopped off in Cochin China (the former French
administrative term for southern Vietnam, as opposed to "Annam" for
central Vietnam and "Tongkin" for northern Vietnam.  While in Ke'so, in
Tongkin, he died of dysentary on 25 April 1878.

The reference to the Histoire as "in reality the work of Msgr. Daveluy"
needs some comment.  Marie-Antoine-Nicolas Daveluy (1818-1866) was
probably the most knowledgeable of all the French missionaries in Korea
insofar as his ability to read materials in Chinese and Korean was
concerned. He had already served in Annam and in southwestern China before
being transferred to Korea in 1845.  In 1856 or 1857, the missionary
directors in Paris instructed the head of mission in Korea, Bishop Sime'on
Berneux, to begin compiling a history of the Korean church, especially of
the period between 1784 and 1836, when there had been no European Catholic
presence in Korea.  Bishop Berneux in turn assigned this task to Daveluy.

Daveluy's work involved collecting any documents relating to history that
he could find and taking oral testimony from survivors of the persecutions
or their descendants.  The thoroughness with which he did this is amazing,
considering the great bulk of the _Histoire_ and the very difficult
conditions under which he had to live and work.  He accumulated not a few
official Korean government documents, mostly judicial sentences and other
materials relating to the interrogation and torture of the Christians;
also partial texts of the official Korean letter to the Emperor of China
relating to the the persecution of 1801, and the edict of the King
(actually the Queen-Regent, Queen Cengswun) defining Catholicism as a
heretical religion and permanently forbidding its practice in Korea; and
even a substantial part of the "silk letter" of Alexander Hwang Sayeng,
confiscated by Korean authorities in 1801, which somehow had come to
circulate among the Christians.  On the unofficial side there are letters
in Korean from early Korean Catholics and scores of narratives recorded
from their dictation.  Finally there are abundant and valuable eye-witness
observations of conditions on the ground (and, figuratively, under it) by
the missionaries themselves.  When it is considered that most of our
knowledge of Korea in these years comes from the top-down views of the
government or the ruling sataypu class (after at least 1750, it is not
advisable to suggest that the term "yangpan" has any necessary connection
with Korea's ruling class), the views of the French missionaries and most
of the Christian community, which were from the bottom and margins of
society, is very valuable and in some cases unique.

In 1862, Daveluy was forced to stop his compilation work because of
particularly harsh surveillance by the authorities, but also because of
the widespread turmoil and peasant rebellions that occurred throughout
Korea in that year.  He gathered together his translations and summaries
of all the materials that he had accumulated, packed them for shipping,
and had them smuggled out to Hong Kong.  In October of 1862, he sent a
separate letter to Msgr. Albrand, the director of the Societe' des
Missions E'trange`eres in Paris.  The letter says in part:

	"I am sending now to M. Libois, our agent in Hong Kong, to be
passed on to you by the most secure means, all of my notes on the history
of the martyrs.  They have not been edited, in spite of all your kind
requests for me to do so: that task is, for me, a physical impossibility
for which you will give no reproach.  I have long been worn out, deprived
so to speak of all my faculties.  The long trips that I have been obliged
to make recently have reduced me to the point that a single written page
is now a frightful labor.  You say to me that a little rest could permit
me to take on the editing.  I respond that the very thought of rest is out
of the question.  Each year my responsibilities and tasks multiply.  In
our present situation in Korea, no rest is possible; there is not even a
place where one might stay for any length of time.  I insist on this
point, because your recent letters seem to oblige me to finish everything
by myself; nothing is held to be impossible.  I refuse no work, especially
of this kind, but one has to have the means for it, and they are
absolutely lacking to me."  (_Histoire de l'e'glise de Core'e_, tome 2,
pp. 454-455)
 
Thanks to the kindness of William Kester, a former student of mine who
interested himself in these matters, I acquired some years ago photo
copies from the archives of the Societe' of several hundred folio-sized
pages in very fine writing in Daveluy's and, here and there, others'
hands.  A rough comparison of some of this material with Dallet's
published text in the _Histoire_ makes it clear that in many cases,
Dallet's text is a literal transcription of Daveluy's notes for pages and
pages at a time (and Dallet says as much himself in a part of his preface
not quoted here).  But it is also abundantly evident that if Dallet had
done nothing else but print what Daveluy sent, as he sent it, the
_Histoire_ would have been an editorial disaster.  This is to say nothing
of the other materials that Dallet gathered, mostly from Catholic sources,
on the Korea missions.  Many of these came from the long running series of
collected letters and monographs from missionaries and other Europeans in
China, known as _Nouvelles lettres e'difiantes et curieux_, published in
Paris during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Some of these
materials were from the Bishop of Peking and related to intelligence and
reports that he received from time to time relating to the situation in
Korea.  Other materials came from Japanese sources and told of Korean
Catholics and martyrs who lived out their Christian lives--and deaths--in
Japan, mostly Kyu^shu^, in the decades following the Imjin Wars.  Such
extraneous materials are particularly prominent in the long Introduction
and the first chapter.  In short, Dallet by no means limited himself to
Daveluy's cache, fabulous as it was.  Therefore it was somewhat
injudicious, to say the least, that the editors of the _Dictionnaire de
biographie franc,aise_ should have said that his opus "was in reality the
work of Msgr. Daveluy."

Sadly, in 1863, the year after Daveluy sent his materials, there was a
fire in the secret church offices in Seoul which destroyed most or all of
the originals in Korean or Chinese.  Even if the fire had not occurred, it
is probably not likely that the cache would have survived the persecutions
that became particularly severe in 1866, and which continued until 1878.  
There can be no question that this was a very grievous loss for history,
but no question either that Daveluy's dispatch of his translations to
Paris in 1862 can be considered providential.

The Introduction was conceived and organized completely by Dallet,
although it too made good use of Daveluy's materials, as well as other
letters from individual missionaries either to the Se'minaire or to their
families.  It is one of the pioneering landmarks of Korean Studies in the
West.  And, as the only part of Dallet that most anglophones ever read, it
has served to represent "Dallet" to two or three generations of American
and other students and scholars.  Indeed, although the 1954 English
translation clearly stated that it was translating the introduction to a
much larger work, I have met more than one from that group who believed
that, in reading this text, they "had read Dallet," and were shocked to
learn that they still had about 1100 pages to go.

Still, if one could read only one part and wanted to know generally what
Korea was like in the middle of the 19th century, one would have to read
the Introduction.  It is a genuine, comprehensive monograph, with separate
sections on geography (physical and cultural); history; royal
institutions; government organization; criminal law, police
("pretorians"), prisons, and tortures (a subject the Christians knew
well); public examinations and schools; the Korean language; social
structure from the nobility to the slaves (ending with some particularly
depressing sentences on female sexual slavery); women and marriage;
family, adoption, and mourning; religion (Confucianism, Buddhism, and
Shamanism, presented as "Ancestor worship, bonzes, and popular
superstitions" but admirably informed and generally free of any European
or Catholic prejudices); the "Korean character, moral qualities, defects,
and habits" (bound to be problematical, but, in context, remarkably open
minded and affectionate, though some might take offense at this phrase or
that, even though none is intended); amusements and customs; houses and
dress; and sciences, industry, trade, and international relations (all
fascinating as far as it goes).

The English translation was done by an anonymous translator and came out
under Charles Dallet's name with the title _Traditional Korea_, published
by the Human Relations Area Files, New Haven (Connecticut), 1954, in an
HRAF series called "Behavior Science Translations." 

All in all, these 192 pages (187 in the English version) are still very
much worth reading and still unmistakably Korean to the core.  The only
chapter on which one could lament Dallet's coverage is that on history,
which is a pastiche of notices from 19th century European writers on China
or Japan, which pass on both the distortions made in those countries and
those of the savants themselves.  Even material gathered from Korean books
known in Paris (and, thanks to Admiral Roze, who pillaged the Kanghwa
branch governmental archive in 1866, bringing the books back to Paris,
there were plenty of those) was sometimes garbled or misunderstood by some
of the French sinologues helping Dallet.  The tributary lens through which
Korea was seen, although a valid circumstance of the time, was taken
literally by people who did not understand the big picture and carried to
ridiculous extremes, reducing Korea to a minor and not very highly
regarded backwater of Asia while ignoring most of Korea's actual history.  
On the other side, the notice concerning Korean political factions is an
example of the wisdom of Dallet following the eye-and-ear witness of
Frenchmen living in what might be called "la Core'e profonde." Although it
would not be adequate as a description in a modern textbook, it shows us
what ordinary Koreans knew about factionalism and reflects the mental
structures through which the missionaries' informants understood it.
Unfortunately, however, Korean history, as presented in this section, is
basically a depressing and wildly misunderstood scene from the Chinese
tributary world on the one hand, and the sketch of factionalism on the
other.  Not a good picture.

The section on the Korean language is a bit antiquated--European (rather
Latin) grammar transferred onto Korean as if it were an absolute
standard--but it has, on the whole, weathered remarkably well.  Dallet had
very good information from Frenchmen in Korea who knew what they were
talking about, and he faithfully transmitted it to his European readers.  
It was the first account of Korean in the Western world that reflected a
real knowledge of the language, although that knowledge was not Dallet's
but his informants'.  It is astonishing that Dallet, who could neither
read nor speak Korean himself, could have transmitted that knowledge with
so few distortions.

The section on women and marriage will certainly confirm everyone's worst
suspicions about the oppression of women in those times.  But it will also
offer many items that will surprise people looking only for the horrors
inflicted by the vicious male Confucian patriarchs.  Dallet's coverage--in
this case drawn completely from sympathetic and knowledgeable French
observors on the scene--is short but not black and white.   

In spite of the many merits of the Introduction, it is on the general
narrative of the history of the Korean Catholic community that Dallet's
work should be judged.  And I believe that by any standard, that judgement
should be very favorable.  We can consider it from two points of view,
first as a general book about Korea in the 19th century, then as history
of Korean Catholicism until 1866.

I've already indicated the great range of information that, while not the
main topic of Dallet, constantly comes percolating through his narrative,
and which has reference to virtually the entirety of Korean society
insofar as the class and status system is concerned.  Occasionally one
comes upon a passage which even looks like its jumps directly out of the
Korean _yasa_ ("unofficial history") tradition.  

I don't know of any other primary source of Korean history before the
1880s that shows women so clearly participating in the narrative.  
Neither Daveluy nor Dallet showed any condescension toward women, nor on
the other side made it look as if they were making any particular effort
to include them in their story.  Women just appear naturally, doing what
they're doing.  Of the 93 Korean saints canonized in 1983, forty-seven--a
majority--were women. Beyond that we have the names and some details of
1,300 other women who died for their faith (see the tables in the Appendix
volume of the _Hankwuk Khatholik taysacen_), and beyond those many other
women who merely suffered or figured in the narrative in other ways.  I
don't think that if the typical ruling class Korean men of the time--even
those who were Catholic--had been writing the history we would have heard
anywhere near as much about women as we do from Daveluy and Dallet.  And
one could cite in Dallet's coverage other constituencies and other corners
of society that are routinely ignored in traditional Korean
historiography.  His is indeed a very valuable general source for the
Korean experience.

Of course the purpose of Daveluy and Dallet was Korean church history, and
more specifically, Korean martyrology.  That they were both fervently
faithful Catholics goes without saying.  In constructing their narrative
of Korean Catholic history, they strongly emphasized martyrdom.  Their
obvious purpose in this was to provide materials that would--and of course
ultimately did--lead to beatification and canonization.  (A second
round in this process has recently begun in Korea.)  One of the most
difficult tasks in deconstructing Dallet is to identify the point where
the Korean narrative is overlaid, and sometimes overtaken, by mid-19th
century French Catholic piety.  In telling the stories of the Korean
martyrs, Daveluy and Dallet could not help but attribute to them a
Catholic ethos and Catholic sentiment that must surely have been extrinsic
to Korean experience, even Korean Catholic experience.  For the period
after 1836, no doubt that Catholic ethos was directly inculcated, either
unconsciously or by design, by the missionaries themselves.  But for the
period before 1836, the fifty-two years during which no European Catholic
set foot in Korea, it is hard to imagine how Koreans could have had the
feelings and made the statements that sometimes show this alien ethos. The
miracles attributed to some Korean men and women occasionally show motifs
that can be found in traditional Catholic hagiography or that evoke martyr
tales from the classical Catholic martyr narrative going back to the reign
of the Roman emperor Diocletian, whose persecutions killed throngs of
Christians and filled the catacombs.  Some of these themes may have come
from books of the lives of the saints, which are known to have been
written by Europeans in Chinese and which could have been introduced into
Korea as well.  There are indications here and there that Korean Catholics
knew something about the particular saints whose names they adopted in
baptism.  But such explanations would seem inadequate to account for the
Catholic piety exhibited in some parts of Dallet, which occasionally goes
quite far beyond anything that would seem normal in the Korean culture of
the time, even Catholic culture.  There is no doubt that we can expect
manifestations of sincere religious fervor from the Korean faithful, but
a Catholic piety that sounds like it comes from France is problematic.

It has already been pointed out that those who cannot read French may
still have access to Dallet in the Korean translation by An Unglyel and
Choy Sek.wu.  What needs to be added to that is that this translation in
some respects is better than the French original because of its exhaustive
and highly competent annotations.  Choy and An have gathered an immense
amount of documentary material from official and unofficial Korean
sources.  On the one hand this material frequently is strongly
corroborative of details in Dallet's narrative, and thus helps us to
appreciate its great value.  On the other, it often adds valuable new
details that were unknown to Daveluy and Dallet.  The first edition of the
An/Choy translation appeared in three volumes from a private publisher:  
Hankwuk Kyohoysa Yenkwuso, comp., _Hankwuk Chencwu Kyohoysa_, Seoul,
1979-80.  It was reissued in 1987, with no changes to the translation but
with a reworking and updating of the annotations.  This second edition was
published by the Hankwuk Kyohoysa Yenkwuso in Seoul (Myengtong).

During the 1980s, I translated the first fourteen chapters (the whole of
Books One, Two, and Three of Part I), up through the persecution of 1801,
from the original French text, adding a lot of my own annotations (at that
point I still had not seen the An/Choy Korean translation). But it is not
likely that I will ever resume this project.  If there is anyone out there
who is interested in continuing the translation, and who would consider a
collaborative project involving what has already been done, I would be
glad to hear about it.  However, my version is still in the draft stage
and I am not prepared to circulate any part of it at this time except in
response to a serious proposal of collaboration.

Dallet's book is one of the great treasures of Korean Studies in the
Western world.  I hope this little introduction will help people to
appreciate its great value and stimulate the readership that it deserves.

Gari Ledyard
King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies
Columbia University in the City of New York




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