[KS] Re: Enforced Romanization_Kando

[gkl1 at columbia.edu]

On Ruediger's question: "Was Kando, at any time after Parhae, a part
of Korea?"
   In the late 1880s, I think in 1888, Korea and Qing diplomats had
negotiations on the Kando area.  Korea claimed them as a
legacy of the 1712 border agreement with the Kangxi emperor,
which recognized Paektusan as a mountain jointly shared between the
two countries. Mukedeng, a Manchu military officer and Kangxi's
confidant and envoy, went to the top of the mountain together with
Korean authorities and set up a monument south of the "Ch'^onji,"
the crater lake, on the mountain spine dividing the east and west
watersheds, declaring this to be the boundary between Manchu lands
and Korea.  This occurred in the background of a protracted effort
by Korea over the previous forty years or so to establish military
and Korean settler occupation of all lands south of the Tuman and
Amnok (Yalu) rivers, a vast area of which south and east of the
Paektu summit had hitherto not been under the administration of any
Korean district during the Chos^on dynasty.
   In the late 19th century, Koreans interpreted this agreement to
mean that most of the watershed of the Tuman River, both north and
south of it, was Korean territory. Koreans had been moving into the
northern watershed, or "Kando," for all practical purposes
unoccupied, since 1860. (By then it had long exercised military and
civilian administration of the southern watershed, which was never
in dispute.) A sticky point in this interpretation was that the
Tuman River, does not flow directly out of the crater lake
but springs from Paektu's eastern slope somewhere
between 20 and 30 kilometers east of the lake. Given that the
Mukedeng monument was on a ridge dividing the eastern and western
watersheds, and Manchus no longer occupied the northern Tuman shed,
and that Koreans had occupied it uncontested for almost 30 years,
Koreans had begun to build a reasonable case for territorial
sovereignty over the area.
   In the late 1880s, the Korean government suffered under the
domination of Yuan Shikai, and China seems to have felt that this
was a good time to force Korea to recognize that the northern
watershed of the Tuman was Chinese territory.  However, the Chinese
government could find in its own archives hardly any records
concerning the Mukedeng agreement of 1712, while Korea for its part
had abundant records of diplomatic discussions with Qing for almost
three years preceding the placement of the monument.  Korea argued
its case vigorously with document after document and map after map
(the latter all of their own making), and China found that it had
hardly any leverage.  Some people say there was a treaty, but I
have never seen any indication that there was one, much less ever
seen such a text.  However this is not a period for which I am
confident of my own knowledge of the archival situation.  But as
far as I can figure out with only cursory knowledge of the 1880s
picture, it would appear that China, unable to prove anything,
abandoned the negotiations while Korea, as soon as Yuan Shikai was
gone after 1894, made frequent assertions of its sovereignty over
Kando. If this picture is wrong, I hope somebody with substantive
documentary knowledge will correct me.  Maps printed in Korea after
1894 show Kando as Korean. Some of those maps were reprinted in
books of Western authorship. China never seems to have complained
of those claims. It was only during the so-called Japanese
Protectorate between 1905 and 1910 that the issue was formally
raised internationally, at Japan's initiative, and by a
Sino-Japanese treaty of 1908 Kando went to China.  As with
everything else that happened inKorea after 1905, major governments
in the world acquiesced. As Ruediger indicated, there are plenty of
factors arguing against the legitimacy of that treaty, but it still
governs the issue today.
   As a matter of arcane interest, Ruediger's phrase "at any time
after Parhae" is also problematic.  It is routine that Korean
historians these days almost universally claim Parhae as a Korean
state. But it would not be easy to find material in Korean records
of the Silla, Kory^o, or early Chos^on states supporting that
position. But it has been been vigorously asserted at least since
the Sirhak scholars of the 18th century.
   Another curious angle is the whole nature of the Mukedeng
diplomacy of the period 1710-1712. That diplomacy was quite
irregular, given that it was not initiated by the Qing Board of
Rites, responsible for the diplomacy with tributary states, as
Korea was at that time. Rather it arose from the Kangxi emperor's
personal curiosity over the watersheds related to Paektusan, which
by his time had been firmly established among Manchus as their
place of origin. He sent Mukedeng to Korea to get to the bottom of
it, and the proceedings of that effort apparently never got from
the Forbidden City to the Board of Rites. At one point in the
negotiations, Koreans even refused to let Mukedeng into the country
because his mission did not conform to official tributary
procedures.  Mukedeng stepped back, but then traveled up the
northern bank of the Amnok/Yalu, recrossing into Korea with his
Manchu military escort up closer to the Paektu slopes, whereupon
force majeure dictated that Korean officials accompany him to the
summit. It was certainly unlikely that Korea, in the end, could
challenge the personal authority of Kangxi himself.  It would seem
that Kangxi did not see this issue as a Chinese-Korean one, but as
a Manchu-Korean matter. At that time the distinction really meant
something, since the Manchurian areas were under separate
administration from China proper south of the Great Wall, and
Chinese were banned from traveling or settling there (unless they
had been native to the region, in which case they were enrolled in
the Manchu banners).  It was literally "Manchuria."  Kangxi
apparently saw no need to treat the matter as anything but a
historical inquiry into where the lands of the Manchus ended and
those of the Koreans began, and in that sense it was not a
"Chinese" issue.  This helps to understand the plight of the
Chinese negotiators of 1888, whose early 18th century predecessors
had never been let into the negotiations. Thus they had no records
with which to confront the Koreans or support their claims. It
remains a matter of interest whether or not Qing PALACE records of
the 1710-12 talks, as opposed to Chinese government records, any
longer exist.

Gari Ledyard

Quoting Ruediger Frank <ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at>:

> Dear list,
>
> talking about laws, does anybody know the fate of the proposed
> bill to
> re-claim Kando (Gando)? As far as I know, a group of lawmakers
> submitted it
> to the National Assembly in September 2004, stating that the 1909
> Kando-Convention was illegal and had been nullified in 1952
> anyway. As I
> understand it, the Kando Convention was signed between Japan
> (acting as the
> protectorate power of Korea) and China and recognized Chinese
> sovereignty
> over a huge chunk of land in Manchuria. A colleague also told me
> that some
> kind of a time margin was attached to the convention (99
> years???). Was
> Kando, at any time after Parhae, a part of Korea? What happened
> to the bill?
>
> I would appreciate any informed comment on the facts, hoping that
> this post
> will NOT stimulate an overly emotional discussion.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Ruediger
>
> Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ruediger FRANK
> East Asian Political Economy
> University of Vienna, Austria
>
> please note new contact details for Feb. 14 until Feb. 26, 2005
> Visiting Researcher
> Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
> Copenhagen, DanmarK
> Phone: +45-35 32 95 40
>
>