[KS] Chinese influence and communities in Korea

[James B. Lewis]

In regards to Japan, I think Prof. Ledyard means the 17th century, not
the 18th century. Japan in the 17th century experienced a boom of
Sinophilia. Preceding this and partly stimulating it must have been the
looted libraries and large numbers of Korean Confucianists abducted
during the Imjin Waeran.

JB Lewis
______________________________

On 04-Jul-11 4:12 AM, gkl1 at columbia.edu wrote:
>         The general impression that I have and that seems to be corroborated
> by the postings of the last few days, is that, at any given time in
> the traditional periods before the treaties with Japan and Western
> countries, and Yuan Shikai, there were Chinese individuals in Korea
> but no Chinese communities. Chinese permitted to live in Korea would
> have some Korean-assigned status. The same would apply to Jurchens and
> Japanese who lived in Korean communities.
> 
>         I've read through a lot of documents connected with tributary
> diplomacy but with the exception of the perennial ginseng smuggling on
> both sides of the northern borders I cannot recall any tributary
> business involving Chinese in Korea. But tributary regulations
> prescribed that any visitors from either side had to be officially
> designated by their respective officials. So, in a way, as far as
> Korea and China were concerned, one might consider the  tributary
> system an inhibitant rather than as a facilitator for alien residency.
> 
>         It is clear from the writings of Hong Taeyong (1731-1783) that
> there were unofficial Koreans living in a small community in Beijing.
> But also that they
> correspondingly had some kind of Chinese-assigned status. In the Qing
> period, most Koreans that one reads of were descended from prisoners
> of the wars of the 1620s and '30s. Such people were incorporated
> within the various Manchu banners.
> 
>         Hong describes a small community of such Koreans that he
> encountered as the embassy caravan made their way toward Beijing:
> "Fort Korea (Gaolibao [고려보,高麗堡]) is 20 li from Fengrun 豊潤 [about 190km
> east of Beijing). In front of the village are paddy fields, which in
> spite of their crude and overgrown state are still of Korean style.
> There is nothing else like it inside or outside the Shanhaiguan
> customs barrier [the border checkpoint between Manchu lands and China
> proper]. The people here have dumplings made of short grain rice mixed
> with pieces of jujubes, not unlike our Korean steamed cakes. Twenty or
> thirty years ago, people at this fort would see our embassies and
> really lay out a welcome, offering wine and food and calling
> themselves 'descendants of Korea' (고려자손, 高麗子孫). But more recently, the
> personnel and soldiers of our embassies have forcibly demanded wine
> and food from them, and cheated the people out of various goods.
> Unable to bear the pain, the people became indifferent and stopped
> welcoming them. A member of our embassy asked them what had happened
> to the 'descendants of Korea,' and they all got angry. 'We have Korean
> ancestors,' they said, 'but no Korean descendants.'" [As most of the
> list will be aware, the name of the KoryO dynasty, Gaoli in Chinese,
> was still the common term for "Korea" in China up until the modern era.]
> 
>         China's situation was quite different from Korea in that it had
> numerous non-Chinese communities, while traditional Korea's sojourners
> were restricted to Chinese, Japanese, Jurchens, and a very few
> Ryukyuans. China also had two completely different institutions for
> dealing with foreigners--the tributary system and what might be called
> an ethnic minorities system, administered by the Lifanyuan 理蕃院. These
> communities were governed by their own ethnic leaders, who were
> designated--and held accountable--by the Manchu directors of the
> Lifanyuan. The nomads among them could go and come as they pleased
> between the homeland and the metropole.
> 
>         In addition to the occupations of Chinese in the early modern
> period, Don Clark might have also mentioned builders and craftsmen.
> They were the people who were most responsible for most the
> western-style houses and buildings built in those times. And I believe
> that Chinese engineers and craftsmen were  preferred for the mines
> operated by foreign entrepreneurs. This was certainly the case at the
> Unsan gold mines operated by the notorious American exploiter Leigh
> Hunt.
> 
>        There hasn't been much comment on the second question originally
> asked by Hilary--about Confucianism. If she thinks that Confucianism
> was highly regarded by the Japanese, she will find that Korea was
> incomparably the more Confucian site. The Japanese knew of
> Neo-Confucianism from the 13th century through the writings of Chinese
> Buddhist monks, but did not really pay much attention to them until
> the 18th century and onward, when Japanese intellectuals began to
> import the writings of Korean Neo-Confucians in the 18th century and
> into the Meiji period. In Japan, Buddhism and Shinto were the main
> concerns, and Confucianism was only a late concern in spite of much
> interest in Nara and Heian times when it was mainly the Analects and
> Mencius. Essentially, the Japanese respected Confucian ethics but
> rejected the Confucian religion. The most important impact of
> Confucianism in late Japanese history was on educators and the school
> system. So, on the whole, Japan ended up with a balance of respect for
> Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism.
> 
>        Of course Korea since the 14th century had had an examination
> system centered on Neo-Confucianism, but especially in ChosOn times
> Buddhism and the Korean equivalent of Shinto--Shamanism--were pushed
> to the edges and ignored. In essence, Traditional Korea ended up as a
> Confucian state and society, with a near-universal respect for
> Confucianism.
> 
>        In more recent times the younger Korean generations have
> generally rejected Confucianism along with much other Chinese
> historical influence.
> Nowadays Buddhism is thriving and the shamans will give you a
> cathartic dance ceremony and some good advice and one can pay by
> credit card.
> 
> Gari Ledyard
> 
> Quoting Donald Clark<dclark at trinity.edu>:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> I too remember the Chinese community in the streets of Myongdong in
>> the fifties and sixties, and also the small "Chinatown" in Inch'on.
>> But I want to call attention to the fact that there were many more
>> Chinese resident in the various cities of Korea during the Japanese
>> period, into the 1930s.  There were quite a few Chinese merchants in
>> Korea, some of them famous suppliers of things to the Western expat
>> community.  A Chinese known at "E.D. Steward" (name derived from
>> former career as a steward on a  British ship) ran a store that
>> supplied exotic Western foodstuffs, with a branch in Pyongyang and
>> seasonal branches at the summer beach resorts at Sorai and Wonsan.  A
>> Chinese tailor named "Taion" supplied suits and other clothing to the
>> Western residents of Pyongyang.  And so forth.  Steward and Taion were
>> Chinese residents; there were thousands of temporary Chinese migrant
>> workers in Korea who came and went during spring and summer. Some of
>> these stayed on and settled down. The Government General's annual
>> report for 1930 shows as many as 67,000+ Chinese residents in Korea.
>>       Many subscribers to this list know about the Wanpaoshan Incident
>> in Manchuria in 1931 and its aftermath in Korea.  The situation in
>> Korea was that Korean migrants--some of the people displaced by
>> Japanese land grabs back home--became irritants to Chinese in
>> Manchuria and there were clashes between them. It was typical for
>> Chinese in Korea to suffer various kinds of abuses whenever reports
>> came back about these clashes in Manchuria.  I did some work on this,
>> relating to eyewitness accounts by missionaries in Korea of violent
>> reprisals against Chinese residents by Koreans.  The Wanpaoshan
>> Incident itself is better-known than the aftermath in Korea and the
>> way the Japanese colonial authorities appear to have manipulated
>> Korean anger there as a way of cleansing Korea of its Chinese
>> population. The following paragraph is based on work I did for my book
>> Living Dangerously in Korea (Eastbridge, 2003), p. 162 ff:
>>       In July 1931, there was a climactic confrontation between Korean
>> farmers in northern Manchuria and local Chinese over water rights and
>> the building of an irrigation ditch near the town of Wanpaoshan
>> [Korean: Manposan] in the vicinity of Changchun. The fields' owners
>> had attacked Koreans digging the ditch across some neighboring fields
>> without permission.  It seemed that Japanese intentionally exaggerated
>> reports of the incident reaching Korea in an attempt to inflame the
>> Koreans.  The news touched off a wave of reprisals against Chinese
>> people and neighborhoods in towns within Korea.  In Pyongyang, a
>> Korean mob laid waste the Chinese business quarter, burning and
>> looting the shops and covering the street with Chinese belongings.
>> Chinese truck farmers working little patches of land on the edges of
>> the city were set upon and actually killed by rioters.  My grandfather
>> Charles Allen Clark wrote in his diary about seeing Chinese houses set
>> on fire by angry Koreans.  The Chinese manager of Taion's (the tailor)
>> lost family members in the fracas and shortly left Korea.  The Taion
>> store was stripped and bolts of Taion's best cloth were strung on
>> telephone wires and lampposts.
>>       A summary article in the Seoul Press on July 10, 1931 reported
>> that an estimated 4,000 Chinese had fled across the Yalu into
>> Manchuria during the preceding week, and that a thousand more had left
>> Inch'on by ship. Accounts through the remainder of the year show a
>> continual exodus of thousands of Chinese residents from Korea to China
>> by rail and ship.
>>       An interesting aspect of this is the way the Japanese manipulated
>> the situation.  I always thought it was ironic that they seemed to
>> support the Korean migrants' claims in Manchuria against the Chinese,
>> and that they stood by as Korean rioters wrought violence on Chinese
>> residents in Korea--at least according to missionary accounts.  The
>> missionaries in Pyongyang employed Chinese as gardeners and were
>> mainly sympathetic to their plight.
>>       An elaborate account of the Wanpaoshan Incident and its aftermath
>> in Korea is in the U.S. Consular archives for Seoul, in the National
>> Archives.  I used this along with newspaper accounts and missionary
>> archives to reconstruct the story of what happened inside Korea after
>> Wanpaoshan.
>> Don
>> --
>> Donald N. Clark, Ph.D.
>> Murchison Professor of History and
>>      Co-director of East Asian Studies at Trinity (EAST)
>> Trinity University, One Trinity Place,  San Antonio, TX 78212 USA
>> +1 (210) 999-7629;  Fax +1 (210) 999-8334
>> http://www.trinity.edu/departments/history/html/faculty/donald_clark.htm
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. James B. Lewis
University Lecturer in Korean History
Oriental Institute
University of Oxford
Pusey Lane
Oxford,  OX1 2LE
United Kingdom
Email: jay.lewis at orinst.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44-(0)1865-278200
http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/html/ea/korean/korean.html

Currently:
Visiting Researcher
Room 454 (International Center for Korean Studies)
Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies
Seoul National University
599 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742
Republic of Korea

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