Kirk Larsen, the man behind It Makes A Difference to the Sheep, has a great post up on the history of the intricate relationship between Qing China and Chosun Korea. The Sino-Korea relationship has been getting a lot of attention, but unlike myself, Kirk actually knows what the hell he’s writing about - he did his Ph.D. dissertation on this topic and is presently writing a book on it. Anyway, just a snippet (OK, more than a snippet):
Ever since the establishment of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), Choson Korea and the ruling power in China adhered to a system of relations that was known as a ?serving the great?? (sadae in Korean or shida in modern Mandarin Chinese). This system was based on two main principles.
First was the mutual acceptance of a hierarchical relationship in which China (or more properly, the Ming and Qing Empires) was clearly superior. This relationship was usually articulated in Confucian familial terms (father to son or elder brother to younger brother) and was expressed by annual Korean tribute missions to China, the occasional visit of a Chinese envoy to Korea (usually to grant investiture to a new Korean king), and the Korean willingness to adopt the Chinese imperial calendar (at least in its correspondence with China). When in Beijing, Korean envoys would present tribute to the Son of Heaven, receive gifts in return and make a bundle trading on the side. When Chinese envoys visited Korea, they would be met by the Korean king at the ?Welcoming Imperial Grace Gate?? (Yongunmun) where the king would prostrate himself on the ground while the envoy read the message from the Chinese emperor.
The second principle was distance and non-interference. Aside from the above-mentioned ritual expressions of inequality and hierarchy, the Chinese and Koreans kept each other at arms length. Other forms of interaction?trade, travel, even letter writing?were severely restricted if not prohibited outright. Neither the Ming nor the Qing directly interfered in Korean domestic affairs. The only exception to this rule was in times of emergency, such as when Hideyoshi invaded Korea in the 1590s. At that time, Korea?s Ming suzerain sent troops to help protect its vassal and heavily meddled in affairs of the court. But once the crisis was over, the Chinese armies went home and things returned to normal.
This system worked very well for both sides but was rather confusing to Westerners who couldn?t make sense of declarations such as that made by the Qing Zongli yamen that ?It is known by all nations of the world that Korea is a dependent state of China. It is also known by all that she is an autonomous country.?? Westerners, with their Westphalian assumptions about nation-states and sovereignty consistently insisted that this state of affairs was unacceptable: Korea had to either be a Chinese dependency or it had to be independent; it couldn?t be both (never mind that it had been both for the last four centuries).
Read the rest on your own.
