Boundless Winds of Empire - Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Choson Diplomacy With Ming China

Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chos¿n political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.

List of contents

Preface
Chronology
Maps
Introduction: Korea and the Imperial Tradition
Part I: The Shared Past
1. Serving the Great
2. Terms of Authority
Part II: The Practice of Diplomacy
3. Beneath the Veneer
4. In Empire’s Name
Part III: Ecumenical Boundaries
5. Cajoling Empire
6. Representing Korea
7. Contests of Ritual
Part IV: An Empire of Letters
8. The Brilliant Flowers
9. The Envoy’s Virtue
10. The East Does Not Submit
Conclusion: The Myth of Moral Empire
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Sixiang Wang is assistant professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Summary

For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.

Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea’s rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.

Product details

• Authors: Sixiang Wang
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.07.2023
• EAN: 9780231205467
• ISBN: 978-0-231-20546-7
• No. of pages: 456
• Series: Premodern East Asia: New Horizons
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; China, Korea, POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / Diplomacy, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Asian, HISTORY / Asia / China, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Chinese, HISTORY / Asia / Korea, c 1000 CE to c 1500, Literature: history & criticism, 15th century, c 1400 to c 1499, Diplomacy, Asian History, Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, c 1500 to c 1600, Literature: history and criticism, history; political science; Asia; Korea