4. Language Strategy

The Emergence of a Vernacular National Space

The dispatch of the Chinese Army and its campaigns on the Korean peninsula further complicated the war of words initiated by the Japanese invasion. As an ally, the Chinese had an even more complicated communicative relationship with Koreans. A much larger radius of written communication was constructed with more points of contact between the two countries, and these points of contact changed with the arrival of the Chinese Army toward the end of January 1593.

Before the arrival of the Chinese Army, communication between China and Korea was still shaped by the ritualistic rhetoric of tributary relations. This was evident in a long series of exchanges of messengers and missives through which Korea and China negotiated the arrival of the Chinese troops. While the negotiation was not without tension, it was carried out in the language of mutual concern. After the arrival of the Chinese troops, however, the unequal relationship, evinced by Korean status as a Ming tributary state, was further accentuated by a situation in which Korea, as a recipient of Ming military assistance, was placed subordinate to the Ming in all matters related to war. Moreover a number of elements, such as rumors, suspicions of each other, their own internal dissensions, the separate pursuit of national interests, and most especially different positions on war and peace, affected them differently.

Chosŏn Koreans felt deeply discomfited at having to rely on the Ming. To begin with, they were apprehensive about the prospect of having a Chinese army on their soil, something that had not happened for almost a thousand years. Allied Silla-Tang troops conquered Koguryŏ in 668, but the Tang attempted to stay and Silla went to war to expel the Tang Army from the peninsula in 676.1 Though initially the Ming entertained suspicions that Chosŏn might have colluded with Japan in a campaign against China, they were promptly disabused of the notion. However, Ming was simultaneously engaged in a large-scale military pacification of the Mongol mutiny at Ningxia² and, as a first step, dispatched to Korea in late July the Liaodong Army of three thousand led by Zu Chengxun (fl. 1570–1600), along with weapons and 20,000 liang of silver.³ The Korean Army joined the Liaodong Army in its attack on P’yŏngyang, but the allied forces were decimated by Konishi Yukinaga. Zu and the Koreans made charges and countercharges blaming each other for the defeat.⁴ The Korean government dispatched a round of envoys to the commander of the Liaodong Army to defend itself. It was a particularly disheartening turn of events for the Korean court. Not only did the prospect of the recapture of P’yŏngyang seem more remote than ever, the court also became greatly concerned that this unfortunate initial foray might adversely influence the Chinese government’s decision on whether to participate in the war.⁵ On the contrary, Zu’s defeat seems to have been a wake-up call for the Chinese government, which came to see the Japanese as a genuine threat to China’s national security. The Wanli emperor decided on a massive expedition. He appointed Song Yingchang (1530–1606) military commissioner of Jizhen, Baoding, and Liaodong and ordered him to commence with full-scale preparations for the war.⁶

Chinese Communiqués

Wanli also sent the envoy Xie Fan to the Korean government. On October 6, 1592, Xie arrived with the following imperial edict promising a large army:

The Emperor decrees to the king of Chosŏn as follows. Your country has for generations guarded the eastern periphery and served [us] with consummate propriety. Rituals and decorum, culture, and economy have prospered and so it was called a paradise [nakt’o]. We learned recently that Dwarf Slaves (Waeno) have consolidated and invaded [your country]. They assaulted and captured the capital and attacked and occupied P’yŏngyang. The people are in chaos and misery; disorder prevails far and wide; the king has taken refuge on the western sea coast and is reduced to holding court in the wilderness. When we think that national territory has been taken away from you, and you are plunged into confusion, our heart is also deeply saddened. We have heard the urgent news and have already decreed to the officials in charge of outlying areas to assemble troops and to carry out a rescue mission.

We are sending the official Xie Fan to bring our special message to the king. You have been entrusted with a dynastic mission of fundamental importance that has been transmitted through many generations of your royal ancestors. How can you lightly discard it in one morning? You must wash away your humiliation, expel the evil enemy, and devotedly work at restoration.

We are also addressing our message to the officials and the people of your country. With a firm resolve to avenge your king, rise up with the righteous rage of revenge.

We have appointed two officials, one civilian and one military, with the sole task of facilitating this. We have ordered them to lead a well-trained army of 100,000 selected from garrisons of Liaoyang, to go and help vanquish the evil enemy. Make sure that the foot soldiers and cavalry of your country join forces with them before and behind, and cooperate to trounce the bloodthirsty savages, exterminating them to the last man.

In receipt of Heaven’s brilliant mandate, we preside as the ruler of the Brilliant Center (Chunghwa)7 as well as the barbarians of the north and south. Every country is at peace, and the four seas are in order. How dare that this ignorant people of small and ugly (soch’u) stature disturb the world! We will send imperial decrees to the garrisons on the southeastern coast. We will also encourage other countries such as Ryukyu and Siam to join [our endeavors], and to assemble an army of several hundred thousand. Together, our allied forces will make a punitive expedition (zheng) to Japan, directly attack the enemy’s central command, and behead the chief of that evil rebellious mob. We will endeavor thus so that the storm will subside. We will not spare generous rewards to those who accomplish [meritorious deeds].

To restore the dynasty of one’s ancestors is great filiality and to rescue the ruler-father from troubles is great loyalty. The ruler and the ministers of your country are well versed in propriety and righteousness. If, in consideration of my wishes, you were to recapture your ancestral land, let the ruler return to the capital, preserve the altars of the state, and guard [your corner] of the periphery; may our sympathy for your distant land and our care for that small country comfort you.8

The Veritable Records describes an emotional scene of the delivery of this edict: upon hearing this, Sŏnjo burst into a wail, joined by all the officials present. The imperial messenger was also moved.⁹ Evidently the news was balm to Sŏnjo and his officials.

Unlike the Japanese infiltration into the communicative space of domestic literary Chinese, over which the Korean government had no control, the Korean court was able to mediate Chinese missives to the Korean people to a great extent. Xie Fan urged Sŏnjo to quickly disseminate the imperial edict to the whole country.¹⁰ Sŏnjo needed no prompting. It does not appear that he, a practitioner of ruler-father rhetoric himself, found any objection to Wanli’s universal claim. What mattered was Wanli’s promise of a large force. He seems to have felt that Wanli’s message not only reassured Koreans but also buttressed royal authority, which had plummeted very low. On October 8 Sŏnjo ordered that the Wanli emperor’s edict be distributed to the whole country. What is interesting is that he also ordered it translated into Korean and disseminated throughout Hamgyŏng Province.¹¹ As far as I can tell, this was the only missive by a ruler of a foreign country that was translated into Korean under royal auspices. Sŏnjo must have felt that the wider dissemination of the edict enhanced his own image. I will discuss the sending out of public missives in Korean script later.

Xie Fan also dispatched his findings in Korea to the Ministry of War in Beijing. It is noteworthy that, whereas Wanli’s edict was couched in the rhetoric of the universal ruler’s benevolence and sympathy to the ruler and the people of a faithful tributary state, and the dispatch of the Chinese troops was promised as the universal ruler’s duty to pacify all within the four seas, Xie’s report, which urged the speedy dispatch of troops, is written with the logic of national security for China:

What we have to be attentive to is that the current state is not with Chosŏn but with the problem of our borders. The point that worries me deeply is that this question does not end with borders, and that they might shake us even into our interior. Liaodong is like the arms of our capital, and Chosŏn is like Liaodong’s fence. Yingping is the crucial area for the Imperial Court and Tianjin is the gate to the capital. Is it not true that for two hundred years, while Fujian and Zhejiang were constantly harried by Japanese pirates, these problems had not reached Liaoyang and Tianjin because Chosŏn protected them as a barrier? . . .

If we campaign soon, we will be able to rely on the help [of Koreans]. If we do it late, the Japanese thieves, commanding Koreans, will confront us. Thus it is my opinion that we cannot delay the mobilization of our troops and vanquishing this enemy for even one day. . . . I sincerely hope that Your Majesty makes an astute decision and promptly orders the concerned ministry that soldiers and horses be dispatched as soon as possible so that it will bring fortune to our borders and the Imperial Altars.12

During his visit Xie Fan said that the Ming army would arrive within about a month.¹³ Soon after Zu Chengxun’s defeat, China had begun serious preparations for an expedition army, calling up officers and soldiers, apportioning 200,000 liang of silver, and accelerating the production of military weapons and supplies, including transport carts, large and small cannon, crossbows, bullets, and other miscellaneous arms and supplies,14 but it took time to assemble a major expeditionary army. Meanwhile Katō Kiyomasa made forays into Manchuria.

The Wait

To stall the Japanese from taking further steps, the Chinese adopted a two-pronged strategy: to prepare for war but also to engage in peace talks. Minister of War Shi Xing (1538–1597) sent an envoy, Shen Weijing, to negotiate a peace with the Japanese general, Konishi Yukinaga. Both Shi and Yukinaga seem to have believed that peace negotiations were far superior to fighting, and, although to different degrees, they were willing to engage in deception of their respective governments to achieve this desired goal. At their initial meeting Shen Weijing and Yukinaga agreed to a fifty-day cease-fire.

The Korean government was deeply anxious over the evolving situation. The cold weather began, but the Chinese Army still had not come. On December 18, when, instead of the eagerly awaited Chinese Army, Song Yingchang sent an exhortation to the Korean king in which he reiterated the Chinese promise of a dispatch of troops, without mentioning any date, and rhetorically encouraged the king to gather the Korean forces so that when the Chinese forces arrived they could join forces “to cleanse the stench of blood, and to accomplish great deeds which would render the magical powers of Our Emperor visible, and to preserve the old territory of Kija,”¹⁵ officials responded in a number of ways.¹⁶ The Censorate memorialized the king declaring that it was impractical to idly wait for a Chinese force whose “real intention is unfathomable,” and that rather than losing the winter, which, in view of the Japanese weakness to cold weather, would be the best time to wage battle against them, the Korean Army should attack on its own.¹⁷

Yun Kŭnsu, serving as minister of rites, sent another letter to Song Yingchang stressing that since the ice was already firm, it was urgent that they attack the enemy without delay. It is noteworthy that this letter shifts in logic from emphasizing the imperiled state of Korea to stressing the potential threat the ruin of Korea posed for China. Yun pointed out that Korea was invaded because it refused a Japanese suggestion that it join Japan in invading China, and that the enemy’s real intention was to attack Liaodong. The letter chastised China for interrupting their plans of war with futile peace negotiations. Yun then says: “If China really wishes to come to Korea with an army to save her, it should do so before the Japanese Army marches again, and before the Korean Army is completely decimated. Only by joining our forces can we succeed in our objective. If Korea were to be devastated and China had to face the enemy alone, it would require an effort a hundredfold greater. Our plea is not for the sake of Chosŏn alone but in consideration of China as well.”18 Sŏnjo declared that he was going to go to Liaodong to see Song in person to ask for the assistance of the army. This did not happen, and an official was sent instead.¹⁹

At the second round of peace negotiations between Japan and China in late December, each side’s proposed terms were unacceptable to the other. One of the terms that the Japanese proposed was the division of Korean territory between them, with Japan possessing the east of Taedong River (territory south of P’yŏngyang) and China acquiring the northern territory (beginning with P’yŏngyang).²⁰ The Korean government had also been approached by Yukinaga for peace talks but found no base level to begin serious talks.²¹ Greatly alarmed by the Japanese proposal of territorial division, the Korean government asked the Ming court to clarify its position on the matter. In response, on January 19, 1593, Song Yingchang sent a letter assuring Sŏnjo:

Chosŏn has been China’s external periphery in the Eastern Sea and has been sincere in its loyalty and fidelity. It has faithfully carried out the duties of a tributary state. When it was invaded and occupied by the Japanese thieves and could not preserve its territory, it has repeatedly dispatched official envoys asking for our help. In sympathy for the king in his plight, our sagacious emperor ordered this command to go to out with an army and vanquish [the enemy]. Just now, our huge army is about to cross the river to attack and recapture P’yŏngyang and the royal capital. These Japanese thieves are cunning, and they are scheming to play us against each other. For example, when Shen Weijing went to their camp, they loudly shouted such things as “We will give P’yŏngyang to China, and not to Chosŏn.” P’yŏngyang is Chosŏn territory. How could China take advantage of the crisis of another country to seize its land while rescuing the very same country? There certainly is no logic to this. I am sending this letter lest the king, at this time when the royal court is in refuge far away from the capital, might suspect us upon hearing such scheming words.

Please rest assured. Govern your country well, accumulate military provisions, assemble soldiers and, with the help of the Chinese Army, recapture your land. If P’yŏngyang is recaptured, then protect it with the army of your own country. If your army is found to be too meager to protect the city, and if you ask for help, we will cooperate with you temporarily, but when order is restored, all personnel and soldiers under this command will immediately evacuate the area. China will display the graciousness of raising up the country which is on the brink of ruin; our command will attempt to carry out the tasks that will preserve benevolence and straighten out righteousness. Please be assured, and do not be swayed by rumor.22

Here was a change in Song’s rhetorical stance. He still adhered to the rhetoric of imperial benevolence, but he embedded his denial of China’s ambitions for Korean territory and its desire to rescue Korea in the logic that Korea was China’s outlier external periphery and thus Korea was China’s national security concern, and that Korea’s status as China’s faithful tributary was of primary importance. In other words, he did not avoid implicitly acknowledging the selfinterest of China, confirming mutual benefit as the basic premise of tributary relations.

Complexities of Dealing with the Chinese

With the arrival of the Chinese Army, a more complicated communicative relationship appeared. In addition to such points of contact as the Wanli emperor, Minister of War Shi Xing in Beijing, and Song Yingchang, who stayed mostly in Liaodong, the on-site Chinese contingent consisting of Supreme Commander Li Rusong and other generals and officials stationed in Korea emerged as an important nexus of communications. True, though some Chinese written communiqués still addressed their messages to Koreans at large, unlike Japanese missives, they were neither solely addressed nor directly sent to them, enabling the Korean government to act as mediator. Thus it was their dealings with Chinese authorities in China and Korea that required the attention of the Chosŏn court.

That the Chinese came as an ally to help Korea expel the Japanese did not erase their cultural difference. It was a difficult situation for both parties, and it seems to have been particularly trying for Sŏnjo and his officials. The ceremonial decorum that had marked the exchanges between the two countries at a distance was replaced by disagreements and conflicts in day-to-day dealings with each other. As is often the case with people representing a stronger country aiding a weaker one, the Chinese often exercised their prerogatives. Sometimes this was provoked by what appeared to be remiss behavior on the part of Koreans. Supreme Commander Li Rusong, when greeted by Sŏnjo on his arrival on January 27, seems to have behaved with decorum. The Korean king expressed gratitude, and the Chinese general responded by declaring that he would not cease his efforts until he had driven the last Japanese from Pusan and assuring the king of imminent victory over the evil enemy.23

From the very next day, though, problems appeared. Enraged that food provisions for soldiers and fodder for horses were inadequately distributed, Li came close to hitting the Korean official in charge. Sŏnjo sent a royal secretary to Li to display concern, punished the responsible officials, and instructed that provisions be delivered without fail.²⁴ Supplying food provisions to troops required complicated logistics, and this problem would remain one of the main concerns of the Korean government. The cost of provisions for the Chinese Army was borne by the Chinese government, but it was Koreans who were responsible for transporting them and, very often, securing grain, an enormously difficult task.²⁵ We have seen that one of the reasons for the Japanese retreat was that supply lines for food were cut.

There are numerous anecdotes describing Li’s imperious manner. He demanded whatever struck his fancy, including the Korean king’s horse.26 He casually castigated Korean ministers of state. For example, several days after the allied army recaptured P’yŏngyang on February 8, 1593, Li sent an official letter addressed to Koreans entitled, “To the Korean court: proclamations (p’aemun) to the officials and people of Chosŏn”:

We have come here from distant lands crossing ocean and mountain in order to save the endangered and the weakened. The head ministers of Chosŏn, Yu Sŏngnyong and Yun Tusu, have behaved entirely laxly. Instead of exerting themselves to wash away shame and exterminate the enemy, they have been feasting, and sitting comfortably in their rooms, drinking and enjoying themselves. This is not only a slight to the court of Heaven (ch’ŏnjo); it also invites ruin to their own country. Their discourtesy and bad manners are truly extreme. . . . Since we are truthful and generous, we will not find fault with small things. We will act according to discipline and lofty principle. We will station troops at P’yŏngyang, decide on military strategy, and, at an opportune moment, achieve victory to bring peace to your home and your country. After national affairs become orderly and the people are safe, we will send an imperial promulgation. Hereby I am sending this letter. Our hope is that officials of the Chosŏn state, high and low, will let all hear of this, and that high ministers shall come to our headquarters at once and try to put our policies into practice. Anyone who neglects or betrays our order will be punished by the heaviest of punishments.²⁷

Li ended with a warning against Yun and Yu: “If they should be idle again, I will impeach them, and apply the law choosing the heaviest penalty. I certainly will not tolerate it.” Yun Tusu had to go to apologize in person.²⁸ It is difficult to assess the basis of Li’s criticism. Li was well-known for his arrogant manner toward civil officials of his own country, sometimes even slapping them.²⁹ The cultural difference might have abetted his anger. Nor is it easy to assess how widely Li’s letter was disseminated among Koreans. The letter is recorded in a number of works compiled by private scholars, including The Trivial Matters,30 which suggests that even if the letter was not circulated right after it was written, it came to be known among officials and scholars.

If Li was behaving arrogantly, some of the generals under him seemed to have behaved with even less restraint. The entry of February 28 in the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo contains the report by the commander-in-chief of the Korean Army, Kim Myŏngwŏn, that Li had cautioned generals under him not to demand food and liquor from Koreans, pointing out that “Chosŏn was the country of ritual and righteousness,” and had reprimanded Zu Chengxun for having beaten the magistrate of a town for failing to instantly produce liquor, which Li pronounced “unseemly behavior for a general.”³¹ Nor did Chinese troops display inhibitions in plundering and looting Korean property.³²

Another difficulty for the Korean court was navigating between various Chinese camps that were in contention with one another. The Chinese were divided into complicated groupings—between hawks and doves, along regional lines, especially between southern and northern armies, and so forth. Li Rusong and Song Yingchang, for example, were fierce rivals. All imposed their will on Koreans to support their views, and Koreans were in no position to alienate any party. For instance, the Korean court was dragged into Chinese disputes regarding evaluations of merit in recapturing P’yŏngyang on February 8, 1593. This victory, won after three days of intense fighting, restored Korean hopes for their country, but it also was the occasion of intense competition for recognition among Chinese generals and soldiers.³³ The first concerned Li Rusong’s performance. Several Chinese officials memorialized the Wanli emperor, saying that of the severed heads that Li Rusong produced, fully half were Korean, and that all ten thousand who died either by fire or drowning during the battle were Korean civilians, not Japanese soldiers. The Chinese court sent inspectors to P’yŏngyang and asked the Chosŏn court to make its own report. Beholden to Li Rusong, the Koreans had to defend him.³⁴ The second occasion involved Li’s memorial in which he assessed the merits of different groups in the battle. He assigned higher credit to the northern army, asking the Korean court to second him. The Koreans are believed to have been much more impressed by the southern army, both in tactics and in bravery.35 Yi Homin, who was commissioned with the task, however, evenly credited the northern and southern armies with merit.³⁶ These were but two examples of the delicate lines that Koreans had to tread between different interest groups all demanding support against other groups.

The greatest challenge facing the Koreans was their very different position from the Chinese toward war and peace. To begin with, the Koreans suspected that, unlike themselves, who were determined to expel the invaders by military means to prevent future incursions, the Chinese generals starting with Li Rusong were not as keen on fighting. Their difference was already visible during the battle for P’yŏngyang. Li was far less eager to pursue the retreating enemy than the Koreans were. He let Yukinaga’s army escape, fearing that a genuine showdown would inflict far more Chinese casualties.³⁷ The Koreans also faulted the Ming armies for their unwillingness to fight at close quarters with the Japanese even though this was the most effective strategy, since Japanese muskets were inaccurate and less effective in close fighting.³⁸

An unbridgeable rift emerged after Li Rusong lost the battle at Pyŏkchegwan, not far from Seoul. The contemporary consensus seems to have been that Li was too confident after recent victories at P’yŏngyang and Kaesŏng and approached the battle with a poorly prepared strategy and too few troops. In any case, the battle was a disaster for the allied forces, and Li barely escaped with his life. He retreated to P’yŏngyang and was reluctant to resume fighting. There seems to be consensus that the Ming defeat in the battle of Pyŏkchegwan was a turning point for the Chinese attitude toward the war. Yoshi Kuno maintains that Li “lost all hope and no longer had either military spirit or energy. He realized that the Ming army of China could not cope with the fighting power and the military spirit of the Japanese, and was convinced that China had no fighting chance against Japan.”³⁹ Chinese sources also suggest that the defeat demoralized the Chinese Army and led to serious peace negotiations with Japan.⁴⁰ Taking advantage of this noncombative mood, the peace party, which believed that, having recovered the northern half of Korea it would be more beneficial to resolve the conflict through peace negotiations, swiftly pushed ahead with their plan.

The Chinese actively engaged in peace talks with the Japanese, without Korean participation. A completely different politics of war and peace unfolded. In China the peace policy was orchestrated by Minister of War Shi Xing in Beijing, Song Yingchang in Liaodong, and Shen Weijing as the on-site negotiator. In Japan Yukinaga headed the peace camp. The heads of both states also favored it. It appears that each one of these participants entertained his own vision of peace, which was starkly dissimilar from others. When these differences became clear, peace talks ended and the Japanese invaded Korea for a second time in 1597.

The period of peace negotiations in its own way was extremely trying for the Koreans. China and Japan were pursuing their own separate interests. The Chosŏn government was made to feel that ultimately it had to rely on its own people, whose support it needed more than ever. Its language policy was the product of an acutely felt sense of separateness from the other, first the enemy and then the ally, and a mechanism through which the government attempted to create and consolidate a sense of unity among Koreans.

The Emergence of a Korean National Vernacular Space

The Chosŏn government felt an acute need to shore up the support of its people from very early in the war. During the flight north the royal court vividly experienced popular anger. Indeed, narratives depict the Sŏnjo court’s flight as at the least nightmarish. As the defense posts around Seoul fell rapidly, the royal court discussed fleeing to seek refuge in the North, but as something unprecedented in the two–hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty, it was simply too horrible to contemplate.41 Hence the journey was taken only at the last moment, after the arrival of news of the disastrous defeat at Ch’ungju, the breakdown of the last of the capital’s defense posts.⁴² Leaving in haste with minimal preparation, the court seems to have been a pathetic sight: it crossed the Imjin River in torrential rain and complete darkness, the whole retinue, including the king, rain drenched and famished.43 The entourage left Seoul on June 9, arriving at P’yŏngyang on June 13. On the following day an order was issued asking that royal table be adequately provisioned.⁴⁴

In a monarchy, news of royal flight was always terrifying and the sight of the monarch in flight induced shock and horror. There are well-known instances of royal flight. Timothy Tackett describes the shock and confusion of the French residents of a country town when they discovered Louis XVI in flight in their midst.⁴⁵ In the case of the French king, it was the ancien régime that was endangered. With Sŏnjo, it signaled peril for the whole country and the entire population within it.

That the people were dismayed and frustrated at a government that had failed to protect them was understandable enough. What enraged them still more was the devious manner in which the government proceeded: it announced to the residents that the royal court would stay in place, then left the place surreptitiously when danger threatened. This tactic was employed in part to forestall mass flight and demoralization of troops while minimizing the risk of capture of the king. The populace, however, justifiably saw it as an ultimate government betrayal inflicted with no concern for the lives of its people, who were thus exposed to the capture by the invaders. We have already seen that in Seoul an angry populace and unruly mobs stormed the palace and burned a number of buildings.⁴⁶

Yu Sŏngnyong describes the reaction of P’yŏngyang residents as follows. When it was rumored that the royal court was about to leave the city, the residents began to flee the city. Wanting to stop this flight by soldiers and residents in order to mount some kind of defense, Sŏnjo, accompanied by the crown prince, had to assure residents that the government would guard the city. When the Japanese Army was seen on the banks of the Taedong River, which flowed through the city, a certain portion of the royal entourage began to leave. Even women and children screamed: “If you were going to leave us behind, why did you deceive us by bringing us back within the walls to make of us food for the enemy?” Everyone is described as having some kind of weapon so that officials were frightened. Yu assured them that the government would guard the city.47 The royal carriage left immediately afterward, while Yu and others remained to guard the city. In a few days the city fell and most officials escaped.

The Veritable Records of Sŏnjo also describes a riot of enraged soldiers and residents (kunmin) who poured into the streets. Palace servants were hit with sticks and fell to the ground, and Hong Yŏsun (1547–1609), the minister of taxation, was hurt. The queen’s entourage was prevented from leaving the city. Only when the governor had several rioters beheaded did the crowd disperse.⁴⁸ It should be noted that only nine days previously the king had gone to a city gate and declared to a crowd who congregated there that the government would defend the city to the death.⁴⁹ Then, on the day of his departure, Sŏnjo met with the elders of the city and, without telling them of his imminent departure, “consoled and instructed” them. The Veritable Records of Sŏnjo says that the royal letter was read to them and that in consequence “all those present wept; the elders at once burst out wailing at full throat, and the whole city wept aloud.”⁵⁰ This is the meeting, according to Yu, in which the king assured the residents that the government would guard the city, but the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo is silent on what Sŏnjo said or what the contents of his edicts were.

Sŏnjo and his officials were also having the worst of times. Sŏnjo seems to have been particularly affected. He had ascended the throne in 1567 at the age of sixteen, and for twenty-five years he ruled without particular mishap. In 1583 and 1587 Korea was even able to pacify disturbances by various tribes in the northeast border region. Sŏnjo seldom left his palace except for ritualistic outings, and he lived in a world of Confucian decorum and order. There was nothing in his reign or the history of his dynasty to suggest that he would not live out his life in an environment of peace as his royal ancestors had for two hundred years.

The record indicates that throughout the flight north, he was in a state of trauma. Particularly sharp was a sense of regret caused by equal measures of shame that he had failed his people and grief that he had been abandoned by them. When, in his edict dated June 4, after his acknowledgment that “this terrible state has all been caused by my mistake. I have no one but myself to blame and I feel nothing but shame,” he cries out, “All you scholars! For generations, your grandfathers and your fathers before you, and you have been in the good graces of the state. Yet, the moment you face a crisis, you all forsake me. Though I do not fault you, you cannot possibly behave thus to me.”51 He does seem to have fallen into a state of plaintive despair.

The urgency of restoring popular good will was clear to the king and his officials. The king began to deploy royal missives, directly addressing the people with unusual frequency. He addressed his letters to all Koreans, to the people of specific provinces, to groups of provinces, and even to specific persons. Interestingly, though the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo mentions that these letters were sent, their contents are seldom recorded, such was the state of disarray in administrative function during the war. Some of the edicts as they were received are included in writings by private persons. Their tone of contrition and pleading intensifies with each reiteration.

In a letter to the scholars and the commoners (samin) of Chŏlla Province, Sŏnjo professes, “If I could, I would use my body as a sacrifice to apologize to the ancestral spirits and all the spirits between Heaven and Earth. My remorse is so acute. I ask scholars and commoners to allow me the chance to correct my mistakes and to search for new rule.”⁵² To the people of Kyŏngsang Province, he portrayed a vision of peaceful life that all of them could return to if only they were to redouble their efforts to vanquish the enemy and earn brilliant names for posterity.⁵³ To several leaders of the volunteer army, he praised their bravery and loyalty and presented himself as a man of sentiment who feels lonely and homesick, as anyone would in his situation, languishing as he was in a distant border region.⁵⁴

While these edicts were clearly meant to reach as broad an audience as possible, they were written in classical Chinese and hence their accessibility to the nonelite population was questionable. True, they were often read aloud, and read in Korean pronunciation, but this secondhand access was not a comforting affair since he desired direct communication. If it were to be truly inclusive, a letter had to be written and sent out in Korean. This was, however, a leap into unimagined and untried territory. No official had ever broached the possibility. It was Sŏnjo who seized on it, and his officials, making no objections, complied.

Sŏnjo’s Leap: Hailing the People in Korean

In the entry of the first of the eighth month (September 6), the Veritable Records says that the king pointed out that his letter to the people of Hwanghae Province has been written but that only scholars would understand it, and so volunteer army leaders and magistrates should see to it that “the letter gets translated into Korean script so that even people in rustic villages will be able to comprehend it.”55 This was done at arguably the worst moment for the Chosŏn, right after the Liaodong Army led by Zu Chengxun was defeated at P’yŏngyang.⁵⁶ As I noted, the court grew alarmed that this unfortunate initial encounter might adversely influence the Chinese central government’s decision to participate any further in the war. Enemy troops were seen in the vicinity, and there was a real danger of capture. Confined to Ŭiju, the northwestern corner of Korea, the court, however, had no place to escape to.

Sŏnjo seems to have again been seized by terror. He reintroduced the possibility of leaving Korea and taking refuge in the Liaodong region of China, which he had discussed earlier. During the court’s flight north from P’yŏngyang, he had declared that he would cross the Yalu into Liaodong and ordered that a formal request for permission to enter be sent to the governor of the province.⁵⁷ No sooner did the court arrive at Ŭ iju than he instructed a messenger to issue a dispatch announcing his arrival in Liaodong.⁵⁸ In preparation for his departure, he transferred to his son the duties of the state and the royal house—governance and responsibility for the ancestral tablets.⁵⁹

What he could not transfer was his symbolic role. He represented final authority in Korea, and his flight would jeopardize Korea’s survival. Officials were aghast at the proposal and objected unequivocally and relentlessly—“the unconscionable act of deserting the people under his care, an act that would turn him into a cowardly little man (p’ilbu),”60 as they termed it. Coupled with the information that his entourage would be received with scorn and shabby treatment in Liaodong, this caused the king to decide to stay on at Ŭiju.⁶¹ When Sŏnjo revived the possibility on several occasions in early September, his officials rebuffed him with even stronger warnings and sharper criticism: “He must not only not voice it but completely eradicate it from his mind as a possibility” (Chŏng Ch’ŏl, governor general of the three southern provinces); “once he crosses the Yalu, any hope for a restoration of the country would forever be extinguished” (Yun Tusu, minister of the left); “once he leaves for the Liaodong, he would become a cowardly little man” and “if the royal carriage were to cross the Yalu, all will end” (Sin Chap, royal secretary).⁶²

The moment of decision came: was he to remain king and do what was necessary to resist the enemy, and thus to regain his authority, or was he to run away to Liaodong and become a “cowardly little man”? Northward across the Yalu lay Liaodong; southward was the wartorn land of Korea. It appears that he gazed at the North one last time but finally accepted his destiny as the king with all it entailed. Sŏnjo would from this time on act with unflinching leadership and resolution. He must have felt he needed to reach all his people, every Korean, to make them understand his true feelings and to ask them to fight the enemy and rebuild Korea with him. And for this he had to use Korean script to ensure true inclusiveness. This is when he made a radical move: he ordered that his edict be translated into Korean and disseminated in that script among the ordinary people. It was as if Sŏnjo’s kingship was reborn in Korean script. Within weeks Sŏnjo reconfirmed the use of the Korean script as a medium of addressing the people.⁶³ Korean script publicly entered the inscriptional space.

For a while Korean script was used to produce translated versions of literary Chinese missives and was deployed in a diglossic context. This symbolized the script’s inclusivity of Koreans. There was of course another property of the script—its exclusivity to the other, that it was inaccessible to non-Koreans, or the perception thereof. Exploiting this special quality necessitated that the script be used alone, without any literary Chinese accompaniment accessible to the other. The Korean government’s independent use of the Korean script came during the period of peace negotiations, when the war entered into a quasi-truce.

The Peace Talks

The politics of the peace talks were enormously complicated. It was not just that each of the three countries pursued different objectives and were thus at cross purposes to one another. What was remarkable was that the representatives of Japan and China, the two countries negotiating the terms of peace, were willing to mislead and deceive not merely each other but also their respective central authorities. To conclude peace talks, they orchestrated elaborate schemes toward their own governments using miscommunication, falsification of documents, and outright deception.

There are scholarly treatments of the details of the various phases of peace talks that lasted three and a half years, though in spurts, and the extraordinarily complicated inter- and intra- national negotiations and maneuverings that contain some of the most baroque instances of treachery and sabotage.64 I do not intend to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that the ineffective control of the diplomatic front by central authorities in both China and Japan was vividly illustrated by the fact that the peace negotiations irrevocably collapsed not when the two parties realized that they could not agree on terms of peace but when the terms of peace as they were dictated by the Ming central government could no longer be concealed from the Japanese authorities.

It is amazing how close the doves in both parties came to deceiving their governments. The Wanli emperor’s investiture ceremony for Hideyoshi as king of Japan, for instance, held on October 22, 1596, at Osaka Castle, proceeded peacefully, as its recipient did not suspect that he was being invested as the king of Japan. On October 25, just as the Ming envoys were about to depart, Hideyoshi asked the Buddhist monk Seishō Shōtai (1548–1607) to translate Wanli’s edict of investiture. Only then did he learn that there had been no concessions on any of the seven conditions whose fulfillment he required and which he had been led to expect were being honored—including Korean territorial concessions and the hand of a Ming imperial princess in marriage—and that instead he was being invested as “the king of Japan.” He flew into a rage and immediately broke off the talks, foreswearing further negotiations.65

It is difficult to believe that Hideyoshi was completely duped by the peace negotiators. It is commonly assumed that, having realized the futility of the invasion, Hideyoshi sought a way out of the predicament in some face-saving manner, but that in the end he could not accept the terms offered to him.⁶⁶ Ronald P. Toby and Kenneth R. Robinson showed instances of diplomatic negotiations between East Asian states in which various parties were engaged in knowing acquiescence to deliberate deception as a means of concluding talks without challenging the face-saving measures of the other party.⁶⁷

In what Ray Huang has termed “one of the greatest diplomatic blunders of all time,”⁶⁸ the Chinese central government was deceived a little longer. Seeing the wisdom of controlling Japan through diplomacy, the Wanli emperor had set the terms of peace on three conditions: first, the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Korea and even Tsushima; second, Hideyoshi’s acceptance of investiture as king of Japan without demanding the restoration of trade, the usual privilege granted to a tributary state; and third, a pledge that Japan would not invade Korea again. The document detailing these conditions was relayed to Konishi Joan, an envoy sent by Yukinaga, when he arrived in Beijing in January 1596. Joan behaved completely in accordance with what would have been expected of the envoy of a country seeking to enter a tributary relationship with the Great Ming Empire.⁶⁹

Thus when the Ming sent envoys with the paraphernalia of investiture for Hideyoshi, it had been led to believe that Hideyoshi would be content to receive such investiture and ratify the peace. Even after the fiasco at Osaka Castle, the Ming envoys continued in their deception. Upon their arrival in Seoul they presented a false report to the Korean king and later to the Chinese emperor that Hideyoshi had accepted the Ming investiture, and they presented supposed gifts from Hideyoshi that they themselves had procured. Their deception was soon uncovered. The representatives of the peace party were punished; Shi Xing was imprisoned and died in prison, probably under torture;70 and Shen Weijing was executed.⁷¹

If the details of the Japan-China peace negotiation sound bizarre and outlandish, we can also view it in the larger context of conflicting worldviews—China was operating from the Sinocentric view that its proper mode of relating to the world was tributary relations, while Hideyoshi, unversed in the intricacies of the diplomacy of this Sinocentric world, was advancing an alternative new vision of the world based on power. As such, as Swope states, the talks were “doomed from the start.”⁷² The war resumed in August 1597 and ended by late December 1598.

Heightened Awareness of Self-Reliance for Korea

The years of peace talks were a trying time for the Korean government. Despite the fact that the stakes were highest for Korea, the government was excluded from the decision-making process. Sŏnjo was adamantly opposed to peace negotiations, and in the first half of 1593 he thrice conferred with the Chinese personnel in charge of Korean affairs—twice with General Li Rusong and once with Vice Minister of War and Chief of Policy for Korea Song Yingchang—in unsuccessful attempts to argue against peace negotiations with Japan.⁷³ Both Japan and China believed it advantageous for them to conclude the war without further fighting. Agreeing to a mutual withdrawal from Korea, the Japanese Army evacuated Seoul in late May 1593 and withdrew to the coastal region, although it attacked and occupied Chinju in Kyŏngsang Province on the way.

Left out of the negotiations for the most part, Korea had to be vigilant against two possible outcomes. One was the resumption of mass-scale fighting without the benefit of Chinese troops. Thus the Korean government expressed great concern with the timing of the withdrawal of troops. The Chinese troops departed from Korea in September 1593, leaving behind a force of sixteen thousand, which also left in the February 1594, whereas the Japanese Army evacuated, though not completely, only in the middle of 1595.74

Even more worrisome was the possibility that a peace might be ratified making territorial concessions of the southern provinces of Korea to Japan. Caught between differing Chinese factions and constantly shifting policies and yet dependent on China, the Korean government had to endure intimidating tactics from various Chinese officials. Intent on executing his peace plans and fearing that Sŏnjo might pose an obstacle to his tactics of deception, Song Yingchang, for example, prohibited all direct diplomatic contact between the Chosŏn and Ming governments. Only when he was recalled upon the discovery of his deceitful schemes was a direct channel between the two governments reestablished. Time and time again the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo mentions growing convictions on the part of Koreans about the unwillingness of the Chinese to fight for Korea and about Japanese territorial ambitions.⁷⁵ While this assessment led to different strategic formulations—the Sŏin faction proposed fighting by relying on the Korean Army while the Namin faction stressed the tactical necessity of peace negotiation as a way of buying time while strengthening the army—all seem to have been made aware of the importance of self-reliance.⁷⁶

A New Linguistic Typology: Parity of Chinese and Korean Script

It appears that during this period royal edicts and official missives written in Korean script alone, not as translated versions of ones in literary Chinese, were sent out and distributed. One such missive dated the ninth month of 1593 survives. The text says:

The King duly instructs the people. After you were captured by the Japanese army, you have been following them contrary to your will. Because you are afraid that you might be killed by them if you were to be caught escaping, and are also afraid that since you have joined the Japanese, you might be killed by our government, you are not leaving the enemy camp. Do not harbor such suspicions. Persuade each other and return. Not only will you not be punished, but anyone who renders meritorious service—who returns with captured Japanese personnel, who offers detailed information about enemy operations, or returns with many captured people or any other worthy task—will be rewarded with an official post appropriate to their status. I urge you to banish your suspicions and to return at once. We have instructed every general and commandant of this order. Have no fear and come back all.

There is no one among you who does not have a parent, a wife, or children. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to return to your old village and to resume your old life? If you do not return now you will be killed by the Japanese. How you will regret it after peace and order are restored. The Chinese Army has been rejuvenated; Pyŏngan Province is filled with them and they are also everywhere in Kyŏngsang and Chŏlla Provinces. The Japanese have hastened in retreat to their land, our joint army with the Chinese will vanquish them in Pusan and Tongnae; the Chinese Navy and the navy of our country will enter the sea side by side and will destroy and burn each and every enemy ship. If you linger there among the Japanese, you will not avoid getting killed. Come quickly before that happens.77

Ninth month, Wanli 21st year (1593)

The Veritable Records of Sŏnjo records in the entry of October 3 Sŏnjo’s order to send out what must be this edict:

Among our people who reside in the Pusan area, many have surrendered to and joined the Japanese army. There must be those who wish to return but hesitate because they are afraid of punishment. We should put up posters for these people assuring them that if they leave the enemy camp not only will they be spared of death they will also be exempted from corvée labor for the remainder of their lives and they may even be rewarded with official posts. Let the Agency for Border Affairs (Pibyŏnsa) take care of this matter.78

It is noteworthy that the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo neither records the contents of the edict nor specifies which language it was promulgated in. We know that it was circulated in the Korean version because a copy survives. I hazard a guess that this was written and circulated only in Korean because of its content and its intended recipients. The Korean script was deployed here as a self-conscious tool of communication among Koreans, intending to exclude others. This was done when multidirectional communiqués among the three countries were at their most active. The edict above displays linguistic exclusivity among Koreans accompanied by an appeal to a shared past evoked in the phrase “to return to your old village and resume your old life.” Unlike the bright future that outsiders might have flaunted, this shared past belonged only to insiders. In conjuring up a shared past, it also reminds the receiver of a shared destiny. Thus the exclusivity of the script also signified an exclusivity of shared history and destiny.

With the autonomous appearance of Korean script untethered to any Chinese text in the public space, linguistic typology changed. Literary Chinese and vernacular Korean, which had been in strict hierarchy, were now seen as complementary. The use of the Korean script was not at the expense or exclusion of literary Chinese. Rather the two languages were deployed strategically, almost with equal value, their use determined only by circumstance.

The royal edicts of this period display this new parity quite clearly. These edicts were written in several modes: some were written in literary Chinese, translated into Korean and transmitted in both languages; others were written exclusively in one language, either Korean or Chinese. The key question to consider is whether a particular edict was written in one language and translated into another or written solely in one language. In the case of the former, the original version seems to have functioned as a principal or more visible version. Each language seems to have reinforced the role of the other in delineating and strengthening the notion of ethnic exclusivity. It was almost as if not only the Korean script was nationalized but literary Chinese was as well. Edicts of all categories, in the affective language of a rulerfather, increasingly evoked the vision of the Korea’s peaceful and unsullied existence before the war and appealed for the people’s active cooperation in reconstructing their country.

The Language of Affect

Nowhere was the rhetoric of national affect more vividly displayed than in Sŏnjo’s “edict of heartfelt pain” (aet’ongsŏ) sent out in mid-February 1599 soon after the war ended. The edict begins with the terrible trial of the war and the heavy burden of taxation on the people that resulted from its expenses: “The smallest thing had to be provided by no one but the people, pushing them into the abyss of poverty.” It elaborates on the depth of royal sympathy for the plight of the people. Then it shifts to the somber tasks that awaited them. Now that Hideyoshi had died, the disaster of war had passed, but Sŏnjo pointed out the enfeebled state to which the country had been brought: “When I think of what lays ahead it hardly looks different from the dangers we endured. The situation is comparable to a person who passed [the crisis of] a great illness but is so sapped of energy that it takes extreme caution to administer acupuncture or medicine, and to a big tree that, though alive, has been shaken to its roots and loosed from its foundation so that it would take a great effort to make is stand again.”

After this display of sympathy and concern for their plight, the king goes on to ask for cooperation in rebuilding the country:

The people are a lovable yet fearful entity; if not for you on whom can my state rely? . . . My heart aches with pain [at the thought of your plight]. I believe the government’s tasks are to reduce what can be reduced and eliminate what can be eliminated of taxes and levies carefully considering what is more urgent and what is not; to mourn the dead and to comfort the living; and to induce the dispersed population to return home and to be together again. This is the beginning of reconstruction, and it will signal a new start. I request that everyone in this country endeavor to make our rivers and lands (kangt’o) beautiful again and to regain our easy and peaceful way of life.79

Like many edicts disseminated during the war, this one was recorded in the Miscellaneous Record but not in the Veritable Records of Sŏnjo. We do not know in which script it was circulated. By this time it does not seem to have mattered. The Korean script, as did literary Chinese, functioned either solely or as the translated half of a principal message in the public sphere. What mattered was that both scripts were deployed to evoke a vision of the ethnic community of the Chosŏn.

The Postwar Inscriptional Space

For the duration of the war, the government actively explored and utilized various aspects of the vernacular for its qualities—it was the “national” script, exclusive of the other, inclusive of Koreans. It is not that vernacular writing dominated the inscriptional space or that the activity of vernacular writing was conspicuously shifted to the inscriptional space. Even during the war, literary Chinese continued to be used in the inscriptional space, and the vernacular was much more actively used in the noninscriptional space. The postwar trajectory of the vernacular became rather complex. During the seventeenth century, during Chosŏn’s conflict with the Manchus, and afterwards in its self-appointed role as the carrier of Confucian civilization, the government seems to have returned literary Chinese to prominence in the inscriptional space. It was in the eighteenth century during the reigns of Yŏngjo (r. 1724–1776) and especially Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) that the vernacular returned to the inscriptional space.⁸⁰

The induction of vernacular writing into the inscriptional space, however, fundamentally changed its role and function. Released from its position as the inferior other of literary Chinese, vernacular Korean gained autonomy, legitimacy, and, most particularly, visibility. The vernacular became an integral part of larger discourse. Discourse was carried out in various combinations of linguistic spaces and languages, and the discourse in literary Chinese referred to and even quoted from discourse in the vernacular more frequently. Through intertextuality, fragmentary portions of discourse in the vernacular that might have been otherwise lost to us are made visible in the classical language, even if distantly. The vernacular offered, on its own, a discursive field in which disparate discourses of ethnicity cohered. It created an alternative discursive space, especially in the fictional mode, in which such topics as nation and ethnicity were contemplated, as will be shown in the next chapter.