Boundless Winds of Empire

The Chosŏn relationships with the Ming and Qing Empires have been the subject of English-language scholarly inquiry for more than a century. If we include research published in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, the number of publications reaches well into the thousands. Most of these works revolve around the notion of a tributary system in which Chosŏn, as the putative model tributary state, submitted to the political and cultural power of the Ming and Qing courts not only out of geopolitical necessity but also from an unwavering ideological commitment to what we might term authentic human civilization (K. hwa, C. hua 華) as embodied in the Confucian classics. The infelicitous result of much of this work is an analytical structure that plunges East Asian diplomacy into an essentialist and indeed Orientalist mire bereft of strategic thought or even human agency beyond the implication of an ever-unknowable and not entirely rational premodern Asian otherness. A number of historians of East Asia have attempted to dismantle this suffocating framework, myself among them, but the tributary system, despite all of its myriad theoretical and empirical flaws, continues to enjoy wide scholarly acceptance, particularly among its more recent boosters in the field of international relations.With the publication of Boundless Winds of Empire, Sixiang Wang takes a rather different approach. He asks us first to reconsider the notion of empire. Rather than a geopolitical entity ruled by an emperor, as the modern word cheguk/diguo 帝國 (literally an “emperor country”) would suggest, Wang redirects us toward understanding empire as a continuous tradition, replacing cheguk/diguo with t'ong/tong 統, a word we might understand as “lineage.” When empire is a lineage, a larger political imaginary, a continuous tradition, and not strictly a spatially bounded geopolitical entity, ample possibilities for a broader participation emerge. Chosŏn participation in this imperial tradition, by virtue of its status as a tributary state to the Ming court, was in no way static. One of the most important contributions of Wang's work is to show that the imperial tradition in which the Chosŏn court participated was also a tradition that the Chosŏn court consistently manipulated, bent, and even actively produced through its deployment of rhetoric and ritual at all levels of its relationship with the Ming court.Wang builds his argument over four parts totaling ten chapters that discuss a series of brief case studies of Chosŏn-Ming diplomatic encounters from the tense Yuan-Ming and Koryŏ-Chosŏn transitions to the periods of Ming and Chosŏn political instability in the fifteenth century, through to an examination of Chosŏn and Ming diplomatic missions of the sixteenth century. Each chapter rests on a foundation of close readings of a broad array of Ming and Chosŏn source materials in literary Sinitic across multiple highly disparate genres. In our current age, rich databases allow for simultaneous searches of multiple archives, be they state chronicles, literary anthologies, diaries, or letters, but Wang's engagement with the source material is not the product of any pedestrian keyword search. He demonstrates again and again a keen awareness of the circumstances of the production, structure, function, circulation, and consumption of the texts he employs, from state chronicles to court memorials, from travel logs to envoy poetry. His deep familiarity and comfort with his sources enable him to understand them not as accretions of data points to be mined and denatured but rather as organic wholes whose meaning cannot be understood in atomistically. This textual sensitivity is at the heart of Wang's call for readers of the documents to keep forefront in the mind that “rhetoric is not rhetorical” but rather performative, and therefore not peripheral but actually central to the concerns of the scholar of diplomacy. If a reconceptualization of empire is the key theoretical contribution of Boundless Winds of Empire, Wang's call to take rhetoric seriously is its clarion methodological proclamation.Wang's fluency in the sources, while consistent throughout the text, is especially evident in his discussion of the forms and functions of the “diplomatic memorial” (p'yo 表) on pages 35–50. His considerations wend their way through the technical details of interstate documents, poetic form, classical allusion, and diplomatic sensitivities, all the while embedded in decades of secondary research in English, Korean, and Chinese. In these fifteen pages, we move through the Analects 論語, the Book of Documents 尙書, Tongmunsŏn 東文選, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑, Koryŏsa 高麗史, Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄, T'ongmun'gwan chi 通文館志, and literary anthologies of Koryŏ and Chosŏn literati. This should not be surprising in that this is indeed the breadth of reading and understanding necessary to approach a document like a p'yo, and yet it is rarely, if ever, in evidence in much of the recent scholarship that has now revived the tributary model. We can hope that Wang's work may serve to (re)set the standard to which scholarship in this area should be done.In covering so many different situations and personages, the transitions from one chapter to the next work well in the first half of the work but begin to feel mildly abrupt between later chapters in part 4. The reader would do well, however, to keep in mind the very first paragraph of the preface, in which Wang acknowledges that his account is, by design, neither exhaustive nor definitive nor meant to present a single coherent historical narrative; rather, it is curated to illustrate the centrality of rhetoric and ritual. Understood in this light, the episodic nature of the work is integral to its value. As extensive as his readings in the sources are, they have touched on only small portions of the enormous amount of primary material available. They allude to further landscapes yet to be revealed. This is in no way a fault but rather a gift. Wang has not only laid the theoretical and methodological footings of a new paradigm of diplomatic history, he has opened numerous doors and left them ajar for future scholars to enter

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Diplomacy · Empire · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy