Sem Vermeersch - A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea

This project originated in my interest in Kory Buddhism. While looking for evidence of Buddhist practices during the Kory period (9181392), I came across Xu Jings description of the householder monk, a fascinating if puzzling account of a group of people whose status was somewhere between that of householder and monk. It being part of two chapters on religion in Xu Jings Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe-Era Embassy to Kory (Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing, 1124), I started making a draft translation of those chapters, an undertaking that proved valuable for two research projectsthe history of Kaesng temples and a book on the Buddhist institution during KoryI was working on at the time. Just then, in 2004, out of the blue I was contacted by H Hngsik, who was mulling over an ambitious project to initiate a multivolume edition of the Illustrated Account of Kory. It was to comprise a text-critical edition of the original text as well as translations into Korean, Chinese, and English, and Professor H asked me if I was interested in doing the English translation. I immediately agreed and set to work on the other thirty-eight chaptersa project I came to regret many times, since the work combines the frustrating terseness and allusiveness of classical Chinese with highly technical descriptions of a variety of customs, objects, organizations, and so on.

Unfortunately nothing came of this project, but in 2007 the Academy of Korean Studies launched its Korean Classics Library 100 translation project and included the Illustrated Account of Kory on the list of works to be translated. As I was already working on the text, I applied to be its translator. Soon after, I was appointed assistant professor at Seoul National University and also became involved in the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, leaving me little time to work on the translation. Therefore, despite my best efforts to complete the work by the 2009 deadline, it was not until 2013 that I managed to submit a draft translation.

The Illustrated Account of Kory is well known, at least among historians and Korean studies researchers. Our main window into Kory society remains the History of Kory (Korysa), completed in 1451. However, the History of Kory deals almost exclusively with important political affairs, the central bureaucracy, and matters of administration. How society functioned and how people lived are almost entirely absent from xiv this text and not to be found in other Korean sources. The Illustrated Account of Kory, by contrast, being an outsiders perspective, contains some fascinating observations that began to draw the attention of scholars from early on. The section on celadon and Xu Jings description of Kory customs are well known.

Beyond these well-known passages the work has not been well studied. There are a handful of articles devoted to it and a few translations into modern Korean, but there remain numerous outstanding problems. To begin with, there is no modern critical edition of the text that compares all extant editions. Although the oldest remaining edition, the 1167 Jingjiang edition, does not pose many problems, alternative readings and/or additions from later editions sometimes provide valuable corrections or offer solutions to interpreting difficult passages. More serious is the problem of how reliable Xu Jings observations are and how to interpret them. For example, the last six chapters but one of the work are a detailed description of the sea route he and his diplomatic mission took. However, the names he gives for Korean islands for the most part do not match any found in Korean sources, making it extremely difficult to identify which islands he is talking about. Another example is his description of Kory military organization. While his description is fairly consistent with what we find in the History of Kory, there are also some notable differences, such as a division whose name is not attested in any other source. Did he make a simple mistake? Or is this a division that was somehow not recorded in Korean sources?

Regarding the first problem, while I prepared this translation on the basis of the 1167 Jingjiang edition, I have also compared it with the Zhibuzu zhai edition and indicated major discrepancies in the endnotes. Other editions or manuscripts have not been systematically compared, but as far as I could ascertain, they would add very little additional information to the two main premodern editions. As for the problems posed by the contents, I have tried to solve them as best as possible either by using all available reference works or, when these do not provide adequate answers, by making inferences on the basis of a study of the context in which the problematic term appears. Fortunately, there seems recently to be a renewed interest in the work among Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scholars; notably the work by Morihira Masahiko on the sea lanes has proven invaluable in solving some thorny issues.