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This article examines the descriptions of Basīlā in the Kūshnāma (ھمان شوك) and determines the credibility of those descriptions as historical evidence. Kūshnāma is a Persian epic and part of a mythical history of Iran written by Hakim Irānshān b. Abī al-Khayr between 1108 and 1111 CE. Many scholars argue that Basīlā in Kūshnāma can be identified with the Silla Kingdom (57 BCE–935 CE) of ancient Korea for many reasons. First, the descriptions of Basīlā in Kūshnāma largely correspond to those of Sīlā/al-Sīlā in contemporary Islamic texts. Second, in some Muslim historical and geographical works such as Masālek wa Mamālek by Sāed bin Ali Jorjāni (1476 CE), and Ājāyib al- Makhlughāt by Muhammad bin Ahmad Tusi (1161–1178 CE), we find that Basīlā is used, together with Sīlā/al-Sīlā, to describe the same area of the Korean peninsula. With the advent of Islam, references to Korea found in twenty-three Islamic sources written between the ninth and sixteenth centuries by eighteen Muslim scholars, including Ibn Khurdādbih (d. 886 CE), Sulaiman al-Tajir (written around 850 CE), and al-Mas’udi (d. 957 CE), suggest that Muslims’ influence had already reached the Korean peninsula by that time.2 Before the discovery of Kūshnāma, however, no documents or epics had been found that describe ancient relations between Iran and Silla in such a detailed manner. In this sense, an in-depth study of Kūshnāma focusing on its descriptions of “Basīlā” will contribute to expanding our understanding of pre-modern relations between the Middle East and Korea. Because both historical events and mythological beliefs of ancient Persia are incorporated in Kūshnāma, this article will consider to what extent we can accept descriptions within Kūshnāma to be reliable historical evidence.

Given the Iranian literary tradition of retelling history by combining legends of pre-Islamic provenance with Islamic-era historical knowledge, this article seeks to place the wealth of information embedded in the Iranian epic Kūshnāma (Book of Kūsh) against the historical context in which its creators composed the epic by consulting select historical and geographical works. According to this epic, after the Iranian king Jamshīd was killed by the Tāzī chieftain Żaḥḥāk, his descendants took refuge in Chīn, Māchīn and B.sīlā. The study for this article utilizes classical Muslim works and Chinese sources in order to elucidate the possible connections between historical events and the plots of tales about exiled Iranian princes as depicted in Kūshnāma. For example, the ancient East Asian kingdoms of China and Silla are the prototypes for Chīn, Māchīn and B.sīlā in Kūshnāma. As a result, this article proposes that Kūshnāma’s narrator might have integrated aspects from a variety of sources—most importantly, the long-standing oral and written traditions of Iranians, and fragmentary evidence pertaining to ancient China and the Korean Peninsula as recorded in Perso-Arabic literature—into the epic’s narrative. Analysis of such a narrative demonstrates that information acquired as a consequence of long-distance East-West exchanges assimilated into the collective memory of Iranians who lived in the early twelfth century. It further indicates that the features of such an exchange phenomenon bear a close resemblance to the material and cultural exchanges that occurred at a much earlier time all over the Eurasian continent.

The Muslim world has been learning about Korea for a long time. Historical evidence shows that some of this knowledge predates the Islamic era; indeed, Iranian merchants have nurtured ties since the era of the Sillā dynasty (57 BCE–935 CE). For centuries after the house’s fall, the name stuck: References to Korea as Sillā, Shillā, and Basillā appear in Iranian historical and literary texts until the sixteenth century. By the thirteenth century, however, as Sino-Iranian connections grew, Muslims began to adopt a new name, Kao-li or Korea. Still, astronomers and geographers continued to use the name Sillā, as evidenced in astronomical texts written in the eleventh, thirteenth, and sixteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, an interesting change in the evolution of the word Sillā occurred: Islamic ephemerides, diaries that chronicle astronomical positions, began to record the name Sillā in the same location along an eastern prime meridian as the toponym Kangdez. The origins of Kangdez—for example, whether it developed from an Iranian or Indian tradition—is unclear. Nonetheless, this widely used dual naming of a single geographical location persisted in Islamic astronomical texts into the sixteenth century. This article traces the transfer of geographical knowledge about Sillā and Kangdez into and throughout the Muslim world through the works of five generations of well-known Muslim astronomers, with a focus on their lesser-known works. It seeks to specify the manner in which astronomical knowledge about the location of Sillā and Kangdez circulated among Muslims from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

The Book of China (Khataynameh), a description of China written in 1516, in Persian, for the Ottoman court by a Central Asian merchant, includes a brief section on Korea in the chapter on the twelve provinces of China, which describes habitual interaction between Muslim and Korean merchants. The brevity of this notice and the mis-categorization of Korea as a province of the Ming state might appear to indicate that the author was largely uninformed about Korea and its political relationship to China. However, the didactic and political nature of the text, which presented a utopian image of China as a model to be emulated by a nascent Ottoman Empire, as well as the author’s more general familiarity with East Asian cultural and political circumstances, suggest that his subsuming of the Chosŏn state into the Ming empire was more an ideologically-motivated choice than a manifestation of negligence or ignorance. The image of economic and military power conveyed through the Ming tribute system formed the basis of a political ideal of universal empire; conveying this ideal was the principal goal of the text. The author’s fealty to an idealized formulation of imperial authority echoes the Chosŏn elite’s own strategy for balancing political independence with material support and cooperation from the Ming, by adhering closely to a Sinocentric Neo-Confucian ideology. The Book of China thus attests to, and constitutes part of, a global process of political communication that connected the Ottoman Empire with Central Asia, China, and Korea.

Keyhole-shaped tombs were originally thought to only exist on the Japanese archipelago and to mark the hegemony of the early Japanese Empire. The discovery of keyhole-shaped tombs on the southwestern Korean peninsula in the Yŏngsan River basin reignited the debate on the nature of the relationship between early “Korean” and “Japanese” polities between the fourth–seventh centuries CE. Questions about the identity of those buried in the “Korean” keyhole-shaped tombs became a hot topic: Were they Paekche? Japanese or Wa? Or Mahan? These tombs only appeared for a single generation in the late fifth–early sixth century in a region that was quickly adopting influences from Paekche and the Japanese archipelago until the region was absorbed by Paekche by the early sixth century. Based on the limited textual evidence, I argue that Paekche’s move south in 475 and the instability of the Yamato court in the late fifth and early sixth centuries created opportunities for the local elites in the Yŏngsan River basin to make connections with both Paekche, Yamato, and other regional elites in northern Kyushu to create an eclectic and multicultural environment that gave rise not only to keyhole-shaped tumuli but also to other burial innovations in the Yŏngsan River basin.

King Injo and his entourage remained on the summit of Mount Namhan for the greater part of the Qing Invasion of Chosŏn. During this time, court officials conducted intense debates as to whether to pursue continued military resistance against the Qing, or to conclude a settlement with them on the best terms possible. These officials have typically been placed into two political factions, the Peace Faction and the Anti-peace Faction. However, such a simple division obscures the complex realities of the political intrigue operative during the invasion. There are a number of records written during the short conflict. They offer glimpses into the actual, and often concealed, context of the political manoeuvres inside the besieged mountain fortress. Two diaries, Kim Sanghŏn’s Namhan kiryak (Resource on Namhan [Mountain Fortress]) and Nam Kŭp’s Namhan ilgi (The Namhan [Mountain Fortress] Diary), look at the war inside the fortress from two perspectives—the former from the point of view of a literati official who spoke of his own willingness to die, and the latter through the eyes of a military official who actually put his life on the line in defence of the wall. Rather than either protagonist embodying a self-contained political entity or representing the only logical conclusion to the war, the writings afford us clues as to the real and understandable concerns of individuals foreseeing an inevitable outcome.

The descendants of Ming loyalists who had migrated to Chosŏn with Prince Pongnim in 1645 were an integral part of the Ming loyalist ideology advocated by the Chosŏn court during the eighteenth century. The significance of their presence in Chosŏn, however, waned with the weakening of this ideology and the rise of Northern Learning in the nineteenth century. Under these adverse circumstances, the Ming loyalist families in the early nineteenth century employed various strategies to re-emphasize Ming loyalism and consolidate their Ming loyalist identity; an initiative they viewed as critical in justifying their presence in Chosŏn society. This article traces the variety of these identity-reinforcing efforts by the Ming loyalist families, ranging from shrine-building and compilation efforts to intermarriage. It focuses on the ritual structures built in Chojong’am by these descendants and analyzes how the symbols of Ming loyalism embedded in this place by the Chosŏn literati in the seventeenth century were manipulated by Ming descendants in the early nineteenth century. Through these initiatives, the descendants asserted a new version of Ming loyalism that not only potentially undermined the claims of the Chosŏn court/literati to be the inheritors of Ming culture but strengthened the symbolic significance of the Ming loyalist families. This study illuminates this implicit tension and disjuncture between the positions of the two parties, which is significant for understanding developments, rather than seeing the Ming loyalists’ activities as an outcome of ongoing cooperative interactions between the Chosŏn court and the Ming families nourished during the eighteenth century.

After World War II, the United States established the US Army Government in Korea (USAMGIK, 1945–48) in South Korea, and tried to justify its military occupation by international law, particularly the Hague Convention IV (1907). The Convention stipulates an occupant’s right to take all the measures necessary to restore public order and safety and his or her duty to respect the indigenous law. Considering the changed situation during World War II, however, where the military institutions of the Axis Powers drove their aggression into other countries, it was inevitable that the Allied Powers would modify the convention to apply it to the occupied countries. Since Japanese public or private property comprised the most wealth in colonial Korea, one of the key issues that USAMGIK faced in liberated Korea was how to handle former Japanese property, ultimately culminating in the confiscation of all Japanese property into the possession of USAMGIK. Thus, this article expounds this thorny issue by dealing with the rationale of this change of the international law, specifically a religious one, with the cy pres (as near as possible) principle, a category that USAMGIK handled with discretion compared to commercial or government property. Consequently, this article shows that USAMGIK ultimately facilitated a close relationship between Christianity and the state in post-war Korean society.

During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, many literacy primers known as panjŏl (反切) were printed in Chosŏn to teach illiterate Koreans the basics of Korean writing. One particular type among them, titled Sin’gan panjŏl (新刊反切, Newly printed primer), is interesting for two reasons. First, although it identifies itself as a primer, most of its contents are in fact horoscope charts which tell fortunes about marriage (kunghap 宮合) as well as inauspicious times in a person’s life (samjae 三災 and chiksŏng 直星). I analyze the principles behind these horoscope charts and show that, while these horoscopes have their origins in Chinese and Indian culture, they have distinctly Korean characteristics. Second, Sin’gan panjŏl may be seen as evidence for a diffusion of han’gŭl literacy driven by economic motivations during the late Chosŏn period. I suggest that Sin’gan panjŏl were probably printed by commercial printers of the time whose primary products were novels. By selling these primers, they could expand their market by bringing literacy to the illiterate, and the horoscope charts would have appealed to even those who were not interested in novels.

This article explores the representation of erotic desire and romance in the works of one of the most influential authors of colonial Korea, Ch’ae Mansik (1902–50), focusing on his short story “Kwadogi” (Transition, 1923) and his novella Naengdongŏ (Frozen Fish, 1940), which revolve around heterosexual intimacy between Koreans and Japanese. It investigates the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality in colonial-period literature, in particular, how Ch’ae fits Korean masculinity into the colonial hierarchy as regards encountering Japanese women in their private spaces. The article suggests that the anxiety of colonized male elites in intimate relationships with colonizer women manifests the tension between making a Japanese woman on the one hand an object of erotic desire and on the other hand a respectable lady. In managing this tension, the colonized male figures attempt to elevate their position in the hierarchy of the Japanese Empire. It also suggests that Ch’ae produces the image of a Japanese woman as both the symbol of Japanese femininity and imperialism—an alternative womanhood that supports both colonized men and the Japanese imperialist project, submissive to both patriarchies. In this way, I argue, the male writers were not colonized subjects in crisis, as they have often been described in literary scholarship, but active participants and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.

Characterization (i.e., the way a character is lexicogrammatically constructed in a text) introduces and develops the reader’s mental representation of the character. Previous research shows that in fiction various means of characterization have been used to encode the character’s views of the world, the relationship between characters, and the underlying theme of the story. Considering the importance of characterization in fiction, this study aims to find out what effects the translator’s lexicogrammatical choices may have on characterization and the implied reader’s construction of the character. For this purpose, Yi Sang’s Nalgae (Wings) and its three English translations were compared in terms of how the “I”-protagonist is characterized in four key passages of the story. The theoretical framework for this study is transitivity, a Hallidayan system of how experiential meaning is represented in the clause.

Kim Sŭng-ok’s early literature has been extensively talked about in regard to a number of themes including as a critique of western capitalism. However, there has been almost no analysis of how some of his early fiction can be read as a response to Pak Chŏng-hŭi’s attempt to create a modern Korean mass identity through conservatizing and re-Confucianizing the nation by means of a powerful military-style mobilization project. After positing the existence of something called “a world of one’s own” in a story titled “Saengmyŏng yŏnsŭp” (Practice for life, 1962) and incorporating a clearly Freudian super-ego vs. Id clash into the plot, Kim Sŭng-ok writes two more stories that can be read as having strong elements of resistance to Pak Chŏng-hŭi’s totalizing project: “Yŏksa” (Strongman, 1963) and “Mujin kihaeng” (Record of a journey to Mujin, 1964). In these stories, his protagonists make efforts to resist the totalizing, subsuming effects of the homogenization and mobilization that appear in the texts and that can be traced to such efforts by the Pak regime. This article will analyze these stories for their attempts to resist the domination of a societal super-ego represented by Pak Chŏng-hŭi’s patriarchal persona and mass mobilization efforts using state power. A psycho-analytic approach will be used to show how Kim attempted to create an individuated ego that could withstand (or escape) the tyranny of this societal super-ego.