Forbidden Place: Borders, Belonging, and the Question of Koreans Abroad in the Mid-19th Century

 This paper explores a pivotal moment of change in thinking about borders and belonging in the former “forbidden zone,” the heart of northeast Asia and adopted home of thousands of Koreans abroad.  For centuries, the borderland between Chosŏn Korea and Qing China constituted a “forbidden zone.”  Crossing into the zone was a crime: if you were found, you were repatriated to your original country and executed.  The policy reflected a key concept of the tributary system, in which the stability of people and place guaranteed harmony between states and “order” in the realm.  In 1860, however, Russia’s annexation of new territories cut into the “forbidden zone” and changed the map of northeast Asia permanently.  Koreans began to leave for Russia in unprecedented numbers and naturalized as Russian subjects, further upsetting the natural order of things.  Ignited by Russia’s refusal to repatriate the Koreans back to Korea, a series of international disputes erupted among Korea, China, and Russia; they revealed a fundamental dissonance in ideas about jurisdiction that were not easily reconciled – plural jurisdiction, unilateral extraterritoriality, and tributary relations.  The mass departure of Koreans also spurred a rethinking about statehood and belonging inside Korea itself.  The king asserted a vision of statehood that simultaneously drew on Confucian ideas of the organic body politic and resonated with an evolving notion of political sovereignty– a triumvirate of people, territory, and absolute claims to sovereignty to both.  All people, including those outside of Korea, were reimagined as central to the identity of the state and fundamental to its preservation during a time of crisis on the peninsula.  The permanent settlement of Koreans outside Korea, however, remained a problem for officials in all three states, who could not seem to wrest this place from its forbidden past.