An Effaced Empire? The Multilayered Historiography of Medieval Korea

This paper argues that scholarly understandings of the Koryŏ state (918–1392) are both inflected by modern political imaginaries of the premodern East Asian world order and are pinned to modern interpretations of early Chosŏn (1392–1910) historiography. Scholars have argued that, while paying tribute to larger imperial Sinitic states like the Laio or the Song, Koryŏ harbored imperial ambitions and attempted to arrogate the symbols of Imperial China by using terms such as “son of heaven” or reign names for the calendar. Such scholarship often explains Koryŏ’s foreign relations with the “emperor at home, king abroad” (naeje oewang) paradigm. However, scholars differ on the exact degree of how imperial Koryŏ was: the limited argument holds that what imperial elements existed were the incidental result of Koryŏ’s selective adoption of Chinese political systems; the more expansive argument is that Koryŏ purposefully fashioned itself as an empire, but that evidence of its imperial system is now lost or purposefully effaced. The foundation of either thesis rests on the interpretation of the integrity and objectivity of the History of Koryŏ (Koryŏsa, 1451), the source par excellence for medieval Korean history. The History of Koryŏ provides enough evidence of imperial trappings to support the limited thesis, as Chosŏn government compilers claimed to write imperial terminology verbatim despite reservations. To argue the expansive thesis, however, scholars must posit a greater degree of doctoring and rewriting during the compilation of the History of Koryŏ to show how editorial intervention erased evidence of Koryŏ’s imperial tradition. The arguments come down to interpretations not just of the History of Koryŏ’s text, but also the exact historiographic principles that underlay its Chosŏn-era compilation, interpretations inflected by politically orientated modern, positivist concerns over objectivity and larger conceptual frameworks of the traditional East Asian world order.