Having just
finished the first half of Pak (or Bak) Jiwon's Jehol Diary (열하일기/Yeolha-ilgi), I wanted to
take some time to reflect on the book so far and share some of the things I
enjoyed about the first part. Although the book is essentially a travelogue, it's
so full of ideas about history, philosophy, society, antiques, art, and life in
general that deciding where to begin discussing the book was quite a challenge.
However, at this point in my exploration of the book, it seems most appropriate
to focus on Pak's curiosity and open-mindedness as a model of the type of
mindset we should strive for, especially in a time as multicultural and
hyperconnected as the present.
The Jehol
Diary caused a tremendous stir when it was first written and ruffled the
feathers of some very powerful figures among Korea's political and literary
elite. To explain why the book was received in this way, let's take a couple of
steps back and look at both how Pak's insatiable curiosity came about and the
times in which he lived and worked. As will be clear by the end of this post, Pak
Jiwon was an exceptional person for his time, and one of his greatest strengths
was arguably his ability to look at his own country through the eyes of an
outsider — an ability
that was sadly lacking among the majority of his contemporaries with the
exception of a small minority of thinkers.
Pak Jiwon
(1737–1805) was born into a family who were members of the noron (노론/老論),
one of the main political factions in the late Joseon dynasty. Although his
intelligence and brilliant memory were recognized early on, after a couple of unsuccessful
attempts at passing the state civil service examination — on one occasion he even turned in a blank test paper — he simply gave up and worked odd jobs to fund trips with friends,
much to the exasperation of his family. During these trips, Pak met and spoke
with people from all walks of life, and in the process of doing so, he
developed an exceptional ease in making new acquaintances and getting along
easily with complete strangers. In addition to these trips in his late teens
and early twenties, he was also indirectly exposed to other cultures through
stories about travels in China which he heard from relatives and friends who
often visited China as ambassadors. These various experiences, both direct and
indirect, helped shape his endlessly curious personality and made him more
receptive to other cultures and customs than many of his more
conservative-minded compatriots.
By the time
he embarked on the trip in 1780 to visit the Qianlong Emperor (건륭제) of China which would
become the subject of the Jehol Diary, Pak was already well-versed in Chinese
literature and history, as well as a fluent reader and writer of classical
Chinese as a result of years of studying for the civil service examination.
Being a seonbi (선비) or 'classical scholar'
devoted to a life of learning rather than the pursuit of official titles or
material wealth, Pak went with the tributary envoy to China essentially as a
tourist without any official obligations, which gave him plenty of free time to
explore and speak with as many different people as possible1. Pak
was invited to join the envoy by his cousin Pak Myeong-won (박명원), who had just recently been promoted to the position of Congratulatory
Ambassador (진하사 겸 사은사, 進賀使兼謝恩使)
for missions to China, and it's a good thing Pak Jiwon was invited at all,
because he proved to be an ideal observer to accompany such a trip and in fact
provided king Jeongjo (정조) with far more useful and
accurate information about what he saw and heard in China when he returned to
Korea than the other government officials from the envoy who simply dismissed
the "barbarian" Manchus ruling China as having nothing to teach
Korea.
This
prejudice toward the Manchus who established the Qing dynasty and ruled China
in Pak's time was typical especially among the Korean elite. Two of the primary
philosophies of the day, bukbeollon (북벌론/北伐論, "Northern
Expedition Theory") and sojunghwaron (소중화론/小中華論, "Little China Theory"), are direct results of this
disdain toward the Manchu rulers of China and their culture, particularly the
queue hairstyle — a shaved forehead with a long
ponytail running down the back of the head — characteristic
of Manchu men. Aside from the unusual hairstyle which seems to have so deeply
disturbed Koreans, what could have caused such intense feels of animosity
toward the Qing dynasty and everything associated with it?
When the Manchus
overthrew the Ming dynasty ruled by the Han Chinese people in 1636, they
established their own dynasty known as the Qing dynasty. Although the Manchus
asked Korea repeatedly for support during their campaign to conquer Ming, Korea
either hesitated to act or outright refused, partly out of loyalty to the Ming
dynasty for supporting Korea during its own crisis in the 1590s when the
Japanese invaded. Naturally the Manchus did not like being brushed off like
this, so they went on a punitive expedition to Korea (병자호란, "Qing invasion of
Joseon") and, after surrounding the city to which the Korean king Injo (인조) had retreated, forced the king to perform a humiliating ritual of
submission — bowing and slamming his head against the
ground several times until his forehead was a disheveled mess of bloody hair — to the Manchu king Hong Taiji. This humiliation would not soon be
forgotten in Korea and became the basis of the bukbeollon or
"Northern Expedition" proposal to invade the Northerners (i.e. the
Manchus) and punish them for what they did to Korea. Even 150 years later, when
Pak was embarking on his trip to China in 1780, this was one of the dominant political
discourses in Korea and a major reason why Koreans regarded the Qing Manchus
with such disdain, refusing to even consider the idea that they might be able
to learn something from the Manchus. Bukbeollon went hand in hand with sojunghwaron
or "Little China Theory," according to which Korea was a miniature
version of China responsible for preserving the "true" Chinese
culture inherited from the previous Han-ruled Ming dynasty until the Manchus
could be overthrown and the Han people could regain their rightful sovereignty.
Hence, many Koreans felt almost morally obliged to oppose the Manchus and stand
by the Han Chinese people and their culture.
Although a
supporter in spirit of the overthrown Ming dynasty and its "pure"
Chinese culture, Pak Jiwon was astounded by the material superiority of China
on his trip and became a passionate advocate of iyong-husaeng (이용후생/利用厚生, "Pragmatism and Welfare"), part of the wider Silhak
(실학/實學) or "practical
learning" movement, which emphasized the importance of adopting
technologies capable of improving the lives of the struggling Korean people,
regardless of where they originate. In Pak's view, rejecting Qing culture and
technologies which could significantly improve the standard of living of all
Koreans on the basis of something as trivial as contempt for the Qing hairstyle
is both absurd and a large part of the reason that Koreans were still
struggling to eke out a living while clinging to "traditional"
technologies in spite of their inefficiency and ineffectiveness. According to iyong-husaeng,
an idea should be judged based on its applicability and usefulness, not on its place
of origin. The main features of Qing's superior material culture which Pak felt
were imperative to adopt in Korea can be summarized in three examples: bricks,
carts, and horse manure, more specifically the reuse of the latter.
One of the
earliest observations that Pak makes upon entering China is that the brick
houses in China are so much better constructed and better insulated than the traditional
stone or thatched houses in Korea, particularly those inhabited by the lower
classes. We learn from Pak's detailed description of the houses he sees during
the trip that, while thatched or stone houses in Korea were poorly insulated and
suffered from frequent rodent infestations due to holes in the walls, Chinese
houses were made of brick, which provided much better insulation since the
bricks were pressed and formed in molds, ensuring consistent, evenly-shaped
bricks which could be fit together precisely like pieces of Lego and sealed
with lime. The rooves of Chinese houses were generally made of tiles, and what
impressed Pak about this system is that even broken tiles were recycled and
joined together to form walls or decorations instead of being discarded. For
the same reason, he admires the Chinese for reusing the abundant horse manure
produced by countless horse-drawn carts passing daily through the busy streets
of major cities. The manure was recycled both as fuel to keep houses warm in
winter and as a material for making bricks.
The
dizzying number and variety of carts in China also appears to have captured his
interest because he gives detailed descriptions of several types of carts,
including the pre-industrial version of a firetruck — based on a design from the
book 'Diagrams and explanations of the wonderful
machines of the Far West' (원서기기도설록최/기기도, 遠西奇器圖說錄最) by Joannes Terrenz (1576–1630),
a German missionary in China — and
bemoans the lack of carts and proper roads for them in Korea as one of the main
reasons that many people remain impoverished. We get a sense of just how much
importance Pak ascribes to carts when he says that "nothing is more
valuable to a country than carts," describing them as "boats on land." According to
Pak, the key to making proper carts is to ensure that the wheels are perfectly
round and to determine the correct spacing between the wheels, the axles and
the body of the cart itself to prevent them from bumping into each other,
reducing the cart's effectiveness. Pak tells us that the previous feeble
attempts to introduce carts in Korea were stymied by these engineering
difficulties and praises the Chinese for their superior technology in this
area. He goes on to lambast Korean politicians and scholars for using Korea's
rugged, mountainous terrain as an excuse for not laying proper roads for the
widespread use of carts and circulation of goods among different provinces,
citing China's far more extreme variations of terrain as a counterargument. If
China, with its vast stretches of mountainous land, was able to lay down such a
complex network of well-maintained roads, why should a country as small as
Korea and with no more rugged terrain than China not be able to do the same? At
the time when Pak was writing, the various provinces in Korea were not
connected by a proper network of roads, nor were carts widely used, which
resulted in exorbitant costs to circulate specialty goods from each province to
other parts of the country, meaning that only the wealthiest could afford, say,
apples from Chungju or sweet persimmons from Goheung. Lower income people would
be able to afford these products and enrich their lives if the proper
infrastructure for their circulation were established.
Another
example of Pak's ability to look at his own country critically from the
perspective of another culture can be found in his appraisal of the Chinese kang
(캉/炕) bed-stove heating system vs. the Korean ondol
(온돌) floor
heating system. Although he felt that the Korean system was more effective overall
in heating homes, he acknowledged the superiority of the Chinese system in
minimizing heat loss through a clever arrangement of heating pipes. Still one
of the most popular forms of heating in Korean homes even today, the ondol
or gudeul (구들) floor heating system goes back a
long way in Korean history, so for Pak to propose a change to such a
longstanding traditional method of heating demonstrates his willingness to make
improvements where needed, unflinching in the face of tradition or history, as
long as the final outcome was more practical or beneficial.
Finally, there
are also instances where he clearly prefers the way something is done in Korea.
During one of his pildam (필담, "written conversation," see note 1 below) with some
Chinese merchants, Pak asks the merchants about the Chinese education system
and learns that children study the Chinese classics in two stages: first, they
memorize the texts by sound alone through rote repetition of the teacher, and
only after this stage do they finally learn how to read the Chinese characters.
However, not everyone reaches this second stage of the curriculum, so there are
instances where people may be able to recite entire books from the Confucian
canon from memory without being able to read even basic Chinese characters. Pak
tells the merchants that children in Korea — children
from upper class families who had the opportunity to receive an education, that
is — learn both the pronunciation and the meaning of
characters simultaneously, which he feels is a more efficient system. From this
example, we see that Pak is neither unconditionally critical nor complimentary
of Korea; he maintains a balanced view of the pros and cons of both China and
Korea, giving praise where it is due and recommending the adoption of
improvements where possible.
The reforms
proposed by Pak have become so commonplace today that it rarely occurs to us
that there was a time when houses were not made of perfectly interlocking,
insulated bricks (with running water and electricity, to boot) and fruits and
vegetables of every variety imaginable were not available year-round. At first
glance, it can be easy to overlook the almost revolutionary significance of
proposing such changes in late-Joseon Korea, but as we learned from a brief
look at the political and social climate in Korea in the 1780s, suggesting such
reforms modeled on a dynasty that was so widely disdained by Koreans at the
time would have been viewed with great suspicion, and unfortunately for the
average Korean person of Pak's time, these suggestions were almost completely
ignored in favour of maintaining the status quo.
Unfortunately,
no complete edition of the Jehol Diary exists in English yet — a few chapters have been
translated by Dr Yang Hi Choe-Wall and published by Brill — but I hope that this post stirs the interest of potential readers
and conveys at least a sense of the book and its importance in Korean
literature and history, as well as its relevance in our time. Even today, or
perhaps especially today, when we are all more connected than ever before,
there is still much that we can learn from Pak's open-minded attitude toward
other cultures, his boundless curiosity, and his willingness to take risks in
the hope of changing his country for the better.
Notes:
1) It would
be more accurate to say "write" than "speak" since 박지원 did not actually speak
Chinese but was able to read and write it fluently like most educated Koreans
of the Joseon dynasty and carried on conversations by means of pildam (필담/筆談) or "written conversations" where
participants would exchange written messages instead of speaking — a sort of in-person real-time version of texting today. However, not
everyone Pak encountered was able to read and write Chinese characters —
a skill requiring years of intensive training to master even
for native speakers of Chinese languages. Occasionally, when Pak would show
someone a written message in an attempt to initiate a conversation, the person
would squint at the characters with a look of incomprehension and walk away.
