ACTA KOREANA Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020: 49–78 doi: 10.18399/acta.2020.23.2.003

Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative: From a Withered Tree to the Qing Imperial Narrative

ZHIJUN REN

This paper examines a seemingly insignificant subject – a withered tree in a Chinese county. From 1712, it became a persistent subject in Chosŏn travelogues, or yŏnhaengnok 燕行錄. It loomed large in Chosŏn travelogues because, as an outlet of Chosŏn anti-Qing sentiment, the tree was believed to prophesize the predestined downfall of Qing rule. The case of this ordinary object shows that Chosŏn writers’ perception of the Qing landscape was not restricted to their immediate observations but was deeply entwined with beliefs that were prevalent in Chosŏn. The withered tree, a ubiquitous subject in yŏnhaengnok, was completely omitted from the Qing imperial narrative, which was compiled in the comprehensive gazetteers of the empire and local gazetteers. How Chosŏn writers chose to write on Qing localities and landscapes was independent from the imperatives of the Qing imperial narrative, which was sponsored by and in turn endorsed the Qing empire-building process. The parallel relationship between the two narratives allows us to see yŏnhaengnok as fitting into a broader production of narratives in early modern East Asia.

Keywords: yŏnhaengnok, Qing imperial narrative, empire, travel, Chosŏn-Qing relations

ZHIJUN REN ([email protected]) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. * The author is deeply grateful to Professor Lee Kang Hahn of the Academy of Korean Studies and Professor Koo Bum Jin of the Seoul National University for their guidance and encouragement. Without the financial and archival supports from the Kyujanggak junior fellowship, the Academy of Korean Studies graduate fellowship, and the Yuelu Academy, this paper could never have come to fruition. The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their deep and profound comments and Professor Joshua Van Lieu for his patient and meticulous editorial efforts. 50 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020

亭亭獨樹四時枯 Gracefully the tree stands alone, withered throughout the seasons, 留待河清不肯敷 Longing for the purity of the Yellow River, it refuses to flourish. 慚愧人心百年死 How shameful that human will should fail after one hundred years, 中原孰有徯來蘓 Who else in the central plain waits in hope for the coming new leaves. Yi Chŏngsu 李鼎受 (1742-1804)

Introduction

Between 1644 and 1894, Korean missions filled the roadways from Seoul to Beijing. A one- way trip took six months, so it is likely that two missions would have passed each other on their journey.1 For more than two centuries, Chosŏn scholar-officials traveled over the same route to fulfill the same purposes – diplomacy and trade with the Qing Empire. These intensive travels generated rich travel accounts and abundant observations on the Qing Empire. Chosŏn travelers created hundreds, if not thousands, of travelogues that have become collectively known as yŏnhaengnok (Records of the journey to Beijing, 燕行錄). Members of the Chosŏn missions included text and images of many kinds, primarily diaries and poems but also prose, records of conversations, tracts on geography and local customs, maps, and paintings to form the unique genre of yŏnhaengnok. They were at the same time travel writings and official reports that fulfilled the purposes of both recording personal memories and collecting intelligence. Chosŏn intellectuals’ travel accounts intriguingly combined keen observations and inimical misconceptions, expressing at the same time their admiration of Qing achievements and abhorrence of perceived Manchu barbarism. Some offered sagacious observations, while some left rather murky – even inaccurate – impressions of their journey to the Qing Empire. Most importantly, however, these travelogues revealed how the journey to Beijing reoriented Korean perceptions of the Qing Empire and the Chosŏn relationship with it. Among the myriad novelties that Chosŏn travelers encountered on their way to Beijing, many fixed their gaze on a withered tree – the subject of the above-cited poem – and consistently wrote about it for more than a century. The withered tree was a landscape feature of neither geographical nor historical significance. It loomed large in the Chosŏn travelogues because, as an outlet of anti-Qing sentiment, Chosŏn travelers believed the tree prophesized the predestined downfall of Qing rule. This ordinary tree became a landmark in the narratives of Chosŏn writers. Their views on the tree were inconsistent: some believed in the myth and faithfully reproduced it, some took the tree as part of an ordinary landscape, and some earnestly inquired into it but remained skeptical. What consistently underpinned their writings about the tree, however, was the anxieties manifest in Chosŏn-Qing relations. The Qing imperial narrative – constituted in both the comprehensive gazetteers of the empire and local gazetteers – delineated the historical and geographical boundaries of

1 Tae Joon Kim, Korean Travel Literature (Seoul: Ehwa Womans University Press, 2006), 118. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 51 the Qing imperium. Strikingly, the withered tree, a ubiquitous subject in yŏnhaengnok, was completely absent in the Qing imperial narrative. In a way, yŏnhaengnok indeed served as a reservoir of what the Chinese found too trivial to record, yet more significantly, the tenacious accentuation of the withered tree in Chosŏn writings and its elision in the Qing imperial narrative reveal a great divergence in the formulation of the respective narratives. Although yŏnhaengnok and Qing imperial narratives both attempted to describe the Qing Empire, Chosŏn writers did so from outside the Qing imperial narrative. As personal accounts of foreign travelers, yŏnhaengnok were neither subject to nor embedded in Qing. While the need for imperial legitimation and insular local concerns colored Qing comprehensive and local gazetteers, the need for Chosŏn to locate itself in relation to the Qing influenced the geographical knowledge featured in yŏnhaengnok. As Chosŏn emissaries traveled through the Qing landscape, locales only acquired meaning through association with particular Chosŏn preoccupations. In other words, they realigned Qing geography in accordance with a Chosŏn worldview, appropriated it into a Chosŏn cultural system, and thereby domesticated it. Yŏnhaengnok describe to their readers Qing politics and culture as Chosŏn visitors observed them. Such observations were profound reflections on Chosŏn diplomatic, political, and discursive positions in the contemporary world-space of East Asia. Thus, Chosŏn travelers’ observations involved not only evolving reconsiderations of Chosŏn-Qing relations, but more broadly a reconceptualization of Chosŏn’s place in the regional order of early modern East Asia.

Foretelling the Barbarian’s Fortune

The Qing forced Chosŏn into a tributary relationship with the 1627 and 1636 Manchu invasions. In addition to a reluctant tributary relationship under duress, the humiliating defeats left a memory of bloodshed that remained for centuries, and added profound animosity to the already hostile Chosŏn view of the Manchus. From the beginning of its tributary relationship with the Qing, Chosŏn actively sought revenge and collected any signs that presumably portended the Manchu downfall. The advocacy of vengeance, promoted by Song Siyŏl 宋時烈 (1607-1689) and endorsed by King Hyojong 孝宗 (r. 1649-1659), coalesced into the “Northern Expedition Doctrine” (pukpŏllon 北伐論). The proactive preparation for a military campaign faded, however, and the Chosŏn court eventually discarded it after the death of King Hyojong in 1659. On the other hand, seeking signs of Manchu downfall remained in Chosŏn consciousness for a much longer time. It was an inveterate belief that the Manchus, as non-Han frontier barbarians, could not sustain a legitimate regime for more than one hundred years (胡虜無 百年之運). This notion of the inherent doom of non-Han regimes litters the writings of the literati during the Song dynasty (宋 960-1279), when the Han Chinese regime constantly faced vital threats from the surrounding Khitan Liao (遼 907-1125) and Jurchen Jin (金 1115-1234) dynasties, both frontier nomadic nations. This theory first found its official expression in Zhu 52 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020

Yuanzhang’s (r. 1368-1398) call to arms against the Mongol Yuan (1271-1368). In 1367, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (明1368-1644) was marching to northern China when he asserted that “judged by the current situation, the ancient saying that barbarian fortune could not exceed one hundred years is indeed credible” and called upon the northerners to “expel the barbarian and restore China (驅逐胡虜恢復中華).”2 Taking this ex post facto prediction literally, Chosŏn intellectuals fervently anticipated the collapse of the Qing Empire within one hundred years of its founding in 1636, on the basis that the Jurchen Jin (1125-1234) and Mongol Yuan (1271-1368) conquests had survived for only about one hundred years.3 The Chosŏn court believed that the Manchu Qing, like other alien regimes in China, was nothing but a temporary and abnormal deviation from the righteous course sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. Such deviations were destined to be transient, and hence could not last any longer than a hundred years. The belief in the Qing’s collapse within one hundred years found its expression in prose and poetry as well as in political discussions in the late Chosŏn court.4 As Chosŏn anticipated the collapse of Qing, it also anxiously prepared to forestall any possible disturbance in the case of a Qing withdrawal from China. The Chosŏn court believed that as the Manchus would ultimately lose their grip over China proper, they would have to return to their homeland in Manchuria, in particular, the region of Ningguta 寧古 塔. In the event of a Manchu retreat, turmoil would inevitably spill over onto Chosŏn soil; the collapse of Qing domination in China would be an intractable catastrophe for Chosŏn. Between 1677 and 1712, investigations of the Qing-Chosŏn border around Changbaishan/ Paektusan 長白山/白頭山 initiated by the Kangxi Emperor (康熙 r. 1661-1722) crystalized Chosŏn speculative concerns into a presumably concrete threat that resulted in the Chosŏn court oscillating between anticipation and anxiety.5 Before 1712, the Kangxi Emperor had initiated three investigations to determine the situation on the Qing-Chosŏn border and dispatched surveyors to Chosŏn. None of these attempts yielded substantial results, partly due to Chosŏn prevarication. The emperor ordered Mukedeng 穆克登 (1664-1735), the Butha Ula superintendent (打牲烏拉總管), to lead the fourth and fifth investigations in 1710 and 1712. An imperial edict was issued to King Sukchong 肅宗 (r. 1674-1720) demanding Chosŏn assistance in these surveys.6 The emperor sought to gather information for the compilation of The Unified Gazetteer of the Great Qing (Daqing yitongzhi 大清一統志). The Qing court carried out similar cartographical projects in other regions with the aid of Jesuit missionaries.7

2 Ming taizu shilu, Hongwu 2.10.30. 3 Fang Chenghua, “Yidi wu bainian zhi yun: yunshulun yu yixiaguan de fenxi,” Taida lishi xuebao 60 (December 2017): 159-191. 4 Gui Tao, “Lun huwu bainian zhi yun: 17, 18 shiji Chaoxian shiren renshi qingchao de jiben kuangjia jiqi wajie,” Shilin no. 1 (2019): 79-88. 5 Pae Usŏng. Chosŏn kwa Chunghwa (P’aju: Tolbegae, 2014), 195-256. 6 Seonmin Kim, Ginseng and Borderland: Territorial Boundaries and Political Relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, 1636-1912 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 47-75. 7 Cordell D. K. Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization,” in The History of Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 53

The Chosŏn court, however, readily interpreted the intention of the Kangxi Emperor as a part of the Qing plan to retreat. Naturally, the Chosŏn court had been suspicious and reluctant to cooperate since the earlier surveys, and by 1691, was deeply concerned by Manchu intentions. As a result, King Sukchong repeatedly solicited advice. In response to the royal enquiry, Yi Hyŏnil 李玄逸 (1627-1704) complained:

If the Manchus only needed geographical information for compilation of the Unified Gazetteer, it would have been simple and convenient for us to delegate an investigation and chart a map. Why would Qing take the trouble of sending five or six emissaries and subject them to the risks and impediments of foreign lands? There must be a menace in their western region and they are digging three holes for their burrow like a wily hare. They must be deceiving us with devious pretexts.

彼若欲知山河形勢纂修一統志而已則不過分付我國委官審視作爲圖畫使之奏聞甚易且便何至煩 使者五六人周行外國封疆經涉險阻乎彼必西有深患故爲兎營三窟之計而詭言以欺我也8

The early eighteenth century witnessed the first golden age of the Qing Empire since its founding in 1636. The Kangxi Emperor defeated the Three Feudatories Revolt in 1681, recovered Taiwan from Ming loyalist forces in 1683, and subjugated the Dzungar Khanate in 1696. By the time of Mukedeng’s investigation in 1712, the Qing Empire was territorially secure and politically consolidated, and indeed deserved an empire-wide gazetteer for its “great unification” 大一統 ( ). News of Qing military victories, however, did not stop the Chosŏn court from speculating on the doom of the Manchu regime. Yi Kwangjwa 李光佐 (1674-1740), secretary of the Personnel Ministry, strongly opposed Mukedeng’s mission in a court discussion:

It is said that a barbarian regime cannot last more than one hundred years. Over the past few decades, Qing has treated us exceptionally well, even going so far as to reduce tribute. There must be a reason for their kindness. After dwelling in the middle land for a hundred years, the Manchus are now accustomed to the extravagance of embroidered silks and meat delicacies in China; it would be hard to endure if they had to return to their deserted northern homeland. In their doomed decay, if they gradually retreat they will exact from us everything from products like fish and salt to lands, but in a sudden pullback they will take the route of our northwestern region.

吏曹參議李光佐尤力言曰語云胡無百年之運彼數十年內待我過厚至於減貢者必有其故蓋百年中 土狃於錦繡梁肉一朝還歸漠北勢必難堪早晩敗歸時緩則欲自魚鹽物産以至土地民人無不取資於

Cartography, vol. 2, book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 179-186. 8 Chosŏn wangjo sillok: Sukchong sillok, Sukchong 18.1.mujin. 54 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020

我急則欲取路於我西北9

Yi cogently brought together the contrary Chosŏn sentiments of anticipation and fearful concern, which found expression in the two prevalent views of the Qing: “The barbarian regime cannot exceed one hundred years” and “The Qing return to Ningguta 寧古塔敗歸” and the potential crisis that would ultimately emanate from their collapse. These beliefs became a principle that guided Chosŏn observation of the Qing. Travelers to Beijing purposefully collected news about natural disasters and local disturbances to support their expectations of imminent Qing downfall. These shreds of evidence, in turn, shaped Chosŏn relations with the Qing. It was with this ambivalence that Chosŏn travelers to Beijing turned their gaze to the withered tree, which attained unusual significance and received persistent attention in yŏnhaengnok.

The Case of the Withered Tree in Chosŏn Travel Writings

The Chosŏn court dispatched tributary missions to Beijing from 1644, when the Qing moved the capital from Shenyang to Beijing, until 1894, the final year of the tributary relationship. Chosŏn missions traveled along a preset route through what is now Liaoning and Hebei provinces to their destination of Beijing. Chosŏn envoys subjected Qing landscapes to symbolic readings in yŏnhaengnok. Their production of narratives on Qing geography was profoundly entangled with anticipations and beliefs that then permeated Chosŏn. In this way, they incorporated features of the landscape and folklore into Chosŏn expectations of the Qing downfall. The repeated journeys constituted an itinerant contact zone that, among other encounters, brought Chosŏn travelers into contact with renowned scenery, natural spectacles, and sites of historical relics. Chosŏn travelers always made lists of such places of magnificent grandeur (zhuangguan 壯觀). They were always astounded by the imperial palaces, temples, and churches in Beijing, the thriving markets and ports in Chinese metropolises, the boundless wilderness of the Liaodong Plain, the bridges and pavilions that adorned mountain views, and the Shanhai Pass (Shanhaiguan 山海關) of the Great Wall, which symbolically demarcated civilized realms and barbaric lands.10 Among these awe-inspiring man-made wonders and natural splendors stood a withered tree in Yutian County (玉田縣), which was a seemingly unexceptional place known only to a handful of locals. Yet it absorbed Chosŏn travelers’ enthusiastic attention and remained a constant subject in Chosŏn travelogues from at least 1712. Chosŏn envoys paid frequent visits to the site, and expended much ink on poetry and

9 Chosŏn wangjo sillok, Sukchong sillok, Sukchong 38.2.kyŏngjin. 10 Sin T’aehŭi. Kukyŏk pukkyŏngnok (Sŏul: Sejong Taewang Kinyŏm Saŏphoe, 2018), 16; Kim Ch’angŏp, “Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 32, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 336-337; Pak Chiwŏn, “Yŏrha Ilgi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 32, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 449-450. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 55 prose devoted to it. On their route, right next to the withered tree, was a misty forest near Jizhou (Jimen yanshu 薊門煙樹), one of the celebrated “Eight Scenic Views of Beijing (yanjing ba jing 燕京八景).” However, being geographically adjacent to a famous attraction did not cause the ordinary tree to pale in comparison in the Korean literary reconstruction of the Qing landscape. Before 1712, the withered tree and the nearby villages named after it were nothing but ordinary places that lay along Chosŏn travelers’ route to Beijing. While most writers mentioned passing through Withered Tree Village (Kushudian 枯樹店), very few spotted the withered tree itself. Even for those few who noticed the tree, they did not associate it with any particular meaning. Min Chinwŏn 閔鎭遠 (1664-1736) recorded the first full account of the tree and its myth as he traveled to Beijing in May 1712. In Shenyang, Min’s mission came across the aforementioned Mukedeng mission heading to the Qing-Chosŏn border near Changbaishan/ Paektusan.11 He sent a translator to enquire about Mukedeng’s date of departure. Upon their return to Seoul, the chief envoy Pak P’ilsŏng 朴弼成 (1652-1747) reported their brief encounter with Mukedeng in Shenyang.12 Personally encountering Mukedeng’s survey team, a source of worrisome irritation to the Chosŏn court, must have dredged up the anxiety that was prevalent in Chosŏn at the time and reinforced Min’s preoccupation with the impending threat of the Qing. It was with this profound sense of crisis that he first learned about the mystical withered tree from a military escort who had traveled between Seoul and Beijing a dozen times and was familiar with the route. Min recorded the belief that the tree had wilted after the Manchu conquest. When the tree regenerated, the locals believed, a true man (zhenren 真人) would emerge and lead a rebellion against the Manchu and found in Yutian a stronghold for the campaign (傳此木復生則真人當出而真人出則當定鼎於此地).13 The tree had been flourishing for three years by the time Min saw it. Min found, to his disappointment, that it was unlikely that any revolt or disturbance could erupt from Yutian because the tax burden was light and the locals lived free of grievance toward the Qing government. Yet Min refused to relinquish the tree as a valid indicator of Qing imperial fortune. He added that the widespread bribery and corruption in the Qing court might ultimately bring about the demise of the dynasty as the withered tree had foretold.14 Associating a tree with a dynasty’s predestination was not unprecedented among Chosŏn

11 Min Chinwŏn, “Yŏnhaeng ilgi” in Hanguo hanwen yanxing wenxian xuanbian, vol. 11, eds. Ge Zhaoguang and Xin Chengyun (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe, 2011), 57. 12 Chosŏn wangjo sillok, Sukchong 38.7.chŏngmi. 13 The term zhenren 真人 is sometimes rendered as “perfect master,” and it carries a religious connotation of self- cultivation and genuine enlightenment. In the immediate context of Min’s account, however, zhenren clearly denoted a legitimate leader in the political sense. In Ming and Qing times, Zhili Province fostered many popular religious sects, which indoctrinated their adherents with anti-Manchu rhetoric. While there is a possibility that the tree’s prophetic myth was first disseminated by the dissenting folk sects in Zhili, the Chosŏn writers clearly did not associate the tree with any local cult. They postulated that the tree in alignment with the orthodox Confucian reference framework of signs and omens portended heavenly will. 14 Min Chinwŏn, “Yŏnhaeng ilgi,” 81-82. 56 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 writers. One year before T’aejo Yi Sŏnggye 李成桂 (r.1392-1398) founded the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392, a tree in Ŭiju 宜州 (now Wŏnsan 元山) regenerated after being withered and decayed for years. Yi’s ancestor Yi Ansa 李安社 once served as a military commander in Ŭiju. Among a series of uncanny phenomena that occurred before Yi Sŏnggye ascended to the throne, people at the time believed that the regenerated tree was an omen that portended the founding of a new dynasty. The Chosŏn state duly recorded this tree in Ŭiju in court records and thereafter integrated it into the narrative of the Chosŏn founding legend to endorse the legitimacy of the new dynasty as having received the mandate of heaven.15 The precedent of the Ŭiju tree and its orthodox status in Chosŏn official documentation likely facilitated Chosŏn travelers’ acceptance of the prophetic power of trees. Nonetheless, in the case of the withered tree of Yutian, 1712 was a crucial juncture at which the withered tree entered the Chosŏn narrative. At this time, apprehension of the Qing in Chosŏn politics and diplomacy and the circulation of information from a military escort to a yangban 兩班 scholar-official combined to imbue the tree with significance. This local legend appeared for the first time in a yŏnhaengnok and developed in the Chosŏn travel experience over the next 176 years. The myth of the withered tree was spreading when Min returned to Seoul on August 27, 1712. What Min had heard in Yutian immediately provided a concrete indication of the presumed Qing downfall and burnished Chosŏn anticipation. In the same year, Kim Ch’angŏp 金昌業 (1658-1721) departed Seoul on November 30 to journey to Beijing. Within this short time, the legend of the withered tree had already circulated among the Chosŏn literati. Before Ch’angŏp’s departure, his brother Kim Ch’anghŭp 金昌翕 (1653-1722) wrote him a series of farewell poems, one of which invoked the withered tree:

路傍叢木何太靈 How efficaciously predictive is the bushing tree on the roadside! 一枯一榮歲幾更 Withering and thriving as years pass by. 黃河淸濁同符應 The Yellow River runs clean or silted, omens of things to come, 眞人消息又荑生 The tidings of a true man once more sprout anew. 使車經過試一憇 Rest your carriage when you travel through, 莫敎胡兒折其榮 Do not allow the barbarian [Manchu] prune its glory.16

With the legend Min Chinwŏn had brought back from China in mind, Ch’anghŭp urged Ch’angŏp to make closer scrutiny of the tree. In his Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi (老稼齋燕行日記, 1712), Kim Ch’angŏp stated that he arrived at the site of the tree on January 20, 1713, and explicitly cited Min and reiterated his account of the myth and, as his brother had advised, sent a servant to retrieve a branch from the tree. The branch indeed seemed alive to Kim, but he refused to draw any definite conclusion because he doubted whether the servant had really retrieved the branch from the actual withered tree.17 In searching for visible manifestations

15 宜州有大樹枯朽累年先開國一年復條達敷榮時人以爲開國之兆. See Chosŏn wangjo sillok: T’aejo sillok, T’aejo 1.7.pyŏngsin. 16 Kim Ch’anghŭp, “Samyŏnjip,” in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 165 (Sŏul: Minjok Munhwa Ch’ujinhoe, 1999), 229. 17 Kim Ch’angŏp, “Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi,” 522-523. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 57 of the predestined hundred-year limitation on Qing rule, Chosŏn writers found in the withered tree salient evidence of the looming downfall of the Qing Empire, a development of immediate concern to Chosŏn security. Yi Kigyŏng’s 李基敬 (1713-?) 1755 account explicitly identified the source of his knowledge and illuminated the genealogy of the tree myth in Chosŏn travelogues. Like many other Chosŏn travel writers, Yi first encountered the mystical tree in the writings of the Kim brothers – Ch’anghŭp’s farewell poem and Ch’angŏp’s diary Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi – who in turn referred to Min Chinwŏn. Kim Kyŏngsŏn 金景善 (1788-1853), who went to Beijing in 1832, quoted Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi on the withered tree. In the preface to his travelogue Yŏnwŏn chikchi (燕轅直指), Kim Kyŏngsŏn exalted Kim Ch’angŏp’s Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi, along with Hong Taeyong’s (洪大容, 1731-1783) Tamhŏn yŏn’gi (湛軒燕記, 1766) and Pak Chiwŏn’s 朴趾 源 (1737-1805) Yŏrha ilgi (熱河日記, 1780), as the most outstanding writings in the genre of yŏnhaengnok.18 Being the first yŏnhaengnok that provided insightful observations and abundant details of the Beijing journey, Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi was frequently used by later travelers as a guidebook and remained the most cited work in later travelogues. Kim Kyŏngsŏn himself cited Kim Ch’angŏp copiously and compared his information with the Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi to the extent that his writing in Yŏnwŏn chikchi is filled with the phrase “Kajae said …” (稼齋雲), “Kajae” being Kim Ch’angŏp’s style name.19 Given the popularity of Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi, it is not unreasonable to assume that most later Chosŏn writers first learned about the withered tree by reading Kim Ch’angŏp. The Yŏnhaengnok travelogues – the majority in the form of diaries – were private in terms of their production. However, their circulation among Chosŏn scholar-officials made such travel records part of a shared experience and knowledge. The myth of the withered tree thence began its circulation among Chosŏn travelers, and tree-spotting became common practice among Chosŏn travelers en route to Beijing. Throughout most of the Qing-Chosŏn tributary relationship, the restricted mobility and frequency of Chosŏn emissaries traveling to China, as well as political protocols, confined them to a preset route that extended for 2049 li, divided into 40 stops over an average of 28 days. The route was slightly altered in 1679, but for the most part, the itinerary remained practically unchanged during the Qing dynasty.20 When Chosŏn travelers embarked on the journey to Beijing, they were following in the footsteps of thousands of their predecessors.21 Likewise, Chosŏn travelers tended to read the same yŏnhaengnok, see the same views, pay attention to the same things, and even talk to the same groups of people. The repetitiveness of the travel experience made the reinforcement of knowledge feasible, later accounts often

18 Kim Kyŏngsŏn, “Yŏnwŏn chikchi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 70, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 246. 19 For example, see Kim Kyŏngsŏn, “Yŏnwŏn chikchi,” 343, 353, 373, 377. 20 Kim Chinam, ed., T’ongmun’gwan chi (Sŏul: Sŏul Taehakkyo Kyujanggak Han’gukhak Yŏn’guwŏn, 2006), 3: 34b-35a. 21 Hae-Jong Chun, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations in the Ch’ing Period,” in The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, ed. John King Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 100. 58 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 reusing information and routinely citing previous writers. Their discoveries in the Qing Empire were thus not in any way unique, but conditioned by the transgenerational accumulation of existing experiences assembled in the writings of their predecessors, and further enhanced by their own writings.22 While the repetition elevated the fame of the withered tree and made it a must-see, this narrative ubiquity did not yield a corresponding narrative conformity among Chosŏn writers. Despite the common origin of information going back to Min Chinwŏn and Kim Ch’angŏp, the image and myth of the withered tree as recorded in yŏnhaengnok were characterized by variations and distinctive interpretations. In fact, the tree myth had already bifurcated at the moment of its incorporation into the yŏnhaengnok travelogues. Ch’oe Tŏkchung 崔德中 (1675-1754) was part of the same mission as Kim Ch’angŏp. As Ch’oe saw it, the tree was thriving and far from sapless, but he was less enthusiastic in associating the regenerating tree with the prophecy of a true king leading a rebellion. Ch’oe agreed with Kim that the growing and falling of leaves reflected epochal trends of prosperity and decay, but concluded that the tree was too far away to allow any close observation.23 While Min Chinwŏn and Kim Ch’angŏp ascribed an unmistakably anti-Manchu prediction of the downfall of the Qing Empire to the tree, later developments defy any simple characterization. Textual knowledge of the tree circulated among Chosŏn scholar- officials through earlier yŏnhaengnok and experiential knowledge derived from observations and myths acquired while traveling. The constant interaction between the two kinds of knowledge produced fluid images of the withered tree. The writing of yŏnhaengnok was a process of collection, organization, expansion, and reproduction. For this reason, some later accounts completely overlooked the works left by Min and Kim; the image of the withered tree and the myth attached to it necessarily departed from their 1712 origin. As such, later accounts were contingent on contemporaneous information available to the writers. By the time Yi Kiji 李器之 (1690-1722) traveled to Beijing in 1720, the myth of the withered tree had become so pervasive among the Chosŏn missions to Beijing that travelers “always took a branch to examine the life and death of the tree.” Yi’s record built on ideas from Min and Kim but diverged from them. He identified the tree as a Chinese scholar tree (koesu 槐樹) and found it so luxuriant that he described the foliage of the tree as resembling a gigantic canopy. He reasoned that the Chosŏn missions usually passed the withered tree in late winter and thus found it seasonally defoliated. Yi also learned from the locals that the correct name for the tree was not “Withered Tree” (Kushu 枯樹) but “Lone Tree” (Gushu 孤 樹).24 Chosŏn travelers were confused by the subtle difference in the Chinese pronunciation

22 Fuma Susumu. “Nihon genson Chōsen enkōroku kaidai,” Kyōto daigaku bungakubu kenkyū kiyō 42 (2003): 127- 238; Ge Zhaoguang. Xiangxiang yiyu: du lichao Chaoxian hanwen yanxing wenxian zhaji (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2014), 23-24. 23 Ch’oe Tŏkchung, “Yŏnhaengnok,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 39, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 498. 24 Yi Kiji, “Iram yŏn’gi,” in Yŏnhaengnok sokchip, vol. 111, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Sangsŏwŏn, 2008), 49-50. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 59 of ku and gu. Yi’s phonological clarification was echoed in other travel writings.25 Poetry on the withered tree limited the descriptive potency of the Chosŏn writers’ narrative. The requirement of rhyme and couplets allowed little space for them to elaborate on the tree myth but brought to the fore their expectancy of receding Manchu fortunes and the restoration of righteous Ming rule. Kim Chosun 金祖淳 (1765-1832) wrote in 1792:

生死榮枯暗自知 Alive or dead, wilted or exuberant, the tree knows all inwardly to itself. 山頭孤立待阿誰 Standing alone on a mountaintop, for whom is it waiting? 他年若有重經日 If ever I travel through here again, 會見靑靑葉滿枝 Surely in sight will be its lush branches covered in dense green leaves.26

While some accounts essentially conformed to Min Chinwŏn’s depiction of the original myth, others deviated from it. Hwang Chŏng 黃晸 (1689-1752), who made the journey to Beijing in 1723, provided another version of the myth, in which the locals forecast the annual yield of crops based on the health of the tree.27 Hwang Chae 黃梓 (1689-?) traveled to Beijing in 1734 and reconfirmed the function of the tree as a prediction, not of the rise of a true king, but of abundant or lean years. He added that according to locals, a merchant from Nanjing, after a devastating failure in his investment, transformed into the withered tree, which bled when chopped. The locals worshipped the tree as an uncanny portent.28 Presumably influenced by Hwang Chae’s tale of the Nanjing merchant, Yun Kŭp 尹汲 (1697-1770) also mentioned that someone from Nanjing came to pray to the tree, begging for its leaves to grow.29 In these accounts, the withered tree was no longer a prophet of dynastic predestination but rather a mundane indicator of the seasonal harvest and commercial fortune. As the tale of the withered tree evolved through several generations of Chosŏn travel writings, it acquired a unanimous form by drawing upon a range of sources. Variations in individual observations and the repetition of collective experiences combined to form the narrative of the withered tree. Sin T’aehŭi 申泰羲 (1800-1850) and Hong Sŏngmo 洪錫 謨 (1781-1857) traveled to Beijing together in 1826. The similarity between their accounts illuminates how knowledge from the past and immediate observation were both at play in formulating individual accounts. Sin and Hong both reiterated the “true king” prophecy and traced it back to Kim Ch’angŏp.30 Hong was more interested in the botanic traits of the tree and noticed it was “as thick as a pillar and perhaps 10-13 meters high (體大如柱長可三四丈).” Sin and Hong retrieved a branch from the tree and both commented that its fruit resembled

25 See, for example, Yi Kiji, “Iram yŏn’gi”; and Hwang Chae, Kukyŏk kabin yŏnhaengnok (Sŏul: Sejong Taewang Kinyŏm Saŏphoe, 2015), 53. 26 Kim Chosun, “P’unggojip,” in Han’guk Munjip Ch’onggan, vol. 289 (Sŏul: Minjok Munhwa Ch’ujinhoe, 1999), 289: 19. 27 Hwang Chŏng, “Kyemyo yŏnhaengnok,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 37, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 277. 28 Hwang Chae. Kukyŏk kabin yŏnhaengnok, 53. 29 Yun Kŭp, “Yŏnhaeng ilgi,” in Yŏnhaengnok sokchip, vol. 115, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Sangsŏwŏn, 2008), 499. 30 Sin T’aehŭi, Kugyŏk pukkyŏngnok, 71-72. 60 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 the shape of a pea pod and bean, and the broken branch looked quite alive for it was moist with sap.31 Other writers remained skeptical of the myth. Both O Chaeso 吳載紹 (1729-1811), who traveled to Beijing in 1801, and Yi Myŏn’gu 李冕九, who traveled there in 1855, found the myth improbable. O acknowledged that the Manchus believed that this tree foretold the Qing’s divine fortune, but concluded that the myth was preposterous (荒誕不足信也).32 Like Hwang Chŏng and Hwang Chae, Yi Myŏn’gu elided the true king myth and only linked the tree with worldly trends. He wrote that the tree would flower again in a prosperous and peaceful age. He also dismissed the myth as “unfounded tittle-tattle (齊東野說).”33 It is noteworthy that even when O and Yi rejected the tree myth and its predictive power, they were still compelled by what had become a convention in the Chosŏn travel experience and found it necessary to mention the tree. Sŏ Kyŏngsun 徐慶淳 (1803-1859) made the journey to Beijing with Yi Myŏn’gu in 1855. His account explicitly related the seasonal change of the withered tree to the dynastical cycle in China. He cited a view that the tree was planted during the Southern Song dynasty and became sapless under the Mongol Yuan. It regenerated during the “majestic Ming,” and only withered again when the Manchus conquered China (樹自汴宋有之而元時始枯至皇明枝葉更爲 發榮及淸入中國枝葉再枯).34 The pattern of thriving and perishing coincided with the wax and wane of dynasties. The juxtaposition of the life cycle of the tree and dynastic cycles implied the illegitimacy of conquest dynasties like the Yuan and Qing. Sŏ’s version hence erected the withered tree as a symbol of suspended and negated imperial legitimacy of the Qing empire. Chosŏn travelers’ initial interest in the withered tree was triggered by the competing sentiments of earnest desire for the Qing’s fall and anxiety about its consequences. By the time Sŏ Kyŏngsun anchored in the withered tree his hope for the restoration of a civilized world order, the Qing had long surpassed its supposed imperial threshold of one-hundred years. As early as 1752, a decade after the predicted downfall of the Qing, King Yŏngjo (r. 1724-1776) had already abandoned the belief when in discussion with his ministers, he said:

… ancient texts say that “barbarian fortune could not sustain a hundred years.” Then how do we explain the barbarian’s fortune [that is still in prosperity after one hundred years]? “It would be better to be without the Book of Documents than to give it unconditional credence.”

古書云胡運不滿百年而今胡之運何如是也盡信書不如無書35

31 Hong Sŏngmo, Ttalbit arae yŏn’gyŏng esŏ nonilmyŏ (Taejŏn: Munjin, 2010), 45. 32 O Chaeso, “Yŏnhaengnok ilgi,” in Yŏnhaengnok sokchip, vol. 121, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Sangsŏwŏn, 2008), 346. 33 Yi Myŏn’gu, “Such’arok,” in Yŏnhaengnok ch’onggan, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Nuri Midiŏ, 2016), 71-72. 34 Sŏ Kyŏngsun, “Monggyŏngdang ilsa,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 94, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 294. 35 Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, Kŏnyung 17.10.5. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 61

Yŏngjo’s semi-official rejection partly released the Chosŏn mindset from the dichotomy of anticipation and anxiety. However, even when the hundred-year belief ceased to perturb the Chosŏn scholar-officials as profoundly as it had in 1712, the withered tree did not lose its place in yŏnhaengnok. Once Chosŏn scholar-officials’ learned of the withered tree in association with the hundred-year prophecy, the basic description of the tree set by Min Chinwŏn and Kim Ch’angŏp remained an instrumental force shaping later accounts, which still adhered to the original myth even when the circumstances Min and Kim faced in 1712 were no longer relevant to Chosŏn. The symbiosis of anticipation and anxiety exerted a physiological effect on how Chosŏn positioned itself in relation to the Qing Empire. After more than a century of relations with the Qing, Chosŏn anticipation and anxiety had been reconfigured into a wary sense of a shared fate with the Qing. Out of reluctance, Chosŏn scholar-officials came to recognize that the fate of Chosŏn was bound to that of the Qing Empire. In 1668, envoys returning to Chosŏn from Beijing brought back news that earthquakes in three Qing provinces had led to the death of thousands. At the same time, some Mongol tribes were showing signs of revolt. Chosŏn officials bragged to King Hyŏnjong that the disasters and revolt were both signs of chaos and demise, which attested to the doomed future of the Qing Empire. While this self-congratulatory attitude was prevalent among some, at the same time, it worried others who contended that those who took pleasure in hearing about the Qing’s troubles failed to comprehend that if the Manchus lost their hold over the Mongols, Chosŏn was certain to become the first victim of the ensuing turmoil.36 Such a view was repeatedly expressed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the following paragraphs will attest. In a 1722 court discussion, Yi T’aejwa 李台佐 (1660-1739) unequivocally linked Chosŏn security to the Qing. He told King Kyŏngjong (r. 1720-1725):

The collapse or survival of that country [Qing] seems extraneous to our country, but considering the penchant of worldly trends, our country is only safe when Beijing is secure; and an unsettled Beijing necessarily unsettles our country …. When disorder descends on China, Chosŏn for certain will be entwined.

夫彼國之存亡於我國似若無甚關緊而第以事勢度之燕京安然後我國自安燕京不安則我國從而不 安矣大抵中國有事之日卽我國必受其弊37

Kim Chosun 金祖淳 (1765-1832) echoed Yi’s concern. In a farewell letter, he reminded his friend Yi Sanghwang 李相璜 (1763-1841), who was about to embark on the journey to Beijing in early 1813, that Qing troubles always turned into Chosŏn problems, and whenever China found itself in chaos, Korean suffering always followed (中國有事則吾東輒相終始). How could

36 Chosŏn wangjo sillok: Hyŏnjong sillok, musin.10.muin. 37 Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, Kanghŭi 61.12.1. 62 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020

Chosŏn prepare cautiously during a time of peace and be ready to cope if a crisis erupted (無事則曷以備豫有事則曷以應變)? Kim advised his departing friend that as a Chosŏn envoy, his urgent and arduous duty was to skillfully gain an insight into China’s situation (大夫之 責不其棘於善覘乎).38 Amidst the imminent threat of a British intrusion in southern China, Yu Sinhwan 俞莘煥 (1801-1859) wrote in 1840 that because of its geographical proximity, troubles in China always endangered Korea. Should the Europeans ever take over northern and northeastern China, Korea could not safely stand aloof. Yu further argued that as a result of geographical boundaries and the language barrier, it was difficult for Chosŏn to gather accurate intelligence from Qing (我之與淸疆界殊言語不通所聞易訛). It was thus all the more necessary to gain firsthand knowledge of the Qing situation覘國 ( ).39 While Yi T’aejwa attributed his reasoning to the “penchant of worldly trends,” Sŏng Haeŭng 成海應 (1760-1839) maintained that the Chosŏn predicament vis-a-vis the Qing was historically axiomatic. He drew lessons from the Yuan-Ming and Ming-Qing transitions to show that Korea had always been dragged into upheaval in China.40 Sŏng later suggested that Chosŏn had to watch Qing vigilantly. Observation had to go beyond the conventional and extend to uncommon places such as “the luxurious constructions of palaces and gardens, rare treasures of artistic relics, absurd shapes of shrines and temples, along with the trivial customs of folklore, as well as the war and conquest of the frontier semi-civilized,” for they “all allowed a glimpse into Qing politics and orders (足以觀其政令之所存).”41 Kim Chosun, Yu Sinhwan, and Sŏng Haeŭng all perceived some potential exigencies in involuntary Chosŏn entanglement with the Qing. To stay current with developments in the Qing Empire, Chosŏn scholar-officials anchored their hope in the envoys. For most of its interaction with Ming and Qing, the Chosŏn court only delegated their envoys to present tributes and official documents to the Ministry of Rites and participate in appropriate court ceremonies as set by diplomatic protocols and tributary discourses.42 However, in the general expectation of the envoys, fulfilling these choreographed duties was only a small part of their tasks. Throughout its diplomacy with the Qing, Chosŏn placed much weight on looking into Qing fortunes through unconventional lenses. This was what Kim, Yu, Sŏng, and many other Chosŏn scholar-officials called “peeking into a country” (覘國 Kr. chŏmguk, Ch. changuo). In a sense, chŏmguk is a euphemism for spying and scouting; such “peeking” was intended to extract more intelligence than Qing officials were willing to reveal.43 Yet for the Chosŏn envoys, chŏmguk had a much more intricate and subtle implication. Cho Munmyŏng 趙文命 (1680-1732), who went to Beijing in 1725, so definedchŏmguk :

38 Kim Chosun, “P’unggojip,” 347. 39 Yu Sinhwan, “Pongsŏjip,” in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 312 (Sŏul: Minjok Munhwa Ch’ujinhoe, 1999), 38. 40 Sŏng Haeŭng, “Yŏn’gyŏngjae chŏnjip,” in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 273 (Sŏul: Minjok Munhwa Ch’ujinhoe, 1999), 299. 41 Sŏng Haeŭng, “ Yŏn’gyŏngjae chŏnchip,” 206. 42 Joshua Van Lieu, “Chosŏn-Qing Tributary Discourse: Transgression, Restoration, and Textual Performativity,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 27 (June 2018): 326-363. 43 Son Hyeri, “Sŏng Haeŭng ŭi songsŏ rŭl t’onghae pon kyŏngse ŭisik,” Han’guk sirhak yŏn’gu 36 (December 2018), 713-716; Kim Chongsu, “Sŏgye Pak Sedang ŭi tae-Ch’ŏng ch’ŏmguk ilgo,” Kunsa 70 (April 2009): 103-136. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 63

When ancient envoys returned from a foreign country, some could foresee and speak of things yet to happen in that country. This is called peeking into a country.

古人奉使外國而還者或先言其國未然之事謂之覘國44

In the sense Cho used it, “peeking into a country” suggested identifying potential trends before they materialized into concrete form. To “speak of things yet to happen” meant to give a discernible form to the ineffable and capture the earliest signs of such developments in a foreign country, regardless of how trivial or absurd they could be. Yi Ilche 李日躋 (1683-1757) went to Beijing as a deputy envoy in 1744. When he reported to Yŏngjo upon the completion of his diplomatic task, he remarked that with chŏmguk, one could learn the governance of a country by looking at such trifling matters as “how roads are repaired and trees are planted.” Tree planting and road repairs were indeed revealing to the Chosŏn envoys. Sŏ Hosu 徐浩修 (1736-1799), for example, noted in 1790 that willow trees were commonly planted along the sides of the main highroads throughout the Qing Empire. These willows were meant to provide shade for travelers and mark the location of highroads when rivers flooded. This design had saved many from the blazing sun and floods. However, many Chosŏn envoys twisted the intention and function of the willows and believed they were nothing but extravagant decoration. Sŏ warned that because of the unreliability of chŏmguk, these envoys could not be counted on for diplomatic tasks like “engage in repartee” (覘國若 是焉用彼專對哉).45 The respected sirhak scholar Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762-1836) never served as an envoy to the Qing but maintained that among Chosŏn scholar-officials,chŏmguk was generally expected of envoys. In a farewell letter to his friend Yi Kiyang 李基讓 (1744-1802), who departed for Beijing in 1800, Chŏng articulated his expectations:

In ancient times, scholar-officials who went to a foreign country as envoys could estimate its rites and morality through trifles, and evaluate its law and order through trivialities. Upon these assessments, he could divine the destiny of the country and predict its fortune. This is called “peeking into a country.” Only those outstanding in astuteness and exceling in perception are capable of such peeking.

44 Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, Ongjŏng 1.10.5. 45 Sŏ Hosu, “Yŏnhaenggi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 50: 437. Since the time of Zhou, envoys had been delegated by their kings with the authority to conduct diplomacy as circumscribed by the situation. This is what Confucius called “engage in repartee” (專對 Kr. chŏndae, Ch. zhuandui) and had since then served as a metaphor for diplomacy: “The Master said, ‘Imagine a person who can recite the several hundred odes by heart but, when delegated a governmental task, is unable to carry it out, or when sent abroad as an envoy, is unable to engage in repartee. No matter how many odes he might have memorized, what good are they to him?’” (子曰誦詩三百授之以政不達使於四方不能專對雖多亦奚 以為). Confucius, The Essential Analects: Selected Passages with Traditional Commentary, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 39. 64 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020

古者大夫之使於異國者見一事之小而知其國禮義之敦薄見一物之微而知其國法紀之弛立以之卜 盛衰決興敗是之謂覘國覘國非有明敏睿知出乎其類者不能也46

Chŏng encapsulated both Cho Munmyŏng and Yi Ilche’s understandings of chŏmguk: foresee what has yet to come to pass and provide significant observations on seemingly trivial things in unusual places. It was up to a sagacious envoy to uncover unconventional sources of intelligence, identify undercurrents before they developed into discernible trends, and call his king’s attention to such signs. As such, Chosŏn envoys were obliged to gather and record such information, from which they extrapolated the destiny of the Qing Empire. These elusive signs did not exclude what would seem absurd or inconsequential to modern diplomats. Chosŏn envoys were constantly on the lookout for such signs, and they frequently formed part of court discussion in Chosŏn. For example, when Yi Ŭihyŏn 李宜顯 (1669- 1745) and Han Tŏkhu 韓德厚 (1680-?) went to Beijing in 1732, they brought back news that a malformed calf had been born in Shandong. The local governor took it to be a qilin 麒麟, an auspicious unicorn, and congratulated the Yongzheng emperor (r.1722-1735) in a memo to the throne.47 The destiny of dynasties was preordained, and the will of heaven was discernible by explicating natural and unnatural phenomena sent from heaven as blessings or warnings. Hence, what might seem to be unworthy or absurd intelligence in modern diplomacy was in fact considered valid and valuable information. In the same vein, the appearance of a mushroom of immortality (yŏngji 靈芝), an auspicious cloud (sangun 祥雲), and nectar (kamno 甘露), as well as cases of the normally heavily silted Yellow River running clear (Hwangha ch’ŏng 黃河淸) in various places of the Qing Empire, were topics of Chosŏn court discussion.48 In this vein, the withered tree stood in a long line of such absurdities and minutiae. Although the withered tree neither formally entered Chosŏn court discussions nor unequivocally affected Chosŏn diplomacy toward the Qing, it nonetheless occupied an enduring place in the Chosŏn textual reconstruction of the Qing landscape. It remained a tantalizingly plausible method through which Chosŏn scholar-officials could peek into a gigantic and overpowering neighbor for signs of Chosŏn’s shared destiny.

Paralleling the Qing Imperial Narrative

As the above analysis of the withered tree shows, Chosŏn perceptions and beliefs were instrumental in how Chosŏn travelers constructed meaning from the ordinary landscape of Yutian in their yŏnhaengnok. They appropriated such accounts of the Qing landscape,

46 Chŏng Yagyong, “Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ,” in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 281 (Sŏul: Minjok Munhwa Ch’ujinhoe, 1999), 279. 47 Han Tŏkhu, “Sŭngji-gong yŏnhaeng illok,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 50, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 233-234; Yi Ŭihyŏn, “Imja yŏnhaeng chapchi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 53, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 501-506. 48 Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, Ongjŏng 7.4.22; Ongjŏng 8.11.17; Ongjŏng 8.12.21. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 65 reframed by their perceptions, into Chosŏn political ideology and forged the accumulated travel experiences into a Chosŏn narrative of the Qing Empire. The persistent writings on the withered tree transformed a feature of the local landscape into a symbolic indicator of Qing imperial predestination and formed a parallel narrative to the Qing imperial narrative. It is crucial to clarify, however, that this parallel relationship does not imply rigid comparability between the two narratives, nor do I intend to verify the historical accuracy or validity of Chosŏn records with their counterparts in Qing sources. Rather, this parallel relationship is characterized by accentuation and omission resulting from different authorial intentions. Whereas the Chosŏn writers brought the withered tree to the fore as a defining focus in the locality of Yutian, the mythic tree was completely absent in local gazetteers. During the Qing period, Yutian was a county in Zhili Province. Together with Fengrun and Zunhua, Yutian constituted the Zunhua Directly Administered Department (Zunhua zhili zhou 遵化直隶州). On the yŏnhaeng route of Chosŏn travelers, Yutian was 250 li from the imperial capital. This short journey was usually divided into four stops (Jizhou 薊州, Sanhe 三 河, Tongzhou 通州, and Beijing 北京) and two or three days of traveling from the county seat of Yutian to Beijing. The county seat of Yutian was well-developed. O Toil 吳道一 (1645-1703), who traveled to Beijing in 1686, described the Yutian county seat as populous and flourishing. O was especially impressed by the high literacy rate in Yutian and the refinement of the young Han Chinese (漢人之子) residents’ appearance and their spiritual disposition. However, O suddenly changed his positive assessment of Yutian: “Such gracious talents are now contaminated by barbaric customs and practices. Even with their extraordinary aptitude and tremendous abilities, they could not be anything beyond a barbarian (雖有高世之姿絕人之才終於夷狄而止 耳).”49 Once outside the prosperous Yutian county seat, Maeng Mant’aek 孟萬澤 (1660-1710), who traveled to Beijing in 1701, depicted a bleak picture of its countryside. He found the villages of Shihuqiao 石虎橋, Caitingqiao 采亭橋, Dakushu 大枯樹, Xiaokushu 小枯樹 and Fengshan 蜂山 mostly impoverished, each inhabited by less than ten households.50 It is noteworthy that among the destitute villages, Dakushu (big withered tree) and Xiaokushu (small withered tree) were named after the withered tree because of their geographical proximity to it. However, in striking contrast to Chosŏn travelers’ obsessive and abundant writings, the mysterious withered tree was completely absent from the official narrative of Yutian. There are three editions of the Yutian county gazetteer (1681, 1756, and 1884), each compiled with revisions of and supplements to its previous edition. In all three editions, the only remotely relevant record of the withered tree is in relation to the villages named after

49 O Toil, “Pyŏngin yŏnhaeng ilsŭng,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 29, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 170. 50 Maeng Mant’aek, “Hanhandang yŏnhaengnok,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 39, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 240. 66 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 it, which served as relay stations in Yutian’s local post system.51 Notably, the 1681 edition recorded the station name as Gushupu 孤樹鋪, which was corrected to Kushupu 枯樹鋪 in the 1884 edition. This naming error supports Yi Kiji’s findings on Gushu and Kushu in 1720. It also revealed the insignificance of the withered tree in the minds of the local people. So trivial were the tree and its namesake villages that the gazetteer compilers, themselves selected from among local scholar-officials and students, took little interest in even their names. As a standardized convention, compilers of local gazetteers usually included a section on propitious and ominous occurrences as well as uncanny phenomena and natural disasters, which they interpreted as manifestations of heavenly will. The 1681 and 1756 editions each had a “miscellaneous records” section (zalu 雜錄), which included sub-categories on auspicious signs and calamities (xiangsheng 祥眚), celestial beings and immortal Buddhists (xianshi 仙釋), tombs (qiumu 丘墓) and investigations into uncanny phenomena (kaoyi 考異). The 1884 edition retained only the sub-section on auspicious signs and calamities, but expanded the records of natural disasters.52 While the gazetteer compilers recorded a wide range of natural and unnatural phenomena occurring in Yutian, the withered tree and its prophecy, which Chosŏn travelers had reproduced for generations, never made it into the collections of local eeriness. On the other hand, records of withered trees were not without precedent in local gazetteers. In Yingshan 英山 in Anhui 安徽 Province, a loving son devotedly mourned his late father for three years, and a wilted tree mirrored his pious virtue and regenerated.53 A similar case was found in Nanchang 南昌 in Jiangxi 江西 Province, where a dying tangerine tree, so moved by the filial devotion of a son for his late mother, miraculously revived.54 Other cases of tree revival occurred in tandem with the bringing or restoration of social and political order. For example, when the Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne in 1662, a tree reportedly revived in front of a Confucian academy in Jiande 建德 in Anhui.55 When a local governor in Jiangxia 江夏 rebuilt the famous Xiongchu tower (雄楚樓), which was burnt during the Ming- Qing wars, a withered tree regenerated.56 There was every reason for the compilers to include the tree in their gazetteers: the convention of placing the tree and its like in existing categories, precedents in other gazetteers, and – although the compilers were probably not fully aware of it – the tree’s popularity among foreign visitors. Then how can we account for the deliberate exclusion or unwitting

51 Xia Ziliu, Li Changshi, and Ding Wei, “Guangxu Yutian xianzhi,” in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng: Hebei, vol. 21 (Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian Chubanshe, 2006), 184. 52 Wang Guangmo and Hu Weihan, “Kangxi Yutian xianzhi,” in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng: Hebei, vol. 21 (Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian Chubanshe, 2006), 222-225. 53 Shen Baozhen et al., “Guangxu chongxiu Anhui tongzhi,” in Xuxiu Siku Quanshu, vol. 654, ed. Gu Tinglong (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2002), 235. 54 Liu Kunyi, Liu Duo, and Zhao Zhiqian, “Guangxu Jiangxi tongzhi,” in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng: Jiangxi, vol. 4 (Nanjing: Fenghuang Chubanshe, 2009), 617. 55 Zhao Hongen, “Jiangnan tongzhi,” in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng: Jiangnan, vol. 6 (Nanjing: Fenghuang Chubanshe, 2011), 774 56 Xia Lishu and Mai Zhu, “Huguang tongzhi,” in Yingyin wenyuange Sikuquanshu, vol. 534 (Taipei: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1986), 13. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 67 omission of the withered tree in the Yutian gazetteer? Most calamities, like droughts, floods, earthquakes, and locusts, and supernatural deeds like drunk Daoists performing miracles and foxes transforming into humans that were recorded in the county gazetteers had already occurred, credibly or otherwise. Only in retroactive interpretation did these events acquire the status of portents. However, in the case of the withered tree, its prophecy remained unfulfilled. During the Qing dynasty, no revolt erupted in Yutian, nor did a true messianic king appear. With the seasonal regeneration of the withered tree and the seasonal failure of its prophecy, the myth lost its prophetic power and descended into mere local folklore that did not circulate beyond the people who lived in the immediate vicinity of the tree. Cases of withered trees in other gazetteers were clearly auspicious signs that attested to Qing imperial legitimacy. The Yutian withered tree, on the contrary, was a blatant denial of Qing legitimacy as it audaciously foretold the rise of a true king – a more legitimate ruler in contrast to a pseudo-king or usurper. It was this fundamental contradiction of the Qing imperial narrative that prevented gazetteer compilers from giving any attention to the withered tree. While Min Chinwŏn and Kim Ch’angŏp’s version of a true king was an unruly prophecy that defied Qing imperial narrative, other versions of the tree story as recorded by generations of Chosŏn writers were, to the compilers, insignificant myths.

The Narrative of the Qing Empire

County gazetteers formed the foundation blocks of a broader narrative of the Qing Empire. The central court ordered the compilation of gazetteers and delegated this task to officials at the local level in late 1671. Before any substantial progress could be made, the Three Feudatories Revolt (1673-1681) precipitated the greatest crisis the Qing dynasty had faced since its founding in 1636. The revolt interrupted gazetteer compilation as the empire had to mobilize every resource for its very survival. The project resumed in 1686, and the first edition of Unified Gazetteer of the Great Qing (Daqing yitongzhi 大清一統誌) appeared in 1744.57 Revisions and updates to the Unified Gazetteer resulted in two more editions in 1789 and 1842. The production of gazetteers reflected the “coming into the map” rubantu( 入版圖) of the newly conquered regions of Central Asia during the Qianlong period and was always in accordance with the shifting outlook of the Qing empire-building process.58 The court commissioned the gazetteers, but local authorities and gentry-scholars funded and carried out the compilation and editorial processes. Compilers then gathered information on the history and conditions of a locality in the county gazetteers and merged that into departmental, prefectural, and provincial gazetteers, which other compilers then synthesized

57 Qiao Zhizhong, “Daqing yitongzhi de chuxiu yu fangzhixue de xingqi, Qilu xuekan 1 (1997): 116-123 58 Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” The International History Review 20, no. 2 (June 1998): 263-286; James A. Millward, “‘Coming onto the Map’: ‘Western Regions’ Geography and Cartographic Nomenclature in the Making of Chinese Empire in Xinjiang,” Late Imperial China 20, no. 2 (December 1999): 61-98. 68 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 in the empire-wide Unified Gazetteer. The territorial hierarchy in the compilation process is most fully illuminated in the preface Wang Shitai 王時泰 wrote for the Yutian gazetteer in 1674 when he served as the county’s magistrate:

Since the founding of our majestic Qing, each province, prefecture, department, and county has revised and printed [their gazetteers] and submitted them for imperial perusal. Laying as it does beneath [the wheels of] the imperial chariot [as a part of the capital domain], how could Yutian not luminously refresh [the old Ming gazetteer] to buttress [this] reign of grand peace and brilliance?

我皇清定鼎以來各直省府州縣業已俱經改刻進呈御覽玉邑以輦轂之下可不煥然更新以仰佐太平 光華之治59

This territorial hierarchy of county, department, prefecture, and province progressively transformed accumulated local knowledge into the final form of a coherent and comprehensive imperial narrative embodied in the Unified Gazetteer. This process of gazetteer production not only placed each locality into a hierarchical relationship with the empire, but it also fundamentally organized knowledge of local particularities in relation to the empire. The county gazetteer frequently related the strategic geographical position of Yutian to the transportation network and security of the empire. Since the Ming Empire, local scholar- officials had depicted Yutian as both safeguarding the imperial capital and providing a key passage between the capital and beyond. In 1468, for example, the Hanlin 翰林 scholar Xie Duo 謝鐸 (1435-1510) of Beijing composed an essay to commemorate the completion of a new city wall in Yutian. He wrote, “Yutian County is less than three hundred li from the capital; it connects to the Shanhai Pass (山海關) and leads to Chosŏn. An endless stream of tributary missions passes through it.”60 Shang Lu 商輅 (1414-1486), while acknowledging the role of Yutian as a communication hub connecting the capital to Liaodong 遼東 and Chosŏn, placed more emphasis on its function as a vital stronghold in defending the capital. He further pointed out that Yutian was within the territory of the capital region (jinei 畿內), with the Shanhai Pass on its left and the Yuyang garrison (漁陽) on its right, and that “nothing is more strategically important.” Yutian secured the capital region and protected it from threats from the east.61 Zhu Zhifan 朱之蕃 (1575-1624), who traveled through Yutian as an envoy to Chosŏn in 1605, also associated the extraordinary scenic view of Yutian with its protective function.62 Qing literati continued to envision Yutian in relation to the imperial structure of defense and communication. Wang Shitai’s 1674 preface to the Yutian Gazetteer reinforced the

59 Xia, Li, and Ding, “Guangxu Yutian xianzhi,” 95 60 Wang and Hu, "Kangxi Yutian xianzhi,” 63. 61 Wang and Hu, “Kangxi Yutian xianzhi,” 63. 62 Zhu Zhifan, “Fengshi chaoxian gao,” in Shi Chaoxian lu, vol. 2, eds. Yin Mengxia and Yu Hao (Beijing: Beijing Tushuguan Chubanshe, 2003), 298. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 69 locality-empire tie that was emphasized in Ming writings:

As a feoff of the capital region, [we] consider [Yutian] to be superior land [part and parcel of the capital itself]. Moreover, while there is no strategic point in the frontier defenses more important than Jimen, Yutian is critical in that inwardly it embraces the divine capital while outwardly it connects with Fengtian and Liaodong.

為畿內侯封稱首善地也且九塞之重莫過薊門而玉邑乃其沖要內拱神京外接奉天遼海63

In this imperial vision, Yutian formed part of a defensive front for the Qing capital, but more importantly, it served as a link between China proper and the Manchu homeland of Fengtian and Liaodong. Others connected Yutian to the history of the Qing Empire and noted that Yutian was “the first to profess its loyalty when the dynasty was founded.”64 Yutian thus secured a place in the imperial narrative for both its geographical proximity to the capital and joining the cause of the Manchu conquest of China at an early date. In a historiographical discussion on the writings of the Qing empire-building process, Pamela Crossley examines how a unique genre of strategic narrative (方略 fanglue) arose to account for the origin and expansion of the empire. The Qing state commissioned such narratives to integrate and reshape a variety of sources to provide an officially endorsed chronology of the Qing Empire. In this comprehensive repackaging, the imperial narrative came to dominate all other views.65 In the same fashion that the strategic narrative reorganized the historical expansion of the empire, the gazetteers at all levels arranged the counties, prefectures, and provinces into a coherent imperial geo-body. Although the primary function of local gazetteers was to record and preserve parochial conditions of population, taxation, topography, institutions, and prominent individuals, it was ultimately the imperial narrative that determined the boundaries of acceptable gazetteer content. The compilation process integrated localities like Yutian into the imperial narrative and compelled them to portray themselves as constituents of the geo-body of the Qing Empire. The empire had the sole authority to determine what from among the myriad events, matters, and memories of the historical past and geographical present of the empire could justifiably constitute the imperial narrative. This is what Ranajit Guha calls “the bonding of statism and historiography” through which state ideology commands the narrative and decides what is historic and what is not.66 The case of the Yutian gazetteer shows that the imperial narrative of the Qing Empire not only outshone its local counterparts but profoundly

63 Xia, Li, and Ding, “Guangxu Yutian xianzhi,” 94. 64 Xia, Li, and Ding, “Guangxu Yutian xianzhi,” 102. 65 Pamela Kyle Crossley, “The Historical Writing of Qing Imperial Expansion,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. Daniel Woolf, vol. 3, 1400-1800, eds. Jose Rabasa, Masyuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 43. 66 Ranajit Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” in The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 304-317. 70 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 subsumed the local narrative in relation to the empire. The bonding of local gazetteers and the Qing imperial narrative resulted in a purge – either by deliberate deletion or accidental omission – of undesirable and irrelevant local knowledge like the withered tree. The yŏnhaengnok writings on the withered tree afford us a clue to the parallel relationship between the narratives produced in early modern East Asia. Narratives produced in different parts of early modern East Asia corresponded to each other, yet the respective processes of their production were motivated by very different concerns. The persistent Chosŏn interest in the withered tree arose from complex concerns that emerged from changing circumstances and perspectives internal to Chosŏn. A genre produced for private purposes, Chosŏn observations of the Qing Empire and the ensuing travelogues were subject neither to the prescriptions of the Qing state nor to the imperatives of empire-building. The yŏnhaengnok writings could thus contain the myth of the withered tree and continue to reinvent its meaning over the course of almost two centuries. Chinese historiographies have long treated Korean sources as a reservoir of historical and ethnographical knowledge that was either impermissible in the Chinese accounts or too commonplace and mundane for contemporary Chinese to bother recording.67 The Ming- Qing imperial archive of knowledge located Korean sources at the periphery both because of the geographically marginal place of the Korean Peninsula in relation to the continental empire and because of their relative irrelevance in the formation of the imperial narrative. In Chinese historiography, Korean sources provided supplementary information which filled sporadic blanks in the Ming-Qing imperial archives and offered some exotic anecdotes. The case of the withered tree appears to be another example of how inconsequential information recorded in Korean sources supplemented the orthodoxy of the Chinese imperial narrative. However, as the genealogy of the withered tree image has illustrated, Chosŏn travelers constantly reconstructed the Qing Empire in their yŏnhaengnok in accordance with preoccupations unique to Chosŏn. The Chosŏn view of empire revealed more about Chosŏn itself than the empire. Recent scholarship has debunked some long-held Sinocentric myths about historical inter-state relations of early modern East Asia. In its relations with both Ming and Qing, Chosŏn actively engaged in shaping the political structure and intervened in the order of civilizational hierarchies.68 Such recognition of Chosŏn’s agency is crucial in freeing the Chosŏn production of knowledge and narrative from a relationship of dependency on

67 Since the 1930s, Chinese historians have incorporated Korean sources like the Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄 to complement a reconstruction of early Manchu histories, which were abridged or altered by later emperors. See Wu Chengwei, “‘Chaoxian’ ruhe jinru Ming-Qing shijia de shijie,” Mingdai yanjiu 33 (December 2019): 155- 198. The publication of the Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip in 2001 and 2008 generated a vast interest in and facilitated a large amount of research on Chosŏn images of the Ming and Qing. The most laudable effort among them is Ge Zhaoguang’s initiative Looking at China from its Neighbors (從周邊看中國), which highlights the value of East Asian sources in literary Sinitic as an extra mirror, in addition to European or Western texts, for foreign images of China. One particular value of yŏnhaengnok Ge recognizes is that they contain unusual details about China that were novel for Koreans but unremarkable for contemporary Chinese. See Ge, Xiangxiang yiyu, 8. 68 See Sixiang Wang, “Co-constructing Empire in Early Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Production and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1392–1592” (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 2015); Yuanchong Wang, Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 71 the Qing Empire. In this vein, as the equals of their Qing counterparts, Chosŏn intentionally produced the yŏnhaengnok to address Chosŏn concerns.

Conclusion

The withered tree last appeared in an 1888 yŏnhaengnok entitled Yŏnwŏn illok 燕轅日錄. The identity of the author remains unknown. Like his predecessors, the author eagerly looked for the withered tree when he traveled through Yutian, but was told by the locals that the tree had died a few years before. He was dismayed that he had missed the opportunity to see it.69 This enthusiastic tree-spotter was likely misinformed by the local Chinese, as just one year earlier in 1887, Yi Sŭngo 李承五 (1837-?) saw the withered tree and mentioned it in his Yŏnch’a ilgi 燕槎日記.70 Nonetheless, the textual reconstruction of the withered tree, a custom that had lasted for 177 years in the writings of yŏnhaengnok, ended with the lamentation of the anonymous writer as he cast a last gaze toward the site of withered tree. Six years after the last mention of the tree in Korean travelogues of the Beijing journey, in 1894, the journey itself came to an end, as Japan defeated the Qing Empire and ended its suzerainty over Chosŏn. Initially triggered in 1712 by a sense of crisis and the hundred-years theory that had seized the Chosŏn mind, the withered tree entered the writing of yŏnhaengnok as one of the many supernatural signs Chosŏn envoys collected in China to support their predictions of Manchu doom. Over the next two centuries, interest in the withered tree outlived both initial stimuli. Even after the abandonment of the prophetic myth, interest in the tree lingered among Chosŏn travelers. Spotting the withered tree became a convention deeply built into the travel experience and the tree stubbornly remained on the Chosŏn must-see checklist. The images of the tree in yŏnhaengnok were partly inherited from the time of Min Chinwŏn and Kim Ch’anghŭp and partly shaped by contemporary elements: personal observations, shifting views of the Qing Empire and the attendant re-positioning of the Chosŏn relationship with it, and changing beliefs of what could account for the fate of the Qing. A parallel relationship emerges with the juxtaposition of the yŏnhaengnok narratives on the withered tree and the Yutian gazetteer. Chosŏn envoys faithfully reproduced the withered tree, a local triviality that did not fit into the imperial narrative, in theiryŏnhaengnok for centuries. The parallel relationship is more profound and nuanced than simply two descriptions of the same object. More fundamentally, it is the deviation in salience and omission in the respective narratives, underpinned by different motivations, that brings the parallel into being. The tree was present in neither the Unified Gazetteer of the Great Qing nor the Yutian county gazetteer, partly because of its triviality in the geographical landscape. However, this omission was likely due in no small part to the fact that such an indicator of the impermanence of dynastic

69 Unknown, “Yŏnwŏn illok,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 95, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 281. 70 Yi Sŭngo, “Yŏnch’a ilgi,” in Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip, vol. 86, ed. Im Kijung (Sŏul: Tongguk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 143. 72 Acta Koreana, Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2020 rule was in fundamental conflict with the imperial narrative. The records of the withered tree in yŏnhaengnok and the folklore surrounding it preserved an anecdote absent in the Chinese archive of local knowledge. The withered tree initially elicited Chosŏn interest because its myth resonated with some deep-rooted sense of anticipation and crisis that pervaded Chosŏn mentality. It entered the Chosŏn purview at a time when Chosŏn was desperately seeking answers to its anxiety in the early eighteenth century. The withered tree seemingly provided manifest evidence, however faint, for the collective preoccupation of Chosŏn writers. In reinventing and reproducing the withered tree, Chosŏn writers metaphorically uprooted and re-planted it in Chosŏn. In this way, Qing landscapes were only intelligible to Chosŏn writers when appropriated into a Chosŏn framework. Chosŏn envoys’ persistent enthusiasm for the tree and its omission in the gazetteers bring two temporalities into conflict. On the one hand, in the invented meaning ofthe withered tree, the rotating mandate of heaven rendered every imperial rule provisional, especially with alien regimes like the Qing. On the other hand, the imperial narrative stressed the eternity of the great unification dayitong( ) under the Qing Empire. The two narratives illustrated contending forms of temporalities: the repetition of the dynastic cycle and the presumed eternity of the Qing Empire. In this way, Chosŏn travelogues did not simply serve as an ethnographical supplement to what took place in Qing. How Chosŏn writers chose to write on Qing localities and landscapes was autonomous from the imperatives of the Qing imperial narrative, which was sponsored by and in turn endorsed the Qing empire-building process. Unlike the local gazetteers, the Chosŏn narrative on Qing localities and landscapes was under no pressure to submit to the imperial narrative. The parallel relationship between the two narratives allows us to read yŏnhaengnok into a broader production of narratives in early modern East Asia. In this sense, yŏnhaengnok are as much a product of individual experience as a disseminator of the shared knowledge of the Qing Empire. It is my intention to debunk the assumed relationship of dependency between the core and the periphery, and argue that what can be derived from yŏnhaengnok is nothing short of an autonomous narrative that paralleled the Qing imperial narrative itself. By looking at the case of a withered tree, I argue that the production of geographical knowledge in yŏnhaengnok was driven by a Chosŏn need to locate itself in relation to the Qing Empire. As the Chosŏn emissaries traveled through them, the places and landscapes of the empire only acquired significance and meaning in association with Chosŏn preoccupations. The envoys realigned Qing landscapes in accordance with their worldview, appropriated them into their cultural system, and domesticated them into their frame of reference. Ren: Rethinking Yŏnhaengnok as Parallel Narrative 73

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