Jung  Jaehoon

10.18399/acta.2016.19.1.011

Yi Ki-ji embassy to Beijing eighteenth-century Korea records of embassy to Beijing (yŏnhaengnok) Northern Learning (Pukhak)

This paper has focused on Yi Ki-ji’s 1720 mission to survey the unique characteristics of his embassy to Beijing. The level of interest that Yi recorded in his yŏnhaengnok in Western painting, astronomy, and calendrical science—including accounts of the nine visits he made to the missionaries at the cathedrals—is difficult to find in other yŏnhaengnok of his time. Given that the scholarly consensus has until now been that it was only in the late eighteenth century that yŏnhaengnok began to display an active, explicit reception of “Northern Learning” (Pukhak), we cannot but conclude that Yi’s record was ahead of its time. The unique aspects of Yi Ki-ji’s yŏnhaengnok reveal the necessity of reconsidering the conventional wisdom regarding these embassies and their records, which holds that it was not until the mid to late eighteenth century that the objective realities of Qing life were recognized among Chosŏn’s ambassadors or that the cultural attributes of the Qing were actively sought out and favorably accepted. Yi Ki-ji’s embassy to Beijing alerts us to the fact that—though exceptional—the act of asserting Chosŏn’s autonomous identity, while at once working earnestly to recognize and accept the realities of Qing China when necessary, was not impossible in the early eighteenth century.