A failed project

I've been hooked on reading travel writing for some time now. I especially like the model where the writer follows in the footsteps of a historical traveller or explorer. Examples are Nigel Barley's book on Raffles and Mishi Saran's "In the Monk's Shadow," which followed the 7th century Chinese monk Xuanzang to India. Many of these books are by writers who follow historical Englishmen or other Westerners. While those stories are fascinating, we also thought it would be valuable to hear more about historical travel from a non-Western perspective.

So we thought about trying our hand at this sort of project. We started with Korea, because we haven't heard much about historical travelers from Korea. And rightly so, if the perception of Korea as historically a "hermit kingdom" is correct. But maybe that's just a myth. We set out to find a Korean who traveled and wrote about his experiences, someone we could follow. We also decided that the person would ideally have traveled to southeast Asia -- at least that would make it easy for us to visit places he visited. And given the length of Korea's history, there must have been someone...

That thinking led us to a question: Who was the first Korean in southeast Asia?

It turns out that it's very difficult to find references to any Korean in this part of the world before about 1920. We did eventually find an article which mentions a Korean diplomat going to Ayutthaya (now Thailand) in the 1390s. Alas, we have no records of what that diplomat experienced.

Japan has had traders in southeast Asia for some centuries? And the Chinese go without saying. But Koreans? We haven't found any. We eventually had some success when we pursued the Christian angle. In 1836 three young Koreans were sent abroad to study to become priests. Kim Tae-go^n (who would become Korea's first priest), Ch'oe Yang-o^p, and Ch'oe Pang-je went to Macau for their studies. That's not southeast Asia but it's close. So we followed up on this. Eventually we settled on Ch'oe Yang-o^p as the most possible figure. Ch'oe, it turned out, went to the Philippines, Shanghai, Mongolia, and Manchuria. He spent 14 years traveling between those places before returning to Korea (and martyrdom). Just as important, a set of letters he had written are preserved! Could this finally be our key to challenging the status of Korea as a hermit kingdom?




Remaining facade of the Catholic school where 3 Koreans studied in the 1830s

Already getting excited about the possibility of travel to Mongolia and the other locations, and already imagining telling a story about individuals in a closed society eager to learn about foreign ideas and about the rise and suppression of Catholicism in Korea, we looked for the letters.

We did got our hands on a copy of Ch'oe's letters, translated from the French in which they were written into Korean. The 19 letters, mostly addressed to church people, contained nothing but references to church matters. Nothing more. No discussion of his reaction to being abroad, meeting non-Koreans, eating foreign food. No discussion of being one of the first Koreans in the Philippines (or Macau for that matter). What a shame! Didn't he understand his responsibility to his society and to history? To experience those things and not to record them? It's nearly a crime...

The project, then, has backfired and only reinforced our idea of Korea as a hermit kingdom. Even those few who got out and experienced foreign societies did not see the value in recording those experiences. Lack of opportunity is at least execusible. Lack of interest, though, is not.



There might still be some chance of finding a curious Korean who left his country and wrote about it. A few Koreans studied in a monastery in Pinang in the 1880s, though we don't know if they wrote anything. There are two fascinating Korean travelogues, both on visits to China. The more lively one is Ch'oe Pu's "Record of Floating at Sea" (표해록), which documents his accidental journey to China and back. We considered following Pak Chi-wo^n's 18th century trip to north China, recorded in "Jehol Diary" (열하일기), and that might be an option if we ever have two months free. But we hoped to find something closer to home in southeast Asia, which would also be fresher given that stories of Koreans visiting China are already well-documented.

For now, though, we're no closer to challenging the notion of Korean isolation.