Things I don’t know about Korea, part 2
I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along: Eunuchs: The Kabo reforms abolish the offi...
Category: Late Chosŏn
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Academia/Christianity/Conferences/English/Gender/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/Late Chosŏn/Religion
Korean (Gender) Studies at ASPAC
In spite of the lovely Korean Studies Center which headquartered the conference, ASPAC 2007 didn’t have a lot of Korean content. In fact, with the excepti...
Two talks this week
A couple of very interesting talks coming up at short notice for anyone who happens to be around in LA or Seoul in the next couple of days (or perhaps both if y...
Sea Devils (revisited)
Professor Gari Ledyard of Columbia University has left a couple of extremely good posts on the Korean Studies Mailing List that deserve to be shared here. They ...
Sell yourself
“Selling yourself” – one of those phrases we use in a somewhat metaphorical sense, but which nonetheless has a more literal meaning than we pr...
Empty history
I’m spending a few weeks in Korea, mainly for the Academy of Korean Studies organised World Congress of Korean Studies that will be taking place this week...
If you thought the Chosŏn dynasty was over, think again
Actually, strictly speaking, 88-year-old Yi Hae-won was crowned queen (or should that be empress?) of the Great Han Empire (大韓帝國) last week, rather than the Cho...
History news round-up (brought to you by the Korea Times)
For some reason the Korea Times seems to be quite a decent source of history news these days, so in the absence of a more heavyweight post, here’s a round...
Yun Chi-ho’s Diary Online
Owen has posted some great links on the study of pre-modern Korean history. In one of his postings he mentioned the National History Compilation Committee (국사편찬...
Homer B. Hulbert Event
I made a visit to the foreigner’s cemetery located at on the Seoul Union Church grounds in Hapjeong. Today banners were hanging in several places around t...
Feuding clans
There is a fascinating article in today’s International Herald Tribune on Korean family grave sites, feng shui and the long-running feud between the Yoon ...
The Korean Folk Village
A few days ago I visited the Korean Folk Village near Suwŏn. You can learn all about the village from the English version of its propaganda video, complete with...
Into the archives
Major source material publication projects for premodern history A bit of a change of pace here, but I thought I’d share a bit of the information I’ve gathered ...
New version of Yorha Ilgi discovered
It’s always exciting when something new and exciting is discovered getting dusty in a forgotten corner of a library somewhere. This time it’s an ear...