Korea as a Marginal Tributary State — Its Historical Position Revealed by Western Sources
Archaeology, anthropology, DNA studies, and Western historical records reveal the peripheral status of the Korean Peninsula.
The historical practice of sending tribute women to Genghis Khan starkly illustrates this reality.
They even sent tribute women as sexual slaves across deserts and the Mongolian Plateau to Genghis Khan.
2016-10-25
The following continues from the previous chapter.
There are many theories regarding the origins of Koreans, based on research in archaeology, anthropology, DNA studies, and other fields. From the perspectives of geopolitics, geography, and ecology, the Korean Peninsula of the Eastern Barbarians was originally a marginal land unsuitable for human settlement.
For that reason, it is reasonable to regard the Korean Peninsula as a basin that collected drifting peoples—Korean-related (Malayo-Polynesian), Wa-related, Han-related from the west, and Tungusic (Eastern Hu) from the north—and historically, it is appropriate to consider that it entered East Asian history during the period of the Three Kingdoms.
Accordingly, Japanese influence was strong, and as mentioned earlier, it is only natural that the king of Silla was of Wa origin.
Koreans claim that the roots of the Japanese people came from the Korean Peninsula as “failures,” but historically, the opposite is true.
They also assert that they “taught civilization to Japan via the Korean Peninsula,” yet while Japan did receive various influences from the Chinese continent until the abolition of the missions to Tang China in 894, it received almost no civilizational benefit from the Korean Peninsula.
On the contrary, historical fact shows the reverse. For example, rice was long believed to have been transmitted from Korea to Japan, but this is mistaken. It was transmitted from the Chinese continent to Japan, and from there passed to the Korean Peninsula along with wet-rice cultivation techniques, a conclusion now nearly certain based on DNA analyses of rice.
It was only in the seventeenth century that Korea finally came to be recognized in the West.
For Westerners, Korea itself was a vague existence, and until the end of the sixteenth century there were not even accurate maps.
In 1505, the Augustinian missionary Martín de Rada, who stayed in Ming China, listed Goryeo as a tributary state of China, yet González de Mendoza’s sixteenth-century History of the Great Kingdom of China makes no mention of Korea at all.
The Travels of Marco Polo, written at the end of the thirteenth century, refers to the golden land of Zipangu, but scarcely mentions Goryeo (Korea).
After being conquered by Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, Goryeo remained under Yuan rule for more than a hundred years.
It is truly strange that Marco Polo, who was trusted by Kublai Khan and appointed to high office, scarcely refers to Korea at all.
Since its founding, Goryeo was troubled over which power to recognize as suzerain—the Khitan Liao, the Jurchen Jin, or the Han Chinese Song—and sent tribute women as sexual slaves across deserts and the Mongolian Plateau even to Genghis Khan.
Despite this, why was it treated as such an “insignificant tributary state.” For the West, the Korean Peninsula was a kind of unexplored region, and information about it was virtually nonexistent.
On early world maps, it was drawn not as a peninsula but as an “island.”
China too lacked an accurate worldview, and the previously mentioned Classic of Mountains and Seas is filled with fantastical content.
Even Fujian Province was regarded as an “island” until the Tang dynasty, and the concept of a round heaven and square earth persisted into modern times.
It was likely from the late sixteenth century, with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, that Westerners began to take a serious interest in Korea.
Missionaries such as Gregorio de Céspedes, who accompanied the Christian daimyo Konishi Yukinaga, wrote about the Korean Peninsula in annual reports sent to Rome.
To be continued.