The conundrum of Little China: The representation of cultural identity in eighteenth-century Korean landscape verse

The representation of eighteenth-century Choson Korea (1392-1910) presents a problem for those interested in pre-modern cultural identity. For several hundred years, the Koryo and Choson kingdoms had occasionally been referred to by Chinese and Koreans alike as "Little China," because of the prevalance of Confucian cultural practices in these kingdoms. Although this term was a positive one, it did not deal with the essential differences and defined Koreans as a version of the dominant Other. The only alternative to being Chinese, however, was to be a barbarian. For a kingdom that venerated Chinese culture, such an appelation was unnacceptable. Caught in this liminal position, Koreans had to represent their country in a combination of subtle ways: either to construct itself as a smaller China in all aspects or to begin to acknowledge its differences. In this study I reveal how these practices participated in the process of the individuation of the Korean identity: as Korea 'became' China (geographically and culturally) it elevated itself as an independent state, and as it recorded its differences it began to value its Otherness. Because the only elements of identity that remained fundamentally non-Chinese were the Korean territory and language, I turn to native and Sino-Korean landscape verse to reveal how the rhetoric of landscape description reflects the Korean self-conception of identity. This study considers the spatial representation of a variety of areas of Choson territory, but focuses primarily upon the Kwanso region, the ancient cultural heartland. In tracing the development of the depiction of this region in both literary languages, I examine how Korea reconciled the contradictions between its 'Chineseness' and barbarian practices. In contrast to the majority of upper-class officials who revered Chinese culture, some scholars in the eighteenth century began to represent their kingdom and its people in a more integrated manner. They began to understand that being Korean in the eighteenth century did not mean being either wholly Chinese or wholly barbarian, but that it was irrevocably the condition of being a combination of the two.