Epilogue

THOSE who mastered how to manipulate diverse epistles emerged as the main actors on the national political stage. Thus nonofficial rural scholars who had been marginalized from court politics could join in the state discourses along with the monarch and court ministers. The effectiveness of circular letters and joint memorials in mobilizing groups of people and spreading their political ideas nationwide led to wide usage of this textual form by literati across the country. Toward the end of the Chosŏn dynasty, even nonelites frequently appropriated circular letters and joint memorials for their political protests. For example, concubines’ sons as groups presented a series of joint memorials to abolish the social discrimination against them.¹ In 1772, about three thousand secondary sons from the Yŏngnam area presented a joint memorial on this issue.² From then on, they kept pressing the royal court to take meaningful action. By 1823, these men had succeeded in getting signatures from 9,996 people across the country, except in two northern provinces.³ By the nineteenth century, peasants had also appropriated circular letters in planning their uprisings. The circular letter in figure E.1 was produced in 1893; it actually sparked a nationwide Tonghak peasant uprising the following year. Remarkably, this letter mainly uses vernacular Korean, with literary Chinese words glossed in Korean pronunciations for nonelite readers. Even more intriguing is the way the senders signed it. As shown at the beginning of the letter, they drew a circle and signed their names around the circumference radially in order not to expose their leader, in case government officials read this. Because there is no preset or agreed-upon beginning and ending in these signatures, this circular letter did not reveal the hierarchy among the signers. Yet, this mode of signing did not simply function as an added security measure. It also manifested the solidarity among the participants in this particular collective political action. Because the circle drawn for this purpose is in the shape of a bowl, this type of circular letter was called a sabal t’ongmun, using the term sabal, which literally means “bowl.”⁴

Discrete political conditions expressed through writings in the same genre could generate completely different political effects. Therefore, the political epistolary genres evolved into various material forms at the discretion of different users. Moreover, social epistolary genres appeared in unlikely places in unexpected forms at the beginning of the modern period. When modern newspapers emerged in Korea in the late nineteenth century, some traditional epistles made their way onto the newspapers’ pages. One article published on September 8, 1898, in the Capital Gazette (Hwangsŏng sinmun) includes a circular letter written by two commoner women about the need to establish schools for women. The short introduction before the full draft of the letter articulates that the editors decided to include it on the first page because they thought it a remarkable case.⁵ The next day, this same circular letter reappeared in the Independent.⁶ Because newspapers referenced each other and frequently reprinted news appearing in different papers, the message of this particular letter disseminated widely across the society. The inclusion of this circular letter in the newspaper also brought about more systematic analysis of the issue by the editors. On September 13, the Independent featured an editorial titled “Women’s Education.” While highlighting that it was unprecedented that women themselves called for schools for women, it argued that women’s education would benefit the country as a whole due to their role as the first educators of children. The editors also criticized the absence of government initiative in modern education.⁷ The insertion of a circular letter in the newspaper thus affected its editorial direction, which would subsequently shape public opinion. Conversely, this circular letter could have suited the editors’ political agenda. In any event, the dissemination of new ideas about women’s social role and their equal right to education stimulated women readers actually to rally together for collective actions. According to a report in the Independent on September 28, about one hundred women gathered to promote the cause of women’s education. Remarkably, the leader of the group began the meeting by reading aloud the very circular letter included in the newspaper.⁸ Besides this kind of circular letter, letters from Korean students studying in Japan who wrote home about the sociopolitical conditions of the country were frequently printed in newspapers.⁹ This easy transferability of information between letters and newspapers increased the role of individuals in shaping public opinion. Writing letters and reading newspapers generated a new public forum in which different individuals and organizations exchanged their viewpoints and deliberated on the issues that concerned them.¹⁰ In this discursive space, the existing collective and collaborative networks of letter writing overlapped with and proliferated through those of newspapers.

Here, as a parallel case, it is useful to examine how telegrams were incorporated into newspapers in late nineteenth-century China, which were instrumental in spreading nationalistic political messages. In the nationalist movements of this period, political telegrams held vital significance as an effective media form because they could have multiple senders and addressees. However, their effect had been substantially diminished to the regional level at best. Political circular telegrams could be widely publicized and attract attention only after they were reprinted in newspapers.¹¹ In the same vein, the Chosŏn political epistles could have had broader impact when they took the form of newspaper articles. Readers might have kept, read, and circulated the papers for a long time, following their traditional reading pattern geared toward letters rather than the daily publication cycle of newspapers. The combination of the different temporalities embedded in circular letters and newspapers does not allow us to apply Benedict Anderson’s description of “newspapers as one-day bestsellers” to the Korean context.¹²

In some rare cases, Korean political epistles appeared even in foreign newspapers. For instance, Kim Okkyun (1851–1894), a fervent advocate of Western-style political reform, appropriated a Japanese newspaper as the outlet to make his political messages available to both the Japanese public and the community of letters across East Asia. While in Japan as a political exile after the failed Kapsin coup in 1884, he barely escaped with his life in 1886 after an attack by an assassin who, Kim claimed, was sent by the Chosŏn court. Kim drafted a memorial in Japanese addressed to the Chosŏn king, condemning his shameful effort to murder him, which the Tokyo Daily (J. Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun) carried in full in Japanese on July 9, two days after its initial appearance in the Gazette of the Government and the Public (J. Chōya shinbun).¹³ Considering that Kim, as an exile abroad, could not submit this memorial to King Kojong (r. 1864–1907), his choice of the genre, language, and media outlet to publicize it seems to have been politically calculated and purposeful. By addressing the Korean king instead of the anonymous newspaper readers, Kim’s memorial must have generated peculiar and exotic reading experiences for the Japanese public. However, it is also possible that Kim intended to make his memorial known to the Korean public. The Hansŏng Gazette (Hansŏng sunbo), the first modern Korean newspaper, published from 1883 to 1886, reprinted international news from foreign papers; the Tokyo Daily was one of these sources for editors.¹⁴ In fact, this newspaper article successfully stoked criticism of the Chosŏn court’s attempts to terminate modernizers like Kim. The sillok records show that the assassin, Chi Unyŏng (1852–1935), was immediately investigated and sent into exile.¹⁵ The court concluded that Chi attempted to murder Kim out of his personal indignation against the leaders of the Kapsin coup.¹⁶ Six days after his memorial appeared in the Tokyo Daily, Kim’s letter to Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), a powerful Qing official who Kim thought had created the assassination plan, appeared in the same newspaper.¹⁷ Unlike his memorial written in Japanese targeting the Japanese public, this letter was written in literary Chinese, which could be read by educated people across East Asia. The usage of traditional political epistles addressed to Korean and Chinese political dignitaries in Japanese newspapers allowed Kim to garner sympathy and support for his political causes not only from the Japanese public but also from the literate population in the region who had access to this newspaper. When the old political epistolary genres appeared in modern media forms, the incongruity between the target addressees and the anonymous communicative mechanism created in the new media environment sometimes greatly amplified popular responses. When plugged into the modern newspaper, therefore, the traditional epistles generated completely new social impacts. Such a shift from one communication technology to another always entails “residue” of the older form, instead of installing disjunction and rupture between them. “Historically, new communications technologies have supplemented and transformed, rather than replaced, older ones.”¹⁸ The introduction of a new communicative mode does not simply dissolve the earlier ones, which makes forming a linear historiography about the improvements in technology more challenging.

The propagation of modern printing technology at the turn of the twentieth century also transformed the physical forms of Chosŏn political epistles and the mode of their circulation. The increase of modern printing shops entailed the incorporation of old writing practices into print capitalism. Not only were the shops eager to expand the production of new kinds of reading material for modern readers, but they also attempted to maximize their profits by printing the genres that Korean people used to handle in manuscript form. Printing shops employed aggressive promotions for this purpose. The colophons of the printed books frequently advertised that the readers could use their printing facilities for various projects. For instance, the colophon advertisement for a letter-writing manual published in 1905 enumerates a variety of printed matter that the printer could produce, including not only such modern textual forms as textbooks, magazines, certificates of graduation, and account books but also old genres such as genealogies and circular letters.¹⁹ As a consequence, some circular letters in this period began to take printed form, copies of which were distributed to members of scholarly groups (figure E.2). This new physical form of circular letters changed reading practices from group readings in turn and in public to individual readings, which subsequently caused a shift in the networking process. As modern printing methods made the existing reading culture obsolete, scholarly networking delivered totally different social meanings. These old textual forms produced with modern printing technology forced their users to compromise between the old reading habits meant to maximize the utility of scant texts and the free use of ubiquitous printed matter available through mass production.

The mass production of letter-writing manuals in this period also exhibits a distinct way in which old epistles were adapted to modern printing technologies. Besides providing diverse model letters for many possible human relationships, some of the manuals also included facsimiles of calligraphic masterpieces. Intriguingly, a spiral letter appeared for the first time in a printed book, Great Way for Reading Manuscript Letters (Taebang ch’ogandok), despite the fact that this textual layout was no longer used in actual correspondence (figure E.3). Because the page, on which a single-page letter was printed, was folded back vertically to tie its loose ends with other pages, a single sheet was split into recto (the right page on the image) and verso (the left page on the image). The readers had to begin to read the longer vertical columns on the recto, which continued on the verso. Then they were to move on to the one line of text written on the upper margin from verso first and then to recto. They then continued to read text in the right margin written with a spiral effect. Finally, the readers were to read shorter columns interspersed between longer columns, recto first and then verso. The readers had to turn the page back and forth to follow this particular reading order. The inclusion of the vernacular textual form made reading this book a meandering experience, unlike conventional book reading. When printed books no longer represented a devernacularized and Sinicized domain amid the rise of the Korean alphabet as a national script in the early twentieth century,²⁰ the Chosŏn spiral letter ironically found its place on printed pages. Instead of instructing readers on how to compose this peculiar letter form, this spiral letter exemplified the nostalgia about the obsolete epistolary trend of the recent past.

This kind of overlap between Chosŏn epistolary culture and modern letter writing also affected the composition of letter-writing manuals published in this period. For example, Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature, wrote Yi Kwangsu’s Model Letters (Ch’unwŏn sŏgan munbŏm) in 1939. In it, he clearly expressed his intention to disseminate his modern knowledge to readers while providing literary entertainment. About one-third of the letters in this publication are Yi’s own, sent out in the past, and the rest are his fictive letters.²¹ Just as T’oegye turned to Zhu Xi’s letters to disseminate Neo-Confucian knowledge, the legacy of reading letters to expand knowledge was continued even by early twentieth-century intellectuals who were saturated with Western scholarship.

Chosŏn political text forms still occasionally reappear. In August 2004, more than forty elders from northern Ch’ungch’ŏng presented their memorial to President Roh Moo-hyun (in office 2003–2008). They protested the exclusion of the region from the possible sites being considered for government institutions. They presented their memorial along with an ax, which symbolically implied their relentlessness, requesting the ruler to behead them if their claim was wrong (figure E.4). This type of political performance with an ax (chibu sangso) was begun during the Koryŏ dynasty by U T’ak (1263–1342)²² and was restaged twice during the Chosŏn period, respectively by Cho Hŏn (1544–1592) in 1589 and Ch’oe Ikhyŏn in 1876.²³ The historical memories of this particular political performance have been kept alive; thus, even the protesters in contemporary South Korea learned and restaged it for their purpose. After 2004, there were at least four other cases in which the presentation of memorials to the president with an ax featured contentious performances.²⁴ While the performers of the first two protests came from the conservative background of Confucian organizations, the other groups that led the latter three had no connection to Confucian tradition in terms of their political identity. In particular, in the most recent case in 2014, the demonstrators calling for the expansion of the national pension system to the poor elderly wore traditional commoners’ outfits. This starkly contrasted with the other cases in which protesters dressed up as Confucian literati, with scholars’ caps and gowns. Although this decision to wear commoners’ clothing visually emphasized the indigent economic condition of the protesters, it brushed aside the historical origin of ax memorials as a kind of political performance reserved for male Confucian elites. These protesters aimed only to make their political activism more dramatic and eye-catching through this traditional performance, regardless of the historical veracity of what they restaged.

As much as the performance with an ax caught people’s attention, the emphasis on the number of participants in maninso holds relevance in contemporary social movements. In October 2010, the elders of the Andong area presented a joint memorial signed by 10,093 people to President Lee Myung-bak (in office 2008–2013). Its modest political message, however, did not match up with its colossal, 100-meter-long physical form (figure E.5). It pleaded for the establishment of a lifelong education center in Andong.²⁵ In fact, this joint memorial was produced as part of the festival for lifelong education in northern Kyŏngsang earlier in September, and the organizers dubbed it “the reenactment of Yŏngnam maninso tradition.”²⁶ The media coverage spotlighted the maninso as the cultural heritage of the region; its reenactment, following the late Chosŏn protocol, demonstrates the historical sophistication of Andong as the center of Yŏngnam Confucian culture. In this respect, the superficial request it makes does not seem to really matter. Regardless of the text’s actual political effectiveness, joint memorials are still considered the representative textual form of traditional political communication between the ruler and the people.

Some other activists in various social movements repurposed this direct connection with the top level of state authority through maninso in fashioning their political performances. In 2015, for example, the environmental movement organizations in the Kyŏngju area protested the health problems caused for nearby residents by the Wŏlsŏng Nuclear Power Plant. They demanded that the closure of the oldest reactor should be decided through a referendum. The government, however, simply ignored the protest by permitting the reoperation of the reactor. The activists decided to produce a maninso to intensify the case. They did recognize that this traditional political ritual, which required the citizens to sign their names with a brush along with their thumbprints, would slow down the whole process and reduce the accessibility to their movement, compared to more convenient online petition drives. At the same time, however, they emphasized that 10,181 people eventually joined in signing the maninso within just two months, which, they argued, testified to the Kyŏngju citizens’ overwhelming objection to the government decision.²⁷ In other words, the political effectiveness of the maninso was not derived from the rapid dissemination of their messages or efficient mobilization of people but depended upon the cumbersome and laborious process that was materialized as the monumental text. The media coverage also explains in detail how strenuous it was to put together seventy-two sheets of paper bearing people’s signatures, which were later mounted on blank sheets of paper. It took two weeks to complete this process for volunteers who joined in the effort after their full-time jobs. The task required five to eight people to work past 11:00 p.m. every night. The final product measured about ninety meters in length. The massive physical form of the maninso format was clearly distinguished from the signature-collecting campaigns that other social movements had previously mobilized in contemporary South Korea.²⁸ This maninso was actually displayed in public twice, in the Kyŏngju City Hall and in the Kwanghwamun Square in Seoul, which many news media covered as an unprecedented event. Just as nonofficial Chosŏn scholars dramatized the number of participants and the monumental physical form of maninso to intensify their political messages, the appropriation of this political technique in contemporary Korea allowed the protesters to attract attention from both the news media and the public.

The current written culture precipitates unprecedented patterns of political involvement. In the presidential election of 2002, Roh Moo-hyun, whom few had initially supported, won by virtue of the new communicative modes developed in Internet technology. The result of this election was not so much decided by Roh’s political ideas or pledges. Instead, his supporters’ domination of the campaign through the Internet transformed apolitical sectors of South Koreans, which had been already saturated with these new communicative modes, into an effective political group.²⁹ Roh’s campaign vigorously propagated his messages on Internet sites that featured video clips of the candidate and audio broadcasts by celebrity supporters. Moreover, through the written communication among the supporters online, it organized the voluntary distribution and collection of “piggy banks,” through which Roh raised more than 7 billion won from more than two hundred thousand individuals. The existing media forms, such as newspapers and television, reproduced the stories about all these new campaign strategies emerging on the Internet, which contributed to set the terms of this election as “opposition between reformist and conservative or between new politics and old politics.”³⁰ Similarly, in Chosŏn Korea, the lifestyle of the elite class had already been saturated with epistolary culture, which was adaptable and collaborative. Their production and visualization of new types of political epistolary texts enabled them to grow into a powerful political group. Besides facilitating the delivery of opinions, the new communicative forms made addressing individual political imaginaries and confirming them in groups effortless, which sparked social actors’ political ambitions. The choice and mastery of the genre best suited for the communicative mode of the given period could empower the people at the social, cultural, and political margins to generate meaningful changes in the methods of domestic communication, knowledge production, social interaction, and political participation.