Format and WordPress stuff
For format of posts, I want to give a special shout-out to Eva this week who’s included an image, and hyperlinks and a bibliography, oh my!! Thank you!
I encourage all of you to see your weekly 5-15 as a chance to sharpen your writing skills a bit: the more you practice, the better you’ll get at analytical writing, and at integrating some funky tech things like tags, hyperlinks, and images with captions. Let’s have some fun!
Challenge: who will be the first to post a Korean history meme? Here are some sites where you can find free templates to create your own: Canva, I:heart:img (click on “select meme template), IMGflip.
Content
To take us all the way back to the beginning… Oh hang on! As Jenny’s post points out: the beginnings of the Three Kingdoms are not that easy to determine: nationalism and myths have conspired against sound historical research to give us an older than reasonable start-date for these kingdoms.
I can solve the mystery of Buyeo’s (Puyŏ) disappearance for Eva: it first was annexed by Goguryeo, and eventually conquered outright. The historical records are a bit messy but most historians agree that the Goguryeo royal line descended from Buyeo. Interesting to know: they not only took over the territory and its people, but also the founding myth. Check out a scholarly treatment of that topic in this book (already in Zotero!): Grayson, James Huntley. Myths and Legends from Korea : An Annotated Compendium of Ancient and Modern Materials. London: Routledge, 2011. (So, that’s how useful the group library is!)
Kaya was (naturally) enchanted by Kaya (which is spelled Gaya in the newer transcription), and you can read a bit more about its history in our student textbook chapters three and four; both chapters also show how the vagueness of the historical record have inadvertently created space for nationalists in Japan to interpret history in an exaggerated way to their advantage.
William makes the fair point that you’d assume all three Kingdoms could band together against the Chinese, but they didn’t. The alliances shift constantly: Silla sought (and received) protection from Goguryeo, then Baekje banded together with Silla against Goguryeo, and in the end Silla became an ally of the Tang. It was cut-throat competition for hundreds of years.
Ryan reminds us that the Samguk Sagi (Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms) provides us a lot of information from the Tang point of view. When we stop and think about this (e.g. using the “How to Read a Text” questions), that’s strange because Kim Pusik was a Goryeo historian, and he refers to Goguryeo as “our” side. The reason is that much of the historical materials from Goguryeo were lost during these incessant wars.
Anna points out that literacy was the new thing in town, and it sure was darn useful to administrators! It also lays the foundation that connects the Korean peninsula and Japan with mainland China and Vietnam: they shared a written language (classical, or literary Chinese), and a corpus of texts, and this functioned in a very similar way to Latin in Europe, including the influence on the modern-day spoken languages for vocabulary.
Buddhism was the other new thing in town, and there may be a bit of a difference between your prior understanding about the religion and how you see it functioning in the early Korean kingdoms. That is because it is a very flexible religion (with also a more philosophical component to it in some traditions), and it has a few thousand years of development across a wide geographic region, with no central authority to try and keep it to a fixed interpretation of set scriptures. In fact, some traditions outright reject texts as a means to reach enlightenment/Nirvana. But as Abe and Serena remind us: remember that Buddhism had a bit of a rocky start! I also want to draw attention to this article: Jorgensen, John. “Goguryeo Buddhism: An Imported Religion in a Multi-Ethnic Warrior Kingdom.” Review of Korean Studies 15, no. 1 (2012): 59–107. Goguryeo [Koguryŏ] did have Buddhism, but it may never haver reached far beyond the elite, is the main point the author makes. I’ve added it to Zotero and included the PDF.
Not history but also useful:
Many of you shared how you intend to continue using Zotero, and I am grateful to Anna for sharing how enlightened she was that this type of software exists, I feel vindicated in taking time out of our schedule so you can learn how to use it. If you need any assistance, please reach out to me or Kelly, and we will help you. This tool is too useful to discard now you’ve been made aware of its existence 🙂
If you are set on a topic for a deeper dive in the exploration of available literature, I suggest you add a folder to the group library, and save items there. It will help us to keep things organized.
We can also use tags and add notes (I can show you, if that’s tech gobbledygook).
Oh, and if you want to be a good citizen of our “Learning Commons”, or itch to demonstrate what you’d traditionally define as participation: you can always do some tidying up in our group library: identify duplicates and delete one (e.g. one without link to PDF), add tags, add notes, or if you see mistakes: tidy up metadata (that is: information like author, translator, date of publication etc.). If everybody does a little bit, we all benefit tremendously from our group library!
