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The Manchu-Korean Expeditions to the Amur: A New Historical Setting in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Northeast Asia

  • The Review of Korean History
  • 2013, (110), pp.205-246
  • Publisher : The Historical Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Seung Bum Kye 1

1서강대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

With the Manchu conquest of Ming China in the mid-1600s, Manchuria became a sparsely populated region: the majority of the Manchu population left their homeland and rushed to China. The Qing authority also concentrated all its energy on the military campaigns against Ming loyalists in the south. The Koreans on the peninsula also abandoned Manchuria, not only because they regarded it as a barbaric land but also because they never wanted to offend the Manchu. It was in this situation that new-comers began to infiltrate into northern Manchuria alongside the Amur (Heilung) River and the Sungari River. The Manchu-Korean joint expeditions to the Amur were planned and launched subsequently. In the early phase of the Manchu-Russian/Cossack conflicts, the Manchu suffered some successive defeats because they were surpassed in firepower and mobility. In the mid-1650s, for this reason, the Manchu authority demanded twice that Chosŏn send some troops armed with Korean-type muskets. Referring to Korean and Russian sources, this paper examines and provides the details of the expeditions and interprets the historical meaning of the expeditions in the context of the emergence of a new political topography in Northeast Asia in the mid-1600s.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.