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Koryŏ Mirrored in the Mongols－A Review on the Early 13th Century Koryŏ Records on the Mongols－

LEE Miji 1

1국사편찬위원회

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In the 1st month of the 6th year of the King Kojong’s reign This review has been ignited from this episode quoted above, it is an excerpt from the Koryŏsajŏryo. After reading this stunning account, I collected the records carrying the Koryŏ people’s observations on the newly acquainted Mongols. The Koryŏ people mainly noticed the differences in etiquettes in several occasions, and as a matter of course the differences between the Mongols and the Koryŏ were documented in an unfavourable voice. The 13th century Koryŏ people called the Mongols “savages” and described the Mongols as “beastly”, “barbaric”. Comparing the series of accounts on the Mongols with the course which the Koryŏ people had gone through while familiarizing themselves with the neighboring Khitans in the 10th-11th century I assume that the Koryŏ people feared any new neighbors who had happened to share the border with their dynasty since the new polity could possibly menace the Koryŏ through the land route any given time. Thus Koryŏ people’s fear for the new polity on the border was expressed in derogation in Koryŏ documents. For the question why the Koryŏ people designated the Mongols as barbarians I suggest that we should take the standpoint of the Koryŏ people of the early 13th century. They had lived within a certain world order of their own that had been maintained for almost 300 years since the Koryŏ dynasty had been established in the early 10th century. In order to preserve the world with which they had been acquainted the Koryŏ people first had to belittle the newcomers from outside of their ‘world’ and declared them as ‘barbarians’. Then the Koryŏ could slowly take up the Mongol as a new partner who they had to deal with, and eventually they accepted the newly formed Mongol-centered world order. This process not only was applied to the relations with the Mongols but functioned as one of the typical diplomatic tactics of the Koryŏ.

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