Joseon History in Episodes — Why a Seoul Neighbourhood Is Named Apgujeong

• In a story about learning history, a pupil asks why anyone has to study it.
• The teacher gives the pupil a knock on the head.
• The pupil, quite reasonably, asks what that was for and repeats the question.
• The teacher goes to do it again. This time the pupil ducks.
• The teacher asks whether the pupil would have moved in time without remembering the first knock.

There is a familiar warning that people who forget history have no future. The saying circulates with different attributions.

The classroom story makes the idea concrete. Having seen one response fail can help you recognise a similar situation before you have to decide what to do.

Does History Have to Be Dull?

Much of the history I learned at school came with an exam attached. We memorised the year of an event or the achievements of a king and learned which answers would earn the marks.

It is easy to leave that experience thinking the material was dull when what you remember most clearly is the work of memorising it.

Give an event a setting and show who had to decide what to do, and it becomes a story you can follow.

Telling Joseon History in Episodes

In Five Forces That Move World History, Takashi Saitō brings events together by theme. The history is easier to follow because you can see why one event is being put next to another.

A story can give a date its place in a sequence of choices. It can also make it possible to ask what else might have happened.

In Episodes in Korean History, Pyo Hak-ryeol puts accounts from official records alongside anecdotes preserved in other sources and oral tradition. He keeps a loose chronological order, giving individual episodes the room to show why they were remembered.

The effect can be that of someone telling you about a world they lived in. It brings to mind E. H. Carr’s idea of history as a continuing conversation between past and present.

Two episodes stayed with me.

The Messenger Who Did Not Return from Hamheung

Taejo, born Yi Seong-gye, founded Joseon. Violent struggles among his sons changed the court he had built and cleared the way for Yi Bang-won, who became King Taejong. Taejo withdrew from the capital and spent time in Hamheung.

In the familiar story, Taejong sent royal envoys to bring his father back, and those who went failed to return. The details belong to the tradition behind the expression. A Hamheung envoy is still someone sent on an errand who fails to come back or send word.

Apgujeong Takes Its Name from a Pavilion

Apgujeong is now associated with a fashionable part of Gangnam. The name once belonged to a pavilion built on the Han River by the Joseon official Han Myeong-hoe. It evokes the idea of being at ease in the company of gulls.

The building is gone. A name put on a riverside pavilion centuries ago is still in everyday use.

E. H. Carr and a Conversation with the Past

Carr describes history as a continuing conversation between the present and the past. This book gives that idea a visible form when it follows an expression or place name back to a story that might otherwise feel remote.

Knowing an earlier situation can help you see how the present got to be this way. It also gives you another example to think with when a similar decision comes up.

Readers whose last encounter with Joseon history was an exam may find a different reason to remember these episodes.

Book Information

Episodes in Korean History: The Joseon Dynasty (Korean title, translated)

Author

Pyo Hak-ryeol

Publication date

5 April 2013

ISBN13

9788992151481

View the book on YES24

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