Boundless Winds Of Empire: Rhetoric And Ritual In Early Choson Diplomacy With Ming China (Premodern East Asia: New Horizons)

For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Choson dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Choson political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order. Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Choson's rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Choson drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and s