Archives, Archival Practices, and the Writing of History in Premodern Korea: An Introduction

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month in 1760, a magistrate of Yesan Lesser Prefecture (hyŏn 縣) submitted a report to the Provincial Governor’s Office (sunyŏng 巡營) about a text titled Comprehensive Summary of Burial Days (Changil t’ongyo 葬日通要). The office forwarded an order from the Bureau of Astronomy (Kwansanggam 觀象監) to locate the text, and the Yesan magistrate replied as follows: “[Though we] thoroughly searched Buddhist temples, [local] Confucian academies, and some private houses within the area [under my supervision] by all means, it was not found.” Comprehensive Summary of Burial Days had been compiled at the order of King T’aejong (r. 1400–18), who wished to rectify existing misbelief and malpractice concerning the selection of auspicious funeral dates on the part of the Chosŏn populace. The project had been completed in the first year of King Sejong’s reign (r. 1418–50), but it seems that the text was lost or forgotten for many years. Scarcely any information is available on this text in existing sources, save for a few entries in the Veritable Records of King Sejong (Sejong sillok 世宗實錄): neither the context in which the government reached out to the local magistrate’s office to look for the text nor whether it was eventually retrieved from one of the other local repositories is known. Nevertheless, this short episode reveals various sites where records were kept in Chosŏn Korea outside of official repositories—such as Buddhist monasteries, Confucian and local academies, and private homes. It also prompts us to consider a number of intriguing points concerning both the perceptions about and practices of record-keeping in premodern Korea: how documents were produced