1883년 조․영수호통상조약 한문본 초안의 내용과 의미 －영국 국립기록보존소 소장 자료를 중심으로－

Abstract

The documents related to the treaty between Korea and Britain in 1883 among those written in Chinese at the National Archives of the United Kingdom(FO 1080/190~191), mainly consists of the correspondence between the diplomatic envoys and drafts of the main treaty and attached agreements. Focusing on the drafts, there are some parts fixed in favor of Britain, disadvantageous to Korea. Those containing the elimination of the conditional abolition clause on the extraterritoriality, the omission of the clause on imprisoning the merchants in case of being caught for trading at non-treaty ports and the revision of the favored-nation clause into the reciprocal one from that of being unilateral correspond to this case. On the other hand, there are also such cases in which the clauses originally disadvantageous to Korea were deleted or changed, as the change of the regulation for the tax in case of renting lands outside the concession, the elimination of the sentence containing disobeying the decision by the government on the amount of the tax in case of renting lands and the change of the clause containing prohibition of the local governor’s interference on British employing necessary manpower for traveling into that of accommodating he travelers. These changes might have been caused by the intention of the British negotiation representative H.S.Parkes to save the East Asian treaty system integrated at the treaty between Korea and Britain in 1883. Meanwhile, the reduce of importance for Korea by Britain can be inferred from the downgrade of formality in diplomacy with Korea by Britain, and the clauses in which Korean opinion seems to have been accepted also can be found from the drafts.