『杞人閒商量』, 19세기 초 洪羲祖가 바라본 조선의 지리지 제작

Abstract

Many local gazetteers were made in Chosŏn Korea. Some were created by the government, including Sejongshillok chiriji (世宗實錄地理志, 1454, Local gazetteer in Annals of King Sejong), P'altojiriji (八道地理志, 1478, Local gazetteers of Eight Provinces), Shinjŭng donggukyŏjisŭngnam (新增東國輿地勝覽, 1530, Geographical Survey of Chosŏn). After the Japanese invasion(1592~1598), however, the government production of gazetteers was reduced, and private production by scholars gradually increased. Over the course of almost three hundred years(1530~1830), the Chosŏn government did not publish any complete, official gazetteers. The reason the Chosŏn government did not create and publish local gazetteers remains unknown to the historians of Chosŏn and modern academia. This paper introduces and analyzes the manuscript called Kiin Hansangnyang (杞人閒商量), the title of which can be interpret as “Thoughts of a worried and unemployed man” (“my thoughts on the Chosŏn gazetteers”) Within the pages of this book, the author expresses his thoughts concerning local gazetteers and offers his suggestions on their future production. The book is a significant source that sheds light on the knowledge and point of view of a 19th-century scholar on local gazetteers. Three surviving copies of Kiin Hansangnyang have been found to date: the Academy of Korean Studies(AKS) version, the Hanyang University version, and the Toyo Bunko version. No direct records exist regarding the author or date of creation for these copies. In this paper, I make the first attempt to determine the author and date of these copies based on the content of the three copies of the book. I argue that the author is Hong Hŭicho(洪羲祖, 1787~?), and that this book was written in 1838. Through a comparative analysis of the three manuscripts, I found that the contents of the Hanyang University and Toyo Bunko versions are the same, but the AKS version was notably revised and modified. In this book Hong explains the history of the National Gazetteers and attempts to state the problem caused their production to cease. He criticizes the existing local gazetteers, calling them outdated and pointing out their weakness. For instance, he argues that they consist of many incorrect geographical facts, too much information about the people and poetical works. Thus Hong emphasizes the need for the official production of new local gazetteers by the government, and he wrote suggestions that were carefully considered, such as selecting government officials who would be responsible for the process and how taxes would financially support the process of creating the local gazetteers. He suggests that the new local gazetteers should remove the literary works and facts about people, instead include only the information that would be practically useful to government administration, such as the size of farming territory, size of the army, the distance between villages, etc. The Kiin Hansangnyang examined in this paper expands our understanding of the stagnation in the creation of local gazetteers by the Chosŏn government and show late Chosŏn scholars’ perspectives on local gazetteers, their critical estimation of the government work, and the struggle for improvement, modification, and centralization of local gazetteer’s production.