19세기 전반 조선 지식인의 대외인식에 관한 일고

Abstract

Yeonhaengjamnok (燕行雜錄) is a travelogue of the 1822 envoy from Joseon to Qing, which is written by an anonymous Joseon intellectual. It contains various detailed information of Chinese humanities, sociology, and geography at the time, in vast volume. The geographic information contained in the travelogue has an especially important historical significance, in the sense that the book is representing a widened world view of the author who grasped the world outside China. This widened perception of the world was derived from the shifting view on Qing China in chuson at the time. As Qing enjoyed its prosperity, Joseon intellectuals in the 18th century started to see Qing from a different perspective. A group of scholars called ‘Bukakpa (School of Northen Studies)’ among the intelligentsia of Joseon pursued to learn the advanced civilization of Qing and tried to see Qing with an objective point of view. The author of Yeonhaengjamnok accepted this new perspective and expressed an uncritical and positive attitude toward Qing’s prosperity in his book. He regarded Qing as something his country should rely on, unlike those Bukakpa scholars who tried to carefully observe and analyze Qing. His perspective on Qing is well reflected on his widened world view. In Yeonhaengjamnok, Qing is described as the center of the world and those countries which were not included in the traditional cino-centric order of Ming are newly accepted as a part of Qing’s new hegemony. The author adopted the world view of a renowned geography a book from the late Ming China, Guangyuji (廣輿記), and established Qing’s world order based on that. He also accepted ‘the theory of Chinese Origin of the Western Civilization’ and used it to insert the areas that were not included in Guangyuji into Qing’s world order. This study tried to analyze the widened world view represented in Yeonhaengjamnok. The changed perspective enables ones to understand the re-establishing process of Joseon intellectuals’ perception of the world in the early 19th century and to see how the tradition of Northen Studies in 18th century was appreciated in the following century.