My projects reconstructs the history of a Korean family of intermediate social status, the chungin (“middle people”), between 1590 and 1933, and traces changing Korean conceptions of identity and tradition. In a nation that proudly claims a history of five thousand years, invented traditions are potent ingredients of identity. By the early twentieth century, less than a generation after the abolition of slavery, every Korean was claiming aristocratic ( yangban) ancestry. Even so, today an ordinary Korean barely knows the whereabouts of ancestors immediately before the twentieth century. These contradictions illustrate the persistence of the status ambiguities and insecurities that outlived the social institutions of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). Neither aristocrat nor commoner, my subject family offers a good avenue for exploring these issues. In the late Choson period, the capital chungin sought to utilize their ever-increasing cultural and economic capital to break the aristocratic monopoly on political power. Then during the reform era from about 1880 to 1904 when chungin achieved prominence in politics, economy, and culture, they also criticized whatever they saw as the vestige of premodern customs, whereas commoners and manumitted slaves imitated aristocratic culture. While not rejecting conventional scholarship’s tendency to link chungin to modernity, I also try to tell a story of human interest that is of value to the Korean history field suffering from a dearth of narratives. Complicating the current understanding of chungin, my study argues that Seoul chungin as a distinct social category encompassed greater variety of professionals and took considerably longer to crystallize than conventionally recognized. Existing studies generally focus on a small number of famous chungin who collaborated with the Japanese, but I demonstrate that many chungin blamed the Japanese take-over of Korea for their loss of newfound opportunities in politics. Ultimately for the Koreans, colonial experience caused a rupture with the pre-colonial past that not only spawned a modern discourse on identity and tradition built on a social fantasy wherein everyone is of aristocratic descent but also excluded chungin as a historical agent.

Prior to this project, I had researched on the Choson military examination (mukwa) system that led up to the publication of my book, Between Dreams and Reality. The book begins with a simple observation: between 1650 and 1850 when Korea was relatively free from invasions and rebellions, millions of Koreans chose to take the examination for military appointments. I show that the examination spurred the subdivision of the ruling elite into central civil officials, central military officials, and local aristocrats while offering a status credential to nonelites of means, some of whom also achieved cultural competence. Thriving in late Choson Korea were the cultural arenas where the elites and the masses could share values deriving from Confucian ideology. I argue that the military examination degree as a social leaven contributed to the stability of the Choson system by giving men an outlet for their ambitions while buttressing the existing social hierarchy. In the long run, though, not allowing greater political participation by local elites and nonelites prevented them from remaining loyal to the system. By the late nineteenth century, the center’s power of moral persuasion, as well as physical coercion, to make the country follow its dictates had greatly diminished.