Boundless Winds of Empire - (Premodern East Asia: New Horizons) by Sixiang Wang (Paperback)

About the Book

Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2025 James B. Palais Prize, Association for Asian Studies

Winner, 2024 UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award, Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley

For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.

Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn's rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea's rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire's legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.

Review Quotes

A study rich in empirical and theoretical contributions. By weaving together a set of rigorously analyzed case studies on Chosŏn-Ming relations, Wang has succeeded in not only deconstructing the old framework of the tributary system but also creating a new framework.-- "H-Asia"

Wang has not only laid the theoretical and methodological footings of a new paradigm of diplomatic history, he has opened numerous doors and left them ajar for future scholars to enter.-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

An exceptional work. Wang's stimulating and highly illuminating account should be read by anyone interested in Korea-China relations, the workings of empire, rhetorical strategies, or the history of diplomacy.--Felix Kuhn "Journal of Chinese History"

Boundless Winds of Empire sets a new standard for Anglophone scholarship on Chosŏn Korea.--Eugene Y. Park, author of Korea: A History

Generations of scholars have stripped down the relationship of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China into an abstract model of the 'tribute system.' With sensitive readings of poetry, apocryphal inscriptions, and other sources rarely considered by the model builders, Sixiang Wang brilliantly restores the idiosyncratic texture of Korean-Ming relations.--Christopher P. Atwood, author of The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources

Sixiang Wang's Boundless Winds of Empire is destined to be a classic. Wang provides a new lens to study the historical relations between Ming and Chosŏn. His emphasis on ritual and rhetoric as frames of reference and the extensive use of Chinese and Korean sources make a tremendous contribution to numerous fields.--David C. Kang, author of American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century

This is a book I have been waiting for. Wang argues that historically Korea was not the compliant vassal that Chinese imagined it to be, but a canny role-player manipulating China's imperial myth so as to constrain its capacity to dominate. An eloquent revision of what we thought we knew.--Timothy Brook, coeditor of Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations Since Chinggis Khan

About the Author

Sixiang Wang is assistant professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.