“Capturing History through a Person,” the title of the introduction, conveys the main thrust of the book very well. Sun Joo Kim defines her new book as a study of the northern region of Chosŏn Korea presented from a regional perspective through one man's life. The man who is lucky to be rescued by Kim after several hundred years of oblivion is Yi Sihang. Analyzing the social and political environment of P'yŏngan Province where Yi Sihang lived, Kim highlights regional discrimination against people of this northern region during the Chosŏn period of Korean history.

In the first chapter Kim closely examines Yi Sihang's personal and familial connections and networks. Then in the following chapter she describes Yi's life in detail. In the process Kim explains key institutions and political issues of the time, including the higher civil service examination system and scandals and problems surrounding it, factional strife among the elite, and the importance of ancestor worship rituals. Chapter 3 focuses on Yi Sihang's effort to articulate and defend the identity and culture of the elite of P'yŏngan Province. Yi Sihang constructed a new cultural imagery of P'yŏngan Province as he contradicted a central government official who had disparaged the society and culture of his region. Yi and his colleagues succeeded in having rescinded an order of the king that for a thirty-year period had prohibited residents of P'yŏngan Province from sitting for higher civil service examinations. In Chapter 4, Kim presents an intriguing story of how Yi Sihang helped create a hero for P'yŏngan Province by recasting the memory of Kim Kyŏngsŏ. Kim was a commanding general in the 1619 Ming–Chosŏn joint operation against the Jurchen tribes in the north. Thanks to Yi Sihang's reconstruction of his life and activities, General Kim was reborn as the incarnation of loyalty, courage, and unbending spirit. In her conclusion, Kim reiterates Yi's achievements as a historian and as a bureaucrat and a policy maker, and emphasizes Yi's efforts to shore up the regional subjectivity of his beloved province. Kim states that Yi Sihang may have created “a few small cracks in the dominant culture leading to the liberation of northerners from discriminatory discourses” and suggests that Yi's views and region-specific writings had a certain impact on the advance of Korean nationalism in the twentieth century.

Kim makes an important contribution to Korean intellectual history by describing and interpreting, for the first time, in a full book, the life and accomplishments of an intellectual from P'yŏngan Province during the Chosŏn period. This book stands on her previous studies of the regional history of P'yŏngan Province, including publications on Paek Kyŏnghae and the hyangan of Chŏngju. Kim's paper on Paek Kyŏnghae was the first historical research to focus on a single intellectual from the Northern area in Chosŏn Korea. The historiography of the Chosŏn period has lacked proper balance because central and southern regions have dominated the research agenda at the expense of northern areas. Northern areas like P'yŏngan Province had societal and cultural traditions very different from those of the central and southern regions of Korea. Kim's book establishes a new milestone for the emerging effort in the field to develop a more balanced explanation of Chosŏn history that incorporates the history of the northern regions.

This book is also important in that it is based on solid primary research, including the uncovering of new historical materials. Before Kim's studies, the collected literary works of Chosŏn-period intellectuals from P'yŏngan Province had not come under close and thorough investigation. Kim correctly argues that the writings of peripheral intellectuals contain unique information about their own areas and thus cannot be overlooked if one wishes to understand Chosŏn society in depth. Korean historians will be stimulated by this book to probe into northern intellectuals’ literary works that have been neglected so far.

Kim makes clear from early on what her research questions are, and reveals where her theoretical inspiration comes from. She adopts a biographical format and presents her study as a microhistory that does not shy away from a structural examination of history. At the same time, hers is a history of mentalities. Part of the challenge in writing a book like this comes from the fact that she is trying to reach an understanding of the structure of history by looking into the life and writings of an intellectual who was not a hero in any sense and whose works exhibit a perspective from the periphery. Her strategy is using insights from Western historians like Ginzburg and Poni, who argued that “a truly exceptional document can be much more revealing than a thousand stereotypical documents” (p. 14). Kim's awareness of the theoretical issues involved in her study helps Korean historiography move beyond the usual confines of the field to engage in fruitful conversations with a larger historical literature.

Despite all the accomplishments and merits of the book, as a fellow historian who has also written on the question of what P'yŏngan history reveals for the larger history of Chosŏn generally, I would like to raise a few questions about the book's premises and arguments. First of all, there is the question of the potential for focusing on Yi Sihang if one's final goal is to reach a fuller understanding of Chosŏn politics and society. The subtitle of the book is “resurrecting regional identity through the life and work of Yi Sihang” and Kim makes clear that “the purpose of this book is to resurrect forgotten historical memories of people, family, lineage, and region, and at the same time enrich the social history of late Chosŏn.” I think, however, that in order to grasp the dynamic and shifting relationship between the central government and the Pyŏngan region Kim needs to have a broader view of the scene than what Yi's life and work shows. Yi Sihang's interest and activities were concentrated on P'yŏngan Province's regional interest and legitimacy as well as securing himself high-ranking positions in the central government. In my view, however, the social characteristics of P'yŏngan Province of the period can best be revealed in the areas of commerce and economic development, rather than in literary works or Confucian thinking of the local literati like Yi Sihang. Kings such as King Yŏngjo and King Chŏngjo were making vigorous efforts to reorganize the political system and revamp social and economic policies, and the changing views of the central government on the Pyŏngan region were an important component of these new policies. P'yŏngan Province is also the region that produced one of the greatest people's rebellions in the late Chosŏn period, the Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812. For these reasons I believe that it is essential to bring into view the voices and activities of merchants, military men, commoners, and kings if one wishes to fully understand the social history of P'yŏngan Province, as I have argued in my own works. To attempt to reconstruct the social history of the late Chosŏn period, or recover regional P'yŏngan identity by narrowly focusing on the world of a Confucian intellectual, seems to me to be an impossibly daunting task. In other words, I have serious reservations about Kim's premise of capturing the regional identity of P'yŏngan Province and the social history of late Chosŏn through the voices of local and central Confucian literati and bureaucrats alone.

The second question is about Kim's interpretation and evaluation of Yi Sihang's accomplishments. She writes that “while Sihang's personal merits and economic resources nurtured his cultural life, his bureaucratic success was crippled by the contemporary political discourse” (p. 144). Did his accomplishments and merits indeed warrant bureaucratic success in the central government? Political discrimination against the literati from P'yŏngan Province in Chosŏn was justified by a widely shared belief that there were no sajok in northen regions. Sajok is defined by Kim as the political and social elites of Chosŏn. The discourse of the non-existence of sajok in northern areas functioned as an excuse, but at the same time it was part of the actual reasoning behind discriminatory practices. Kim has long refuted that discourse, and repeats in this book her argument that northern elites conducted their cultural and social lives as they imagined the yangban of other regions did. She asserts that the allegations that there were no yangban in the north were manifestations of the prejudices and biases held by the central elites. The sajok, however, were different from the yangban, and repeated statements by Confucian literati during the late Chosŏn period that there were no sajok in the northern region cannot be treated as a product of mere prejudice. The life and accomplishments of Yi Sihang, as put forward in this book, do not convince me that the literati of P'yŏngan Province, represented here by Yi Sihang, were in possession of academic and cultural assets comparable to those of officials and scholars from the central and southern regions. Praise of and commiseration with Yi Sihang emanating from governors and Yi's friends at the private level are not enough to confirm his qualifications for bureaucratic success. Yi's historical studies did not advance beyond the region in scope. He did not speak to national policies nor participate in academic debates that could have impressed literati and officials from across the country. Kim's cautious suggestion on Yi Sihang's influence on later ideas and social changes seems to lack sufficient evidential basis.

An example that shows the passive nature of the northern literati's effort at asserting their regional legitimacy is a series of discussions on Tan'gun. According to Kim's explanation, although Yi Sihang thought that P'yŏngyang's historical genealogy started with Tan'gun, he did not mention Tan'gun in his 1714 memorial, most likely because he did not want to go against the central elites who were inclined to respect the heritage of Kija more than that of Tan'gun. In a previous article Kim emphasized the fact that Paek Kyŏnghae, a P'yŏngan literatus, gave Tan'gun equal footing with Kija in 1802. But, as I have explained elsewhere, King Yŏngjo and King Chŏngjo worked to enhance Tan'gun's authority more actively and much earlier than Paek. For example, King Yŏngjo bestowed a hanging board on the shrine of Tan'gun in 1724, not much later than the year of Yi Sihang's memorial.

I am on the same page with Kim in criticizing the practice of regional discrimination in Chosŏn politics. But I think that criticism alone does not suffice because discriminatory practices and discourses evolved out of certain structures and logics that governed politics and society, transformation of which was thus necessary to end the discriminatory practices. What is important is to see how Neo-confucian literati, government officials, and the kings understood the reasons and effect of such discrimination against northern people and what directions their effort to reform the system took and why.

Thanks to Kim's hard work we now can hear the clear voice of an intellectual from the north who lived in the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Chosŏn, and I congratulate her for pushing the field toward a new direction with an engaging and important book. I do think, however, that Yi Sihang was a provincial intellectual not closely enmeshed with ordinary people's lives and the commercial development of the region. He thus represents rather a small slice of the P'yŏngan society, whose case serves as a rather narrow window to look into the complex politics of the late Chosŏn period.