東亞文化圈視野下朝鮮後期對澳門的認知

Since the sixteenth century, as a place of settlement by the Portuguese, Macau has been a transfer station for European missionary and mercantile activities in East Asia. It helped the Europeans reach the Chinese coastal area and Japan, establishing interaction between the Europeans and these two countries. Much research has been done by scholars in the fields of Chinese Maritime History and the History of East-West Cultural Interaction. However, the scholarly world has overlooked the relationship between Macau and Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) because they did not interact with each other directly.

However, the knowledge of Macau as constructed by the Chosŏn court and intellectuals helps us to understand how the Chosŏn Dynasty utilized the unique network of East Asian cultural interaction in Beijing and Japan to collect information on Macau and the Portuguese. The information can be used to reveal Chosŏn's knowledge of western cuItures and its basic understanding of the Western world before the opening of Korean ports in 1876. It also suggests that although not many Koreans had been to Macau, they still had many writings about the city, implying the importance of the East Asian cultural network in providing knowledge about overseas matters. Although the information might not be reliable or might actually contain misinformation, Korea was far from ignorant and was still informed about the outside world through the East Asian cultural network. Therefore, this paper attempts to study such official documents as Chosŏn wangcho sillok, the records of the interaction between Yonhaengsa, the missionaries, and Chinese intellectuals. It also studies documents that contain information collected by the Japanese T'ongsinsa, so as to illustrate how the cultural network of the East Asian cultural sphere enabled the Chosŏn people, as members of the Chinese tributary system, to understand mysterious Macau without the aid of any first-hand experience.