Between Familiar and Exotic: East Asian Ethnicities in a 15th-century Korean Travelogue

This project investigates the medieval East Asian interethnic relations and perspectives portrayed in the fifteenth-century Korean travelogue, "A Record of Drifting across the Sea," written by the Korean official Ch'oe Pu (1454-1504). Focusing on ethnographic findings during Ch'oe's inadvertent travel to Ming China (1368-1644), it explores cultural and ethnic sensitivities and boundaries—permeated as they were with stereotyping and generalizations—both within China and between China and Korea and beyond. By showing the variability and complexity of identify formation through interethnic and cross-cultural contacts, it illustrates the flexibility and plurality of ethnicity across medieval East Asia, an important but seriously understudied subject.