Event

In the early summer of 1592, over 150,000 Japanese soldiers landed in quick succession on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula and launched an all-out offensive against Korea. Faced with this sudden invasion, Korea's Chosŏn court sought military assistance from China's Ming court, and the Ming soon dispatched expeditionary armies across the Yalu River to Korea in order to drive back the Japanese. Together with the Ming soldiers also arrived groups of Chinese merchants, and sources indicate that they played an important role in the procurement and transport of military provisions during the Ming's war in Korea. This paper assesses how the Ming armies sought to enlist the cooperation of merchants in the Liaodong region as they readied themselves for the Korean battlefield. It also probes the manner in which Chinese and Korean sources depict the wartime presence of Chinese merchants in Korea during the Japanese invasion. Analyzing the role of merchants in the Ming's logistical preparations for its war effort in Korea sheds new light on the previously little-studied link between the Ming's cross-border war and the nature of commerce in the Chinese-Korean borderland in the closing years of the sixteenth century.

Masato Hasegawa received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2013 and previously taught at the University of Oregon. His dissertation, "Provisions and Profits in a Wartime Borderland: Supply Lines and Society in the Border Region between China and Korea, 1592-1644," examined the impact of cross-border wars on local society in the Chinese-Korean borderland during China’s political transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. Focusing on the wartime procurement and transport of provisions across the Chinese-Korean borders, it analyzed the manner in which the logistics of cross-border military campaigns profoundly affected and disrupted the lives of individuals and the region's agricultural cycle. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication and preparing a new project on the cross-border movement of merchants and contraband across the Chinese-Korean borders in the second half of the seventeenth century.

*CEAS Humanities Colloquium Series