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In pre-modern Korea, paper was renowned for its white glossy surface and cloth-like strength, becoming an important item in both tributary exchanges and private trade. The unique material of the tak tree and related technical innovations, including toch'im, the repeated beating of just-produced paper that provides sizing and fulling effects, were crucial to this fame. However, the scholar-officials who integrated papermaking into the state production system in order to meet administrative and tributary needs initially made toch'im corvée and then penal labor, thereby dismissing it as simple toil. They were not alone, though, in denigrating a form of manual labor. Historiographies of modern science and technology are generally silent about such work, focusing instead on how we invented the human out of drudgery. However, papermakers in late Chosŏn Korea (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) chose to identify their artisanship with toch'im and eventually succeeded in securing recognition for that technique as a highly paid specialty. By examining this skilling of toch'im, this paper seeks to change the historiographical silence about toil. It overcomes the archival silence that accompanies manual skills by tracing toch'im's contours through its changing locations and associations in society's changing social and material networks, revealing paper artisans' social techniques, or everyday politics that eventually dignified their laborious technique. Paper artisans' changing relationships with tak barks, tools and facilities, central and local authorities, farmers, merchants, and scholar-officials reveal how such social skilling was made in late Chosŏn Korea, where papermaking became a most successful industry. This tracing of toch'im re-situates creative toil and everyday politics of artisanal hands in the interconnected transformation of social relations, craft, and knowledge practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have stressed that regional dynamics led to the outbreak of the Musin Rebellion, the largest rebellion in eighteenth-century Korea. Scholars have examined the economic and political situation leading up to the violence and concluded that political marginalization caused Kyŏngsang Province elites (from the Southerner faction) to launch the rebellion. This paper analyses evidence from official sources about rebel motivations, rebel geographical associations and the court view of the causes. Although post-rebellion government statements acknowledge tensions between the court and many Kyŏngsang Province elites, rebel testimony showed no evidence of any anger about discrimination against elites from a single region. There is also inconsistent evidence of regional concerns in the membership of the rebel organization, which was drawn from three southern provinces and mainly concentrated around the capital. My findings challenge the conclusions of regionalist scholars and place the Musin Rebellion in a trajectory of late Chosŏn rebellion that was attempting to redress factional political discrimination and was not caused by regional concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mummy studies in Korea are instrumental in reconstructing the health and disease status of pre-modern Joseon peoples using firm scientific evidence. However, this scientific approach to such investigations in Korea is a relatively new discipline which began only within the last decade. Previous studies on Joseon tombs and their contents were performed exclusively by dress historians because most of the artefacts recoverable from Joseon tombs were textiles. In this report, we examine some of the excavation records left by dress historians in order to elucidate the approximate number and preservation status of Korean mummies discovered prior to the advent of their scientific investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]