Jeanhyoung Soh

Jeanhyoung Soh is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science from Seoul National University, with her dissertation titled "The Relation between Power and Authority of Kings in Late Chosŏn Dynasty: Interpretations of the concept of Hwangkuk (皇極)." In 2018, she was a Henry Luce postdoctoral fellow at the Ricci Institute of Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco. she has taught Premodern East Asian history, the intellectual history of the Joseon Period, and political thought in East Asia. She is focusing as an intellectual historian, on the political language and rhetoric of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her research interests include the Jesuit translations of Coimbra texts in China, the translation of Western political texts in Asia, and the reception of Western geographical knowledge by Korean intellectuals and their reconstructed worldview.

The project

Title: Copies and creations: Three copies of Aleni’s Wanguo quantu, rediscovery and rearrangement of East Asian geographical information in the late Joseon period

"This research focuses on three Korean copies of Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖 (Complete map of all countries, 1623) by Giulio Aleni (1582-1649) and their ways of rediscovery of East Asian traditional geographical ideas. The three Korean copies were Manguk jeondo 萬國全圖 (1661) by Bak Jeongseol 朴廷薛 (1612–1693), the Cheonha do jido 天下都地圖 by the Joseon Government in the late eighteenth century, Taeseo heosa yimadu manguk jeondo 泰西會士利瑪竇萬國全圖 (1821) by Ha Baekwon 河百源.

The research focuses on duplications of Wanguo quantu and the transcriptions of Zhifang waiji rather than other maps and geographic ressources, to understand how Korean people before the midnineteenth century received and used Renaissance geography. One example is the replication of Kunyu wanguo quantu in 1708 by the royal painter Kim Jinyeo, overseen by the Bureau of Astronomy. This happened almost a century after Jeong Duwon, an envoy to Beijing, imported it. The big copies, about 531x172 cm, were only seen by a small audience, mainly royal family members and bureaucrats. While there are at least ten copies of Kunyu Quantu in Korea, they were made in the late nineteenth century when other maps from Europe, the United States, and Japan were available. This required a different approach and ressources. These details emphasize how important Wanguo quantu and Zhifang waiji were as geographical sources for intellectuals in seventeenth to early nineteenthcentury Korea."

Institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• “Utopia and Dystopia: Cheonha do and the Reception of Renaissance Geography in Late Joseon Korea” in Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky, Remapping the World from East Asia: Towards a Global History of the ‘Ricci Map’, University of Hawaii (2024). (English)
• “Wispers and Politics: A political Historical Examination to the Tale of a Murdered Ryukyu Prince in the late Joseon Period,” Korean Political Science Review 57-4 (2023): 91-111. (Korean)
• “Gaoli zhiming shilüe: An intercultural, interlaced text between the Jesuits in Shanghai and the Missions Etrangères de Paris in Seoul,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 10-4 (2023): 585-604. (Korean)
• “Reconstruction of historical memory viewed through the circulation, citation, and referencing of a Korean Catholic Hwang Sayeong's Silk Letter, ” Kyujanggak 61 (2022): 1-31. (Korean)
• “Translating Ideology: Democratic Concepts and Institutions of The Spirit of Laws in Japanese and Chinese Translations,” The Review of Korean and Asian Political Thoughts 20-2 (2021): 105-130. (Korean)