뉴스레터

Hello! My name is Lee Mi-ja (李美子), and I teach at Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大學校) in China. Let me begin by saying thanks to the NAHF for inviting me as a visiting professor from abroad. My university is located in Hangzhou (杭州), Zhejiang Province (浙江省), China. Hangzhou is a beautiful tourist city, well known to the world for the West Lake (西湖) Cultural Landscape placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. And the Qiantang River (錢唐江) famous for the tidal bore is running to the east of our university's campus. The tide rushing into the river can be seen from my office all the time.

I am from the City of Helong, Jilin Province, China, which happened to be the location of one of Balhae's five capitals. I first learned the history of Balhae at Yanbian University from field trips to Balhae sites. And my understanding of Balhae deepened through frequent exposure to Balhae's culture at the Museum of Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture of Korean Ethnic Minority where I had landed a job after graduation. As you know, the history of Balhae was documented very little, and it hadn't been studied much until the 1980s. In Japan, on the other hand, the exchange with Balhae was relatively well documented, and the history of Balhae had been studied extensively since the early 20th century as an imperial national policy necessary for the invasion of Manchuria. Even though this advanced research was problematic because its motive had been the invasion of a country, it was a project of academic significance that enriched the experience of studying the history of Balhae.

In 1993, I had an opportunity to continue my study of the history of Balhae in Japan, specifically in the Department of Korean History at Kyushu University (九州大學). It was, and still is, a controversy whether Balhae had been the regime of a local ethnic group of China or the regime in succession to Koguryo. Given this controversy and my hometown being the location of one of Balhae's capitals, I thought that I as a descendant of Balhae should be responsible toward the history of Balhae and ready to reveal it myself. Since Balhae did not document its own history very much, the study of Balhae's history has no other resources to rely on than Chinese documents written from the Sino-centric point of view, or sporadic documents written from the viewpoint of Korea or Japan. As Professor Yoon Myeong-cheol of Dongguk University pointed out, "History is a collection of facts. Therefore, verifying and restoring as many facts as possible should be the primary goal of historians, unless it is concerned with the matter of meaning or assessment. And accuracy and strict objectivity must be applied as the prime principle of verification, confirmation, and reproduction of facts." Accuracy and objectivity need to be secured in verifying and restoring the history of Balhae. To that end, I believe that it will be necessary to ascertain historical records and understand them for the truths they told.

Especially while he was at Kyushu University in around 2002 for lecture, Professor Yoon established the East Asian Mediterranean model about the waters surrounding China, the Korean peninsula and Japan, and did a lot of research on the maritime activities of Koguryo and Balhae from the perspective of maritime history. I felt that the perspective of maritime history was essential in order to have a more objective view of the history of Balhae. As the first step toward approaching the history of Balhae from the perspective of maritime history, I reviewed previous studies in this field. The Center for Japanese Studies (日本學硏究中心) in Beijing has up to hundreds of thousands of Japanese materials that have proved helpful to me. On the other hand, however, I couldn't find any Korean materials on the maritime history of Korea or the history of Balhae in any of the libraries or research institutes in China. Given the controversy between Korea and China over the histories of Koguryo and Balhae, I think it is necessary that both sides should be willing to share and exchange their materials and the results of studies with each other. In this regard, the Northeast Asian History Foundation has a well-organized database that can be accessed by researchers for useful information such as historical records on Koguryo and Balhae and the results of recent studies from countries around the world. Moreover, it is my impression that the NAHF is ahead of China and Japan in the studies of Koguryo and Balhae.

I came to Korea recently as a visiting researcher to the NAHF so that I can review the NAHF's research results, and understand the history of Balhae from a broad perspective through exchange with scholars at the NAHF. I will take this research opportunity at the NAHF to spread the results of Korea's studies on the history of Balhae to scholars in China, trying to serve as a bridge between China and Korea for exchange in the study of the history of Balhae. Thank you!