Almost any Korean person knows that kings of Joseon were referred to as "king" while Chinese emperors were referred to as "emperors," and there was a strong symbolic hierarchy. Well Koreans can be quite nationalistic, but I don't think anyone will really deny that.

Imo Joseon-Ming tie was particularly strong because the Joseon ruling class followed very orthodox Confucianism, often following the social norms described in Chinese classical text to a letter. Many modern people are critical of that because it obviously weakened the nation (e.g. the suppression of commerce and trades). It was also the way the nobles distinguished themselves from commoners who weren't educated in classical Chinese

Almost any Korean person also knows that Hangeul was despised by noblemen in the Joseon era. So it's not a secret or taboo topic in Korea.

• Plus, despite ignored by male aristocrats, the Korean script was widely used by women and commoners, which led to the rise of vernacular literature. We know a lot more about the Joseon era thanks to the vast amount of scripts written in vernacular Korean

However, when one says Korea (or Vietnam or others) was "tributary state" or "vassal state" of China, while it's basically true, there can still be contentions about to which extent it was symbolic and to which extent it was substantial. Joseon Korea didn't have to pay a lot of "substantial" tributes to China.

• Joseon had to pay tributes to Ming just once every three years
• The contents were Just dozens of kilograms of ginseng and similar amount of hemp, mats, paper, ink, etc. It can almost be seen as an expensive gift, rather than tax
• There were very few exchanges of people/talents/human resources
• Some tributary states were even benefited by the tributary relationship because some Chinese emperors doled out gold
• The tributary states were sometimes asked to join military operations of China, but at least in the case of Joseon, it was very few and far between. Ming China only lasted for like 250 years anyways
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tributary_system_of_China
• (https://ijkh.khistory.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.22372/ijkh.2021.26.2.151) .

So there can be contentions about how "symbolic" or "substantial" the tributary relationships were.

I think it's a dispute that can only be resolved by collaboration of professional historians in different countries

Few Koreans deny that there was a hierarchical international order between China and its neighbors in the pre modern time, and kings of Korea (as well as Vietnam and other similar countries) agreed to endorse the symbolic authority of Chinese empires.

They typically are cautious to emphasize that because of its obvious potential of being misused for Chinese expansionist agenda.

Plus I don’t think “revisionism” is a good word here because it has a connotation of a former aggressor/perpetrator of atrocities denying its past. Korea considers itself as a smaller nation that needs to be defended

Learned a lot from this, thank you!

I hope someone else can check if each bullet point is true (unbiased) or not. Assuming that most of what you said is true,

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>In 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh (who later became Emperor Gia Long) established the Nguyễn dynasty. In the second year of his rule, he asked the Jiaqing Emperor of the Qing dynasty to confer on him the title 'King of Nam Việt / Nanyue' (南越 in Chinese character) after seizing power in Annam. The Emperor refused because the name was related to Zhao Tuo's Nanyue, which included the regions of Guangxi and Guangdong in southern China. The Qing Emperor, therefore, decided to call the area "Việt Nam" instead

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it seems that the pre-modern relationship between Joseon and China you described is not different from the pre-modern relationship between Vietnam and China.

You seem to be a Chinese person. What reaction would you expect when you shout "Vietnam was a Chinese vassal state"?

While I largely agree with you,

>In the end the stuck up Royals fucked up the country by inviting the Japanese to deal with the Peasant uprising

There's a lot to unpack here too... I wrote a very long piece about this period which I'll post later. Actually the one who was the most anti-Japanese was Queen Myeongseong (commonly called "Empress Myeongseong" but I think that's a bit inflated title), who was the most influential politician in Joseon court back then. Her role and personality in that period is vastly underevaluated by later Korean historians, perhaps because of Confucianism-influenced gender bias.

She was consistently anti-Japan perhaps because she knew that Japan would be the biggest geopolitical threat to Korea. That's why she first allied with Qing China, and as soon as Qing lost the Sino-Japanese war, she immediately moved to ally with Russians. That was the point Japan decided to murder her (unnecessarily violently).

• Both Qing and Japan intervened the peasant uprising, and the queen was pro-Qing and some aristocratic faction was pro-Japan. This was the major cause of the Sino-Japanese war in which Japan defeated China. Right after this the queen tried to ally with Russians, the Japanese murdered her and had the Russian diplomats literally see her mutilated body as a warning. I think the symbolic and political significance (and the level of violence) of this event is not as much discussed as it needs.

King Gojong, who was her supportive husband (and the one who benefited the most from her political shrewdness), had been personally quite friendly with the emerging pro-Japan faction among the aristocracy. However, after having to let his wife violently murdered by the Japanese, he got deeply depressed, and after a few months he suddenly moved his residence into the Russian embassy, and kicked out all the major members of the pro-Japan faction.

So the Korean royalty pretty much resisted Japan's influence. There were quite many pro-Japan aristocrats but they lost influence after the queen's murder. It was when Russia was defeated by Japan (1905) that Korea couldn't resist the Imperial Japan's power anymore. Right after Japan won the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army encircled the Korean palace, and Japanese prime minister (or its equivalent - Ito Hirobumi) walked into the Korean palace and made the Joseon court sign a protectorate treaty (Eulsa treaty). King refused to sign it himself, but some of the court high officials did. That was the de facto end of Korea as an independent political entity.

Well

1. I agree that Joseon history can be read as a sort of downward spiral - it gets worse in the 19th century
2. It was not necessarily as dark in the three kingdoms, Unified Silla and Goryeo period. I think it was the Mongol invasion in the 13th century that crucially influenced the fate of Korea and neighboring Japan. Goryeo (Korea) fiercely fought Mongols, relocating the whole population of the capital to an island, but got eventually devastated. Japan stayed intact. I often think that this is comparable to the fate of Persia and some part of the Islamic world in the Mongol invasion.
3. After 100 years of Mongol dominance, Korean aristocrats became completely conservative and fundamentalist (in Confucianism). A similar trend also happened in Ming China but it was more extreme in Korea. It was not that the first king of Joseon sealed the deal on Korea's future, it was the collective of the aristocrats who completely turned fundamentalist Confucianist. Many Joseon kings were personally stifled, and resisted the orthodoxy, especially in the early period. But the orthodoxy would become even more dominant

• A similar trend of ultra-conservative orthodoxy also happened in Vietnam though, so I don't think it's just the case of Korea. Spain is another example that "sealed the deal" on their country's future when it was caught in the religious craze and kicked out all the Protestants and Jews

Good question -- some Korean historians ask that question to themselves, I guess. I don't have an answer, but major peasant rebellions (yellow turban or taiping style) would happen in the 19th century

In the 17th century... right after the war... umm perhaps peasants were just way too starved and devastated to do anything. After the war with Japan, there was a major epidemic that further plagued the nation. Seeing dead people or even families on the street was common. Afaik, both French Revolution or Yellow Turban happened when the economy and communities were relatively healthier

Plus, there was little merchant class because of the suppression of trades. And aristocrats were very heavily controlled by the fundamentalist Confucian ideology to be loyal to the king, and they had substantial ideological control over peasants through provincial, village-level institutions.

After the war with Japan, in late Joseon, oppression on women would also exacerbate. So perhaps the village societies chose to enhance social control rather than revolt