Admonitions on Governing the People is a much celebrated work by Chŏng Yagyong (pen name Tasan, 1762–1836), which is quite often quoted by historians of Chosŏn Korea, because it has detailed analysis of social ills of the time as well as author's suggestions to remedy them. It is a voluminous piece of work consisting of myriads of historical precedents of Korea and China and laced with numerous technical concepts and terms, whose complexity and richness still generate questions and debates among scholars. The edition in modern Korean translation (KT hereafter), which is used by Choi Byonghyon, was the fruit of a decade's work by a group of scholars. Choi spent seven years to complete and publish this English edition, a result of admirable commitment.

The translated text is appropriately preceded by a short translator's note and an introduction, which intends to provide useful information on the text and the author Tasan, and the social, political, and intellectual environments of late Chosŏn. Korean scholarship on Tasan alone, not to mention the cultural and intellectual history of late Chosŏn, is extensive and ever growing, and it is probably impossible to master all existing literature. Yet, Choi's introduction relies on somewhat outdated scholarship, and is thus unable to place Tasan and his works in the recent exciting developments in the relevant field. For example, one of the key and much debated historiographical issues of late Chosŏn intellectual history concerns the category of “Practical Learning school (sirhak).” According to Choi (and many other scholars of Korea) Tasan's three books, Design for Good Government, Toward a New Jurisprudence, and the Admonitions are “virtually the summa of Tasan's ideas on social reforms and the ethos of the Practical Learning school, with which he was affiliated” (p. xxiv). But I would like to ask if there were a school of scholars known as “Practical Learning school” in Tasan's time. Choi explains that “[T]here were two dominant philosophical and political ideologies during the Chosŏn dynasty: Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning” (p. xxvi) as if “Practical Learning” was a totally separate intellectual tradition detached from Neo-Confucianism. As early as 1975, Michael Kalton, a researcher of Chosŏn Korea, argued that the attention to practical issues is integral to Neo-Confucian ideology and the assertion that sirhak was critical of or rejected Neo-Confucianism is an over-simplification.Footnote ² Recent Korean scholarship also began to accept this critical view and call for more careful and dynamic approaches to late Chosŏn intellectual history rather than dwelling on the dichotomy of Neo-Confucianism and sirhak.Footnote ³ Conventional scholarship (and Choi seems to agree) depicted the powerful scholar-officials in the dominant Noron faction as having no interest in any reform ideas of government. Revisionists, however, found that Noron scholars were strong supporters of new ideas such as Northern Learning (Pukhak), including evidential scholarship (which Tasan also espoused, as Choi mentions) and institutional reforms. While Choi states that “ideological conflicts and confrontations between opposing camps” were clear-cut and rigid (p. xxvii), recent scholarship reveals somewhat fluid and open intellectual interactions among Seoul-based scholars with different factional affiliations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Tasan was alive.Footnote ⁴ According to Hwang Hyŏn (1855–1910), Tasan, a man of the Southerner (Namin) faction from Kyŏnggi and Seoul region, seemed to have been willing to network with any admirable scholars regardless of their factional affiliations. Kim Chŏng-hŭi, a renowned Noron member and a champion of evidential scholarship, (whose critical approach Tasan subscribed to, as Choi notes), who was once commissioned to edit Tasan's works, highly praised Tasan's scholarship, and many families whose factional affiliation was different from Tasan deemed his work such as the Admonitions important and kept a handwritten copy (the Admonitions was first published in 1902).Footnote ⁵ Choi also portrays the historical environment in which the Admonitions emerged as the Chosŏn government being in “serious disarray” (p. xxxi) due to foreign invasions and factionalism. There was almost 200 years of gap between major invasions of Japanese and Manchus and Tasan's time, and the Chosŏn state carried out many small and big institutional reforms targeted to solve some institutional troubles. Though it is true that Tasan was extremely critical of corrupt and abusive local administrations and the general decay of state institutions, it does not necessarily support the argument that the Chosŏn government system was in crisis and on the verge of falling. Readers of Tasan's critical works could deduce social conditions of Tasan's time, but should be careful not to judge them from a modern perspective.

The translated texts flow well and quite comprehensible. I confess that I did not and could not check all the translated texts against the original, but adopted a strategy of spot checking, starting with the first part of the book. Though I immediately recognized that Choi has done an admirable job in rendering such a difficult text into lucid language, I found his translation strategy problematic. Choi informs the readers in his Notes on Translation that “the copious information and historical facts were curtailed in order to provide the most relevant and meaningful English translation” (p. xi). Indeed, I found Choi omitted many paragraphs and sections from the original text. A few examples are: a missing paragraph in Book I, Chapter 1, first topic (8; KT, I:17); Book V, Chapter 2, a topic on yamen clerks who are connected to state councilors and provincial governor and look down on their magistrate, the entire section where Tasan goes over historical and legal precedents to deal with these tyrannical clerks is missing (224; KT, II:93–94); more than two pages in KT, which gives examples of financial abuses wrought by yamen underlings and Tasan's remedies to fix some of those problems, are dropped in the third topic (231; KT, II:103–5); a detailed history of local yangban association [hyangso] and the capital liaison office [kyŏngso], one of the topics often quoted by scholars, is not translated in Book V, Chapter 3, second topic on the role of aids of the magistrate (236; KT, II:113–14). In these cases and others, readers would have no idea which entries and details are omitted and abbreviated, and there is a danger that the readers can be mistaken that the translated text represents the entirety. This makes me wonder how much of original text has been cut out and summarized. Since the translated text is already quite voluminous, the massiveness of the original text does not seem to warrant the arbitrary cut of the original text. When the translator decided to skip or summarize, he should have at least left a note about it in a distinguishable font or style to inform the reader.

My criticism on the translator's introduction and translation strategy, however, should not reduce the value of this English edition of the Admonitions. Students and scholars of China and Japan, not to mention Korea, should find it useful and it will make early modern Korea much more accessible.