King Yeonsan’s autocracy nearly jeopardized Joseon’s Neo-Confucian project to create an authentic Confucian kingdom. After the restoration of normal Confucian politics with the enthronement of King Jungjong, a group of orthodox Neo-Confucian scholar-officials, led by Jo Gwangjo 趙光祖 (1482–1520), who shared a strong desire to transform Joseon like the Three Dynasties of Chinese antiquity – namely, Xia, Shang, and Zhou – embarked on radical reform. This chapter investigates Jo Gwangjo’s attempt to radically reconstitute the Joseon state, which, in his view, had been massively derailed from the Public Way after Yeonsan’s tyranny, strictly in accordance with Neo-Confucian moral principles and ritual prescriptions. The case of Jo Gwangjo shows how the refusal to accommodate Confucianism to the political reality resulted in a political catastrophe when both Neo-Confucian teachings and Joseon’s constitutional practices were acknowledged as the sources of legal authority, revealing a deep tension between moral economy and institutionalized contingency.

Jeong Dojeon 鄭道傳 (1342–1398) was one of the most important Neo-Confucian scholar-officials during the late Goryeo and early Joseon periods, not only as an architect of Joseon’s Confucian constitutional structure but also a revolutionary Neo-Confucian who spearheaded the founding of a new dynasty. This chapter examines the relationship between Neo-Confucianism and Jeong’s political radicalism by demonstrating how, despite his commitment to Mencian moral economy, Jeong could transform Neo-Confucianism, an otherwise abstract “Learning of Principle,” into a revolutionary political ideology devoted to the Public Way. Central to the chapter’s claim is that by undergoing the so-called Xunzian moment, which involved a painful recognition of the breakdown of moral economy, Jeong developed a renewed attention to righteousness, commonly regarded as a virtue regulating the ruler–ruled relationship, as a public and political virtue and principle by which to rebuild the public world in a way that could serve the people’s well-being effectively.

The Western account of political realism stresses that politics is outside ethics, having its own distinctive principles that are internal to it, thus being irreducible to some foundational moral principles and values. This dominant account of political realism, however, is deeply a-cultural, failing to note that politics is always embedded in a specific culture composed of distinctive moral principles and practices. This chapter explores multiple visions of political realism advanced by Korean Neo-Confucians – hence, varieties of “Confucian realism” – when they wrestled with addressing various kinds of contingencies in their own political circumstances through the use of “the expedient” or taking a “Xunzian turn.” This chapter explores the core ideas of each Korean Neo-Confucian thinker discussed in the book, and shows how they could strike the middle ground between Confucian moral economy and the political reality in which they found themselves, thereby generating a sense of reality from within Confucianism.

This chapter aims to investigate the nature of the moral-political predicaments caused by King Sejo’s usurpation, which entailed the executions of the king, his own nephew, and his younger brother, and how Korean Neo-Confucians attempted to remedy it. Sejo’s political action involved a series of violations of Confucian moral principles, such as righteousness, loyalty, filial piety, and brotherly love, and it critically undermined Joseon’s Confucian constitutionality, requiring a special response to it consistent with the Neo-Confucian moral ideal. This chapter captures this special response to the problem of “contingency” caused by Sejo in terms of “reverse moral economy.” The framework of reverse moral economy helps us understand how the constitutionality of the Confucian state was understood by the Korean Neo-Confucians in early Joseon, how it was threatened by one of the most powerful political agents in violation of Confucian moral principles, and how it was restored, thereby redeeming the Public Way.

This chapter examines the career of Wei Liaoweng, a Southern Song official and Neo-Confucian scholar, to explore the multifaceted roles and responsibilities of local administrators during a period of political turbulence and social transformation. It investigates how he navigated overlapping identities while negotiating between ideological commitments and the practical demands of governance. Although Wei devoted significant effort to fortifying local defenses and securing revenue, his administration was far from purely extractive. He worked to alleviate the economic burdens of local residents, developed water management systems, promoted education by building academies and supporting government schools, and implemented social welfare and public health programs. Wei’s Neo-Confucian convictions informed an activist vision of governance that emphasized community building and collaboration between local officials and literati. His career illustrates the dynamic interplay between intellectual and political life, the integration of state and local initiatives, and the critical role of personal networks in sustaining effective local administration.

According to Dazai Shundai, the original purpose of Confucian teachings is to aid in governing the state, but Confucians since the Song dynasty have lost sight of this goal, focusing instead on cultivating the individual heart. The same misunderstanding of Confucian teachings has appeared in Japan as well, so the aim of the current work is to restore Confucianism to its proper role in Japan as a set of techniques for government.

According to Dazai Shundai, observations of heaven are important for making calendars, but heaven and its intentions ultimately lie beyond the limits of human knowledge; for this reason, heaven should be feared. The music of the ancient sage kings is based in a correct system of tonal pitches, which must be spread throughout the realm. Systems of weights and measures must also be uniform throughout the realm. Geographical records are an important tool for governing, and these records should be made broadly available to the people.

The East Asian community of states, having matured by the tenth century, thereafter continued to develop along somewhat independent trajectories. China settled into a distinctive late imperial form, characterized by the presence of an examination-recruited mandarin elite. Korea became more uncompromisingly Confucian; Vietnam gained independence; and Japan came to be dominated by uniquely Japanese warrior elites: the Shogun and samurai. China, under the Song Dynasty, became a major center of maritime trade and advanced technology. In the thirteenth century the Mongols erupted into East Asia, conquering China and reducing Korea to a subordinate “son-in-law” state. The Mongols, ironically, helped expose Koreans to Neo-Confucianism, and under increasing Confucian influence, Chinese-style family patterns became the new “tradition” in Korea. In Japan, conflict between leading warrior families resulted in the epochal Gempei War (1180–1185), from which Minamoto Yoritomo emerged victorious and became Japan’s first Shogun. By the end of this period, growing volumes of maritime trade ushered East Asia into the Early Modern age.

This chapter traces the cultural history of lotus in the Chinese tradition: from its appearance in The Classic of Poetry and Han dynasty rhapsodies to the exuberant wordplay on ‘lotus’/’love” in the popular songs of the Southern Dynasties, from the flower of carnal desires to a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, from the neo-Confucian appropriation of the lotus as a sign of moral purity to the name of the most notorious female character in Chinese fiction, lotus is inscribed with various literary, cultural, social, and religious significance. Focusing on the changing and expanding story of the lotus, this chapter suggests that the lotus is a plant of hybridity, a site of contested meanings, and that its botanical and literary lives are intricately intertwined with the social and cultural histories of China.

The Confucian “way of knowing” was validated through classical texts that transmitted the wisdom of antiquity. Early Song rulers promoted Confucianism as the ideological foundation of the state, and the reformulation of Confucianism commonly known as “Neo-Confucianism” took place against the backdrop of the newly unified Song dynasty. Well before the Song, the establishment of government schools and the examination system institutionalized early ideals of learning, transforming them into knowledge useful for governing a bureaucratic state. During the Song, debates over the content of the examinations – and thus what kinds of knowledge were valued – were sparked by political disputes, but disagreements were also based on deeply held beliefs about the meaning of learning and the purpose of knowledge. The cosmological underpinnings of Confucianism were articulated and transmitted through new interpretations of the Classics in the Northern Song, synthesized and systematized by the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200). History was a way of knowing distinct from the Classics as a source of political and philosophical principles. The Jurchen Jin incorporated and adapted these ways of knowing with their own in their rule of the north. The introduction of print technology altered people’s relationship to texts and to the transmission of knowledge.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch’s mandate relied on listening to his people’s grievances, the Joseon state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to petition the sovereign regarding grievances not rectified in lower courts. While Joseon-era women are usually considered to have been silent subjects outside the home, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal rights as men to appeal grievances to the state. This chapter parses women’s linguistic practices in claims-making to show how their petitioning rights complicated gender dynamics of Confucian society. The gender hierarchy was reinforced through women’s narrative strategy as they appropriated discourses of domesticity. At the same time, I posit that women as legal agents were re-gendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning. Through gendered claims, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their sense of morality but also their entire family.

Prior to the late nineteenth century, Chinese scholar-officials studied ancient Chinese history to make sense of contemporary affairs. Thus, rather than situating themselves in global space when they traveled outside China, they attempted to situate the world within China’s historical time. This chapter contends that world-historical writing emerged in China in the early twentieth century after the rise of print capitalism as an attempt to address concerns about global space. Specifically, the question of how to make sense of China’s decline in the global order motivated scholarly interest. In this effort, the temporal dimension of ancient history remained relevant. In An Outline of Western History, Zhou Weihan juxtaposes the histories of foreign countries with Chinese chronologies. Zhou’s book is possibly the first Chinese-language work on ancient world history written by a Chinese scholar. In it, he stresses the value of ancient history and dismisses notions of fundamental differences among cultures in modern identities. As he repeatedly asserts, “Peoples throughout China and the West are alike – their intellects are the same.” Zhou’s absence of a cultural nationalist view is especially striking compared to the views expressed in later nationalist works published in China by the end of the twentieth century.