The King’s Conveyance: The Ritual Dispute of 1488 and the Unwritten Constitution of Early Modern Korean-Chinese Diplomacy

Abstract In 1488, the Korean kingdom of Chosŏn received emissaries from China announcing the accession of a new Ming emperor. The two sides engaged in a protracted dispute over what appears to be a trivial detail in an accessory ritual: whether the king would welcome the emissaries while borne on a palanquin or riding a horse. The dispute’s resolution was even more curious: rather than conceding, the two sides conducted the reception ritual twice. This article examines the process of this dispute and argues that the dispute warrants rethinking what has traditionally been understood as an uneven, bilateral diplomatic relationship in terms of an early modern Sino-Korean constitutional order. The casuistic mechanisms used by both sides to argue their points drew upon divergent interpretations of a shared, but multivalent repertoire of authority: a common imperial and classical past rooted in the sense of a Chinese translatio imperii .