Doksa Sillon (Korean: 독사신론) or A New Reading of History (1908) is a book that discusses the history of Korea from the time of the mythical Dangun to the fall of the kingdom of Balhae in 926 CE. Its author––historian, essayist, and independence activist Shin Chaeho (1880–1936)––first published it as a series of articles in The Korea Daily News, of which he was the editor-in-chief.[1]
As the first work to equate the history of Korea with the history of the Korean race (minjok),[2]Doksa Sillon rejected the conventional Confucian histories that focused on the rise and fall of dynasties[3] as well as the Japanese Pan-Asianist claims that Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese were all part of the "East Asian" or "yellow" race.[4]
^Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea (2003), p. 152, note 8; Henry H. Em, "Democracy and Korean Unification from a Post-Nationalist Perspective" (1998), p. 57; Henry H. Em, "Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Sin Ch'aeho's Historiography" (1999), p. 341.
^Henry H. Em, "Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct" (1999), pp. 345ff; Kim Bongjin, "Sin Ch'ae-ho: 'A Critique of Easternism,' 1909" (2011), p. 191.
^Andre Schmid, "Rediscovering Manchuria" (1997), p. 34. See also Schmid's Korea Between Empires, 1895-1910 (2002), pp. 183-84, 230.
^Andre Schmid, "Rediscovering Manchuria" (1997), p. 32.
^Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Narratives of Nation Building in Korea (2003), pp. 15-16.
^Key S. Ryang, "Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936) and Modern Korean Historiography" (1987); Stella Yingzi Xu, "That glorious ancient history of our nation" (2007), p. 171.
Bibliography
Em, Henry H. (1998). "Democracy and Korean Unification from a Post-Nationalist Perspective." Asea yongu 41.2: 43-74.
Em, Henry H. (1999). "Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Sin Ch'aeho's Historiography." In Colonial Modernity in Korea, edited by Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, pp. 336–61. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press.
Kim Bongjin. (2011). "Sin Ch'ae-ho: 'A Critique of Easternism,' 1909." In Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman, eds., Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850-1920, pp. 191–94. Plymouth, England: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ryang, Key S. (1987). "Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936) and Modern Korean Historiography." The Journal of Modern Korean Studies 3: 1-10.
Schmid, Andre. (1997). "Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Ch'aeho and the Politics of Territorial History in Korea." Journal of Asian Studies 56.1: 26-46.
Xu, Stella Yingzi. (2007). "That glorious ancient history of our nation: The contested re-readings of 'Korea' in early Chinese historical records and their legacy in the formation of Korean-ness." PhD dissertation, Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, UCLA.