Translator’s Preface

Summary

UIGWE, A UNIQUE tradition of documentation of the Joseon Dynasty, recorded details of royal events in both text and illustration to serve as future references. The illustrations contained in Uigwe, known as banchado, are precious artworks that allow us today to reproduce things of the past when photographic documentation was not available.

Professor Han Young-woo’s book offers an accessible introduction to King Jeongjo’s royal procession to Hwaseong of 1795 as recorded in the Wonhaeng eulmyo jeongni uigwe. His book includes a considerable number of pages featuring the colourful illustrations of the banchado with annotations of each scene to help readers gain a better understanding of Jeongjo’s grand event that may be hard to fully grasp by text alone.

The original Korean edition gives a full account of the route of the eight-day royal trip to Hwaseong. For readers unfamiliar with Korean geography, however, this English version presents major points of the route in the main text, giving further small details in the footnotes. Also, translator’s notes have been added to help clarify important concepts mentioned in the text so that readers even with relatively little knowledge of Korean history and culture can enjoy the book without struggling too much with such terms.

Although this book is intended for the general reader, it is hoped that its scholarly relevance will also be acknowledged. As regards Korean words, these have been transcribed according to the Revised Romanization of Korean published in 2000 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, comprising a simple transcription system without diacritics and is widely used in publications of a non-academic nature. Following the translation guideline offered by the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea in 2014, translation of a suffix is added at the end of certain Korean words, especially names of places and buildings, so that the meaning of those words could be clearly understood.

Many of the terms cited from the original Uigwe are obsolete words of which the meanings are not easy to comprehend without expertise in the field. In particular, the titles of a number of civil and military officials appearing in the explanatory notes on the banchado presented a considerable challenge in translating this book.