The Chosŏn Border Defense Council’s drifting records of Chinese vessels in early modern East Asia : a quantitative analysis of statistically salient place names and common nouns in the Pibyŏnsa Tŭngnok (1687–1880) conversation records

Abstract

This study aims at building a part-of-speech tagged corpus for all the drifting conversation records from Pibyŏnsa Tŭngnok, which is the official record of the daily affairs of the Border Defense Council of the Chosŏn dynasty, and conducting a quantitative analysis of the statistically salient place names and common nouns therein. The author also establishes a methodological framework and demonstrates how to conduct quantitative analysis when extrapolating patterned information in a vast corpus by using techniques like a word frequency table and co-occurrence analysis to uncover hidden patterns and correlations in a large dataset. Our results show that Fujian was the major source of the crew members and passengers of these sailboats, while some crew members were hired in Thailand. Beijing is the most frequently observed non-native place in the conversation records, since the officials were deeply interested in the distance between Beijing and other places in China. The Chosŏn officials appeared to grasp every opportunity to inquire about the physical geography, political institutions, military power, current maritime situation, newsworthy events, and the recent development of Qing China.