Introduction
Scientific debates on the nature of insects originate with Aristotle who tried to understand all Entoma in a general order. Aristotle’s natural history established the early foundation of studying tiny creatures in the Western world. The natural history of insects in East Asia also has a long history but it is hard to determine a specific founder like Aristotle. The English word “insect” came from the Aristotelian concept that Entoma has incisions. Chinese and Korean concepts of worms (ch’ung) are not as apparent in terms of their origins.1 Nevertheless, we should not take this as evidence that people in East Asia had little knowledge about insects. Silk, for example, gives us a powerful example that humans and insects built a working partnership early in China. Shadowed by the success of China, Korea’s skills in handling insects have received little attention in historical research.2 This article intends to examine how Koreans perceived and explored insects in the late Chosŏn period and how those perceptions changed through the cases of three thinkers: Yi Ik (1681–1763), Yi Pinghŏgak (1759–1824) and Yi Kyu-kyŏng (1788-?).
Before the eighteenth century, insects had been a topic of academic discussions and literary descriptions mostly because of their symbolic roles in Confucian metaphysics. Neo-Confucianism (Sŏngnihak) had built moral knowledge into the core body of human cognitive works, establishing the belief that all things are subject to the moral cosmos of li (pattern principle). Some insects, most notably the honeybee, were believed to be self-evidently virtuous because their behaviour proved the ethical consciousness for which humans must strive. On the contrary, others like the locust appeared to punish people, mirroring the degree of immorality in the world. A plague of locust was deemed unavoidable and uncontrollable as if they acted on behalf of an angry superior being. When people broke ethical rules, the insects delivered a message to wrong-doers. Needless to say, other insects likewise had tremendous symbolic weight in the Confucian worldview. For instance, sericulture (sang) focused on silkworms occupied a critical position in East Asia in a political-economical set with agriculture (nong). The Chosŏn dynasty passionately adopted the same Chinese system of thought and technology, but there has been little research on the historical change in Korean perceptions of insects.3 Therefore, the continuously growing knowledge on insects that existed in the late Chosŏn period can give us unique opportunities to look into the transformation of Korean knowledge on the natural world.4
In this article, I will examine the reformation of Korean entomological discourses from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The academic interest in insects initially appeared as part of the metaphysical study of li, as Neo-Confucianists believed that they could discover causes for all phenomena through the “investigation of things and the extension of knowledge (kyŏngmul ch’iji).” The standard epistemological method of Neo-Confucianism directed intellectual efforts to the comprehension of the connectivity between the human mind and the external world. Since li was a priori knowledge, every phenomenon even in the world of insects could be explained by the universal truth. While the metaphysical unity between humans (in) and non-humans (mul) began to be questioned, the method of kyŏngmul (investigation of things) continued to inspire academic surveys on myriad things. Under the new banner of Broad Learning (pakhak/pangmul), Koreans revitalized research on non-humans, distancing themselves gradually from medieval metaphysics.5 As Benjamin Elman points out, the pursuit of comprehensive knowledge on nature evolved in the direction of scientific learning in late imperial China. And the Korean scepticism on the metaphysical unity of humans and non-humans was significantly influenced by Chinese scholars such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) and Fang Yizhi (1611–1671).6 In the milieu of new intellectual experiments and dynamism, Yi Ik, Yi Pinghŏgak and Yi Kyukyŏng led Korean entomological discourses toward a new age of learning from physical evidence. In so doing, they not only recognized the value of observational discovery but also acknowledged the disunity of humans and non-humans, and humans and their environment.
The Ethical Quality of Bees: Honeybees and Wasps
General ideas and nomenclatures about bees had already existed before Yi Ik, and Korean elite males could learn about the bee from their main source of education, Chinese classics. Until Yi Ik initiated an in-depth discussion on the bee, however, information about it had at best remained fragmented and elementary. A sixteenth-century glossary written by Ch’oe Se-chin (1468–1542), for instance, gives us an apparent contrast to Yi Ik’s essay that I will examine in depth below. In the glossary, Hunmong chahoe (Chinese-Korean Dictionary for Educating the Unlearned), Ch’oe Se-chin paired classical Chinese terms with Korean vernacular terms. About the bees, he had only a general concept of pong (ponga or pŏl) with one sub-category of honeybee (milponga).7
Since Yi Ik was a philosopher of Neo-Confucianism and Sino-classics, he was indifferent to translating the names of bees into Korean. Instead, he tried to contemplate the general nature of the honeybee as one agent in the moral cosmos. As li was a self-evident and universal pattern of all things, he believed that bees must have their pre-designed role and function. His investigation was to manifest the metaphysical meaning of the insect and, by doing so, enrich moral knowledge. His essay on the natural history of bees, “Pongsa,” focused on the ethical quality of honeybees (Apis cerana Fabricius).
In Yi’s method, personal experience or empirical information was of less importance than textual sources and metaphysical thinking. He highly evaluated the excellence of bee social organization in terms of orderliness, harmony, and hierarchy. The behaviour of bees, it seemed to him, reassured that social hierarchy was natural. Yi Ik took the unconditional loyalty of worker bees and the division of labour in a hive as physical evidence of the social order. The tight organization of bees embodied the universal pattern of li. Ethical lessons were derived from the life of bees. In Yi’s view, honeybees never wasted their time. They devoted their life solely to the single mission of collecting honey. They never competed with other insects in vain, Yi Ik complimented. As a real-life case of li, bee society exemplified the moral virtues of tranquillity, harmony, and order. The lord ruled at the top, and the subjects worked relentlessly below. In this regard, he argued that there was nothing that could better follow li and Confucian ethics than honeybees. He believed that by observing the virtuosity of honeybees he could enhance his own moral integrity.8
His anthropocentric discourses of the bee perfectly fit into the standard model of Neo-Confucian epistemology. “The investigation of things” would result in “the extension of knowledge,” where knowledge served for strengthening one’s moral backbone. Since Neo-Confucianism trained its students in analogizing from a priori knowledge, the extension of knowledge should not undermine the fundamental premise that nothing was free from li. If loyalty and diligence were the manifestations of universal morality, his study of bees intended to confirm the truth already known. Studying the exact nature of bees for its own sake, therefore, was out of the question.
In his Neo-Confucian epistemology, there appeared a serious gap between the physical reality and the metaphysical order. It is striking that Yi Ik missed a critical fact of bee society that they have a female monarch. He might not have realized the gender of the queen bee; or, he might have ignored it intentionally. In either case, he consistently called the queen bee “King bee” (pongwang). To him, the existence of the queen bee would have been a dangerous antithesis to the concepts of li and Confucian gender ethics. In fact, worker bees as well as the queen bee are all females. If we bear in mind that male drones have only a marginal role of fertilizing a queen in a bee colony, Yi Ik’s description of the bee society was a philosophical fiction. The actuality of nature was to be concealed for the purpose of defending a priori knowledge that patriarchy was a natural condition of all things.
Because of his metaphysical promise, he failed to understand the nature of the mating flight (nuptial flight) of the queen bee and her drones. He observed that the “King bee” came out of the hive regularly. In the essay “A Royal Tour of King Bee” (pongsun), he managed to discover the natural phenomenon that a queen bee flew with her male drones. It would have been easier for him to explain the nuptial flight if he could have accepted the “King” as a female that needed to get fertilized by her mating partners. And yet he chose not to compromise the philosophical cohesion that bee society exemplified ethical ideals. Instead, he analogized again from a known fact in human society. Given the premise that the queen bee was “King,” he assumed that all the monarchs, including bees, took a royal tour for a show of splendid pageantry.9 Thus, he misinterpreted that the nuptial flight was the same as the king’s ceremony. In a similar fashion, his moral entomology gave a fictional role to the male drones. He did not understand why the males always stayed close to the queen for seemingly no reason. He connected his observations of the bee’s behaviour to a political and ethical lesson that the drones, like lazy aristocrats in human society, embodied the low morality of seeking comfort from the monarch. He claimed, “all those who filled their belly without any contributions must feel ashamed” in his observations of the behaviours of the male drones.10
Simultaneously, his moral perception of insects had a positive effect of encouraging direct observation. According to Neo-Confucianism, insects were able to think and behave morally with a predetermined cause. If the mission of honeybees was ethical, everything hostile to honeybees could not help but be unethical. He called predators that fed on bees “bad bugs” (akch’ung) for that reason. Yi’s concept of “bad bugs” differed from the modern concept of pest because he defined the “badness” from an ethical standpoint. Spiders and house centipedes, for instance, received his attention for their predatory habits against honeybees.12 The category of “bad bugs” also included various bee killers such as wasps, moths, ants, mantids, aphids, and dragonflies.
However, the moralistic view of insects faced one dilemma. The Book of Odes, a Chinese classic upon which Neo-Confucianism relied, taught differently about the nature of wasps. The contradiction between the Chinese classic and his personal observation must have been a serious problem to him given the fact that his vocabulary and knowledge of insects heavily depended on Chinese texts. In the Book of Odes, the wasp was praised for acting upon noble causes. In the poem “Xiao wan,” it says:
In the midst of the plains there is pulse,
And the common people gather it.
The mulberry insect bears an heir,
But the sphenx carries it away.
Teach and train your offspring,
And they will be good as you are yourself.13
The author of this ancient poem knew that the wasp caught caterpillars. And they interpreted that the wasp did so for the good cause of raising it as its own offspring. By the effects of education, according to this poem, the caterpillar transformed into a wasp. The message of the poem was clear: that education could change one species to another. This ancient view on metamorphosis gave birth to the theory of “born of change” (hua sheng [C]) in Chinese knowledge of insects.14 It seems that Yi Ik found a good solution to this dilemma: since the reality of wasps, like the gender of the queen bee, could imperil the moral knowledge of the ancient classics, he simply left the two contradicting characteristics of wasps unexamined.
The enigmatic nature of wasps had attracted many observers in China. As early as the fifth century, Tao Hong-jing (456–536) cast doubt on the classical description of the wasp in the Book of Odes. The legendary Daoist physician and alchemist claimed that the wasp, in fact, sacrificed the caterpillar for the selfish cause of feeding its own offspring. The wasp was not at all acting out of an egalitarian will but abducted the worm, he claimed. Later, Li Shizhen (1518–1593) agreed with Tao Hong-jing in Ben cao gang mu [C] (Compendium of Materia Medica). When a more realistic and non-ethical approach to the wasp became normal, the debate met another turn with Fang Yizhi. Fang Yizhi argued in Wu li xiao shi [C] (Small Encyclopedia of the Principle of Things) that the worm might be alive after the wasp captured it. Fang Yizhi did not elaborate his thesis with more evidence, but he may have developed the notion that wasps placed eggs in the body of captured prey. Like a parasite, the larvae of the wasp grew within the live victim, making the host a zombie. Therefore, Fang Yizhi’s entomology distanced itself further from moral debates and concerned itself with the actuality of the external world. His implication was that the cruelty, which easily transcended human imagination, was normal in the world of insects. Once ethics became a particular property of humans, the philosophical fiction of insects gave way to more scientific and evidence-based non-fiction.15
If Yi Ik implicitly reckoned the value of direct observation in knowledge production, it was Yi Kyukyŏng who stepped further away from the moral entomology and moved closer to evidential learning of insects. Although we still need more research on Yi Kyukyŏng’s philosophy and methodology, it seems clear that he depended more on physical evidence than Yi Ik. Yi Kyukyŏng relied on pure thinking less than Yi Ik in understanding the nature of things/matter. Yi Kyu-kyŏng’s method can be better explained by his term “learning basics” (chipon). He thought that it would be an error to follow either Neo-Confucianism or the Yangming School blindly unless one confirmed basic facts. We can assume some influence of Fang Yizhi on Yi Kyu-kyŏng because Yi quoted many times from Fang Yizhi’s book, Wu li xiao shi. Just as Fang Yizhi recognized matter (wu [C]; mul [K]) in separation from the human mind, it is plausible that Yi Kyu-kyŏng acknowledged the limit of moral knowledge.16 He argued that the true value of learning can be found in verification of accurate knowledge. Even though it was irrelevant to moral education, he thought, knowledge had a value in itself. What he most despised was “insufficient explanations” (sŏlyak).
He sensed that Korean knowledge of insects needed improvement. That explains why Yi Kyu-kyŏng wrote twenty essays on insects and added them to his encyclopedia, Oju yŏnmun changjŏn sango (Yi Kyu-kyŏng’s Collection of Individual Essays in Myriad Things). In the collection of his entomological essays, we can see that he sought specific and accurate information about honeybees and wasps.17 In particular, Yi Kyu-kyŏng made remarkable progress in the two questions that Yi Ik could not solve decades before. Yi Kyu-kyŏng also failed to grasp the gender of the queen bee. And yet he described the nuptial flight in great detail, and claimed that the flight brought about specific effects on bee society. The group of “King bee” and male drones together called “the bee’s court (pongjo)” came out of the hive.18 He added empirical descriptions on the flight as below:
On a sunny spring day, when there is no wind, bees fly out from their hive and circle around it. They enter and leave their home a few times. Then, the king comes out. [I assume] it must be a kind of a ritual for learning. Soon enough, the king goes and is followed by a group of bees. Among the chasers, those who only fly to the highest point can stay close to the king. Those who cannot fly so high must take a position at a distance. Those that remain close stay alive, while the others die.19
If Yi Ik observed the same thing and interpreted it from a human perspective, Yi Kyu-kyŏng tried to capture the actuality of the happening. The cruel selection of the fittest in the queen’s mating flight received no moral judgment from him. Instead, he took it as a matter of fact.20
Likewise, we can find that Yi Kyu-kyŏng took a non-ethical approach to the wasp. Since he trusted observation as a method of learning, he rejected the ancient theory that the wasp acted for a noble cause. In his survey of the wasps in Korea, he listed three different types: Kwara, Yŏlong, and P’oro. These three types not only had distinctive behavioural patterns but also hunted different prey. The first two usually hunted mulberry caterpillars and small spiders. The third one captured a long-legged spider and a cricket. Being in the same family of the wasp, they had the common characteristic of stinging their prey. Once they secured the victim, they removed the victim’s legs and stored them in a cave. In the cave, they deposited their eggs.21 Therefore, he believed that the wasps gave the abducted to their caterpillars in the cave. Yi Kyu-kyŏng questioned Fang Yizhi‘s thesis that the wasps stunned their prey and made zombies out of them. Without more evidence, he refused to support Fang’s thesis.
As such, the Korean discourses on bees and wasps changed with the increasing importance of observational information. If Yi Ik initiated the debate on the ethical quality of bees and wasps, Yi Kyu-kyŏng continued it when he surveyed myriad things for writing his encyclopedia. Yi Ik’s accounts reveal the basic structure of Korean perceptions of insects. Insects were important players of the ethical universe. When this philosophical fiction no longer explained the actuality of nature such as the nuptial flight and the wasps’ hunting, new methods were employed by Yi Kyukyŏng. The quest of describing nature accurately can be revisited in a different angle. In the following section, I will examine the same shift from philosophical fiction to scientific non-fiction through an episode of silkworms.
Neo-Confucian Political Economy and Korean Indigenous Silkworms
The Korean relationship to insects can be assessed from another perspective to show that some insects had a symbolic role in the Confucian political economy. If beekeeping was a personal hobby, silk production from breeding a moth (Bombyx mori) required systematic efforts and long-term state policy. This approach was employed more in a place like Korea where the insect was not a native species. In China, the moth had evolved with humans from an early age. At some point in its evolution, the moth lost the ability to fly and entirely depended on human aid for reproduction. While the Chinese mastered the skill of caring for the moth and its caterpillar, it is questionable whether Koreans had the same level of expertise and technology in pace with the Chinese. The exact natural history of Bombyx mori in Korea is difficult to know, but later records show us that there could have been a substantial difference between the Chinese moth and the Korean moth in the late Chosŏn period. At the very least there existed a notion that Korean moths were different from Chinese. In sericulture, the care of the silkworm always demanded intensive care and expertise, and an outbreak of sickness quickly annihilated populations of silkworms in nurseries.22 Just as sericulture had symbolic meaning in the Chinese perception of humans-and-insects relations, it also created a long-lasting and veiled interaction between Koreans and the indigenous moth on the peninsula. Given the heavy weight of the Neo-Confucian normality of civilization, discovering the native moth could not have been done without a departure from the obstinate natural philosophy.
The history of humans-and-moths relations altered significantly after the Chosŏn dynasty defined sericulture as an essential part of its political economy. In 1415, the royal court supported the publication of a manual, Yangjam kyŏnghŏm ch’walyo (Essence and Experience of Growing Silkworms). The author, Han Sang-tŏk, compiled it from Chinese references while working as a high-ranking official.23 Embracing the Chinese concept of Confucian monarchy, the Yi royal family actively promoted sericulture as well. In particular, the queen and female members of the royal family were obliged to partake in the palace ceremony of Ch’injamrye.24 Since the Chosŏn king proclaimed that he would be a Confucian, the family showed its dedication to sericulture by building a royal nursery and a textile workshop in and outside of Seoul. The queen, as the female head of the royal family, showed her efforts and attention to the enterprise when she attended the ritual at Ch’angdŏk palace every spring.25 Around the capital, mulberry tree orchards appeared in vicinities such as the current Chamsil (which literally means “silk-rearing rooms”) and Chamwŏn (“mulberry orchards”).26 In spite of these early efforts from the highest level of society, it seems that Korean silk production grew slowly at best.27
Considering the sheer amount of knowledge, it seems rational that Koreans relied on the Chinese sources. China was doubtlessly the most advanced in silk production. Chinese textual sources and knowledge had enjoyed absolute authority.28 For example, Li Shizhen in Ben cao gang mu recorded that Chinese silk-producing moths were diverse in species. Breeders in southern Guangdong had identified five different species: San Mian, Si Mian, Liang Xing, Qi Chu, and Ba Chu. The moth, as Li Shizhen noted, passed moultings that the Chinese understood as “sleep” (mian [C]). San Mian, which had three “sleeps”, was a standard species in northern China while the four-time sleepers (Si Mian) were more commonly found in southern China.29 This biological difference and nomenclature of Bombyx mori was widely acknowledged from the Yuan dynasty as we can see in Wang Zheng nong shu (Agricultural Writings of Wang Zheng), a popular manual of agriculture and sericulture.30
The growth of Korean knowledge in the field can be found in the late Chosŏn period. In the same way that moral philosophy motivated Yi Ik to observe honeybees, Korean women began to garner first-hand information as they were expected to care for the moth according to Confucian ethics. Initially their empirical knowledge did not enter the realm of letters, as the literacy rate of women remained low in the early Chosŏn period. 31 The active participation of Korean women in sericulture proves that Neo-Confucianism became a motivation of scientific activity despite its oppressive gender ethics on women. Nam Mihye, a Korean scholar, reports a case in which a Korean woman of the late seventeenth century established her own business by utilizing her skills of breeding the caterpillar. After she married a man in P’yŏngan Province where many silk-producing workshops existed, she mastered the technique and proved her expertise enough to be a successful and independent breadwinner.32
Map 1
The Map of Korean Sericulture in 1907 (Black dots mark the silk production) Hayashi Dansaku, Kankoku sangyō chōsa fukumeisho (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1907).
Therefore, no matter how fictional the perception of female-and-caterpillar companionship was, the moral philosophy did not oppose the development of scientific knowledge. Training women as good breeders perfectly fit into the metaphysical order of li. We can find another case of the combination between moral philosophy and natural philosophy in female scholar Yi Pinghŏgak. Writing in the Korean vernacular alphabet, she recorded what she knew and how she felt about the caterpillar. First of all, she took it for granted that caring for the caterpillar was a female duty. However, she claimed that Korean women must raise their voice and make decisions from their own ethical thinking. Instead of following the customs blindly, she urged her female readers to treat the caterpillar as a life. Yi Pinghŏgak recognized an unethical element of silk production because it was made possible by the death of the moth. She wrote, “If you put the cocoon in boiling water, you can see that it reacts and writhes in pain. … They act so because they want to live and cannot tolerate the hot temperature”. She later questions, “How can a benevolent person (ŏjin saram) do such a thing?” Yi Pinghŏgak instructed differently from the Confucian norm that virtuous women should raise and kill the caterpillar. Based on her own observations, she noticed that the caterpillar was not so different from any other living thing. “Occasionally, you can raise them in a small number and weave cloth for seniors of your family,” she instructed. 33
Her independent voice on the meaning of sericulture challenged existing ideas based on self-evident propositions. Yi Pinghŏgak tried to refine her scientific knowledge of the caterpillar as if she were a medical caretaker. Her ethical enthusiasm pushed her to examine the insect as an object of research. In her encyclopedia, Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ (Home Encyclopedia for Women in the Inner Chamber), she wrote specific remedies for treating the illnesses of the insect. The caterpillar became most vulnerable after its “sleep”, she argued. If it showed any signs of sickness, the breeder must counter it with swiftness and determination. One possible remedy was to nourish the insect with special foods. After boiling red peppers in water, one could spill the water on mulberry leaves. Then, one should add powders of sticky rice on top of the leaves soaked in the peppered water. She verified this remedy in her own experiment. In a severe case of illness, one should add licorice to the spicy water. It is striking that she did not quote from any Chinese classics or Korean texts as verification of her methods; rather, she believed that real-life lessons alone created scientific knowledge.34
In the same context, the appearance of Korean empirical knowledge widened the boundary of the Korean concept of the silk-producing moth. The empirical method could not have appeared without the awareness that China could be wrong about the moth - especially Korean indigenous moths. The authority of Chinese knowledge weakened decisively when Koreans recognized the distance between Chinese moral and natural philosophy and the Korean reality. The discovery of Korean native moths coincided with similar discoveries in Ming-Qing China and Tokugawa Japan. In Japan, a native species of Antheraea yamamai was found. Terajima Ryōan called it “Yamamayu” in his encyclopedia Wa Kan sansai zue (Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia). In his account, there was a difference between the Chinese moth and the Japanese wild moth in that the Japanese moth could fly and survive in nature without human aid. The silk from the wild moth, conventionally called Tussar silk now, is sturdier than the ordinary silk of Bombyx mori. The Japanese weavers used Tussar silk without dying because no ink could change the color. Later, this moth migrated to Europe by the hands of European breeders.35 In fact, the family of Saturniidae has many other varieties in China and India as well.36 In Ming China, the Chinese wild moth, perhaps Antheraea pernyi, began to draw attention from the fifteenth century. As far as we can confirm from the records, Chinese breeders in Shandong province raised the wild moth in oak trees in the seventeenth century.37
In the early nineteenth century, Yi Kyu-kyŏng noted in his entomological essay the existence of Korean knowledge and practices in using various wild moths. Today it is impossible to determine what kinds of wild moths Korea had in the nineteenth century. However, Yi gives us some reasonable clue to guess their identity. He claimed that farmers in Hwanghae province weaved Tussar silk. Koreans normally used three species of moths in sericulture: Sangjam, Chamsiljam, and Chakpanjam. Interestingly he argued that these three were not identical to the Chinese moth, which Koreans called Wŏnjam (which literally means, “Original Caterpillar”). The Chinese moth was only found in the northwestern border area of Hamgyŏng province, and in all the other regions, people disliked the Chinese caterpillar. Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on how different the Korean moths were from the Chinese, and thus it is difficult to determine whether Bombyx mori had taken a different form on the Korean peninsula. It is also possible that there appeared a mutation of the species in Korea. Either way, it seems that Koreans believed that their silk-producing moths were unique and indigenous.
In his classification of the moths, Yi Kyu-kyŏng did not confine himself within the normative idea that Koreans should learn about Bombyx mori from China. He classified the insects into four species: San (Mountain), Ya (Field or the Wild), Ka (House), and Su (Water).38 He found two sub-kinds of Ya (Field or the Wild) in Korea. In Hwanghae province, local breeders raised a moth that only fed on the leaves of the Chinese Cedrela tree. By taking a name of the Chinese Cedrela tree, the local people called it Ch’un’gyŏn. Another kind of Yajam, he wrote, had no preference in diet.39 Given the short information, it is difficult to determine which was Antheraea pernyi and which was Antheraea yamamai. He collected information about the moths from Korean breeders because for him, their empirical knowledge was equal in value to any text. According to a local breeder, four towns of Hwanghae province – Haesŏ, Hwangju, Sŏhŭng, and Pongsan – were producing Tussar silk. The method was described as below:
When one rears wild moths, the task starts from catching them in the wild.40 They are much larger in size [than the normal moth]. Then, their legs must get tied by a string. It is to prevent them from escaping. After that, one places males and females on the same paper. They begin to mate, and females lay eggs. The eggs must be stored carefully until the next spring. When spring comes, the eggs will hatch. The caterpillars should be placed on branches of the Ailanthus altissima. They will feed themselves on the trees. Later, they turn into cocoons. The cocoon is the gigantic size of a chicken egg. They are firm and densely spun.41
Yi Kyu-kyŏng added a special note that the wild moth had a certain merit. Because the wild moth had no dietary preference, poor peasants could raise it at a relatively low cost. When they did not have mulberry orchards for common use, the native moth could be a cheap alternative to Bombyx mori.42
To sum up, Korean perceptions of the moth were based on more concrete and specific knowledge in the late Chosŏn period. Initially, Korean sericulture spread under the state policy of transplanting the Confucian ideal. As a part of moral philosophy, the duty of breeding the caterpillar enforced close contacts between Koreans and insects. Gradually, however, Korean knowledge of insects moved toward greater inclusion of empirical information. When sericulture was no longer something that Koreans should copy from China, Korean voices appeared on why and how to raise the moth. Moreover, their discovery of Korean wild moths was an astonishing sign that they had departed from the nominal thinking and behaviour.43
A New Concept of Pest Control
In the last part of this article, I examine another case that illustrates the shift in Korean concepts on insects. As we discussed above, Confucian ethics ruled Korean ideas of “good and bad insects”. “A bad bug (akch’ung)” meant a predator which harmed something moral. The ethical balance in nature was beyond the control of humans because the cosmic balance stood on a self-evident rule of li. People were to take the behaviours of insects for granted as a result of the natural law of all things. While honeybees and silkworms were born to have a bonding to virtuous people, others were also to have their own cause of existence. The locust exemplifies a different role of insects in the cosmic balance. It seemed that grasshoppers did not have an obvious benefit for humans; rather, there was a notion that they represented the rage of Heaven against immoral humans. The classical Chinese term, Huang [C] (Hwang [K]), referred to a broad range of grasshoppers in the family of Acrididae. The word Zai Yi [C] (Chaei [K]), which included in its meaning a plague of locusts, held a metaphysical message that natural disasters occurred as a kind of punishment for humans who had severed the harmony of the universe.
Since a secular ruler under Chinese civilization was given the Mandate of Heaven, it was his duty to maintain the balance. If he was responsible for moral degradation in his realm, nature could show signs of discomfort and anger through varied catastrophic events. Whenever such disasters happened, it meant there was an urgent need for humans and their leaders to repent their actions and change course. In this philosophical fiction, auspicious occurrences such as a good harvest signaled the excellence of the ruler’s moral integrity and actions.44
The Confucian concept of natural disasters affected the Korean perception as the Chosŏn dynasty declared Neo-Confucianism as the state’s doctrine. In the Confucian tradition, the New Text School contributed to the formation of the theory of natural disasters. Under the leadership of Dong Zhongshu [C] (179-104 BCE), the New Text School interpreted the records of natural blights from an ethical perspective. Although Neo-Confucianists toned down the ancient mysticism of Dong Zhongshu, Neo-Confucianism used the texts created by the New Text School. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Korean nobles who embraced the Chinese philosophy began to use the Confucian concept of natural disasters for their own political purposes. They actively interpreted the happenings in nature as a means of checking the autocratic power of the Yi monarchy. 45 Prominent scholars such as Yi Ŏnjŏk (1491–1553) and Yi Yi (1536–1584) advised Yi kings to review their moral quality whenever natural disasters struck.46 Since the Neo-Confucianists believed that the human mind and the external world were inter-connected, it was difficult to study nature as an independent object of scientific research.
We can find a critical voice on the old theory in the eighteenth century. Yi Ik initiated scepticism on the Neo-Confucian interpretation of natural disasters. He doubted if Dong Zhongshu comprehended the external world accurately. In the essay “Chaei,” he pondered a different way of seeing the human-and-nature relationship. This does not mean that he wanted to redefine nature as something independent from the human mind, but he did worry about the limitations of Confucian ethics: what if nothing happened when a secular ruler made a horrible mistake? Could the silence of Heaven legitimize a poor administration? Yi Ik lamented that many rulers felt no responsibility for their bad decisions as long as Heaven showed no signs of rage.47 As a devotee of Neo-Confucianism, he wished to renovate the ethics by using his method of “the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge.” Although direct observation of nature did not take over ethical contemplation, he used the happenings in nature in his argumentation. When all humans see the same sky, he argued, there was no reason that certain people, like the Son of Heaven, could communicate with it exclusively. He was not willing to separate the human mind from the external world, but he cautiously considered a possibility that there could be multiple sets of the truth; one in the human mind and the others in nature.48
In his reconceptualization of natural disasters, the observation of locusts played a significant role. In an essay titled “Pujong kuin (Locusts and Earthworms),” he remarked on his personal experience of watching grasshoppers and their reproductive methods. He wrote as below:
[A grasshopper] flew and sat on the ground. It began to dig a pit like earthworms, using its sharp tail. Once it finished, the grasshopper placed the lower body inside the hole. Then, it did not move for a while. I observed this scene myself. I saw that the tail has two edges and that these edges are sharp enough to penetrate hard soil. One day when I strolled around in the countryside, I happened to spot it doing so. I attempted to repel it away in vain, and it stubbornly refused to move. So, I dragged it out of the hole by force. Then it suddenly reacted and showed intense agony. Soon it released white bubbles from its abdomen. In the bubble, there were several dozen thin larvae [sech’ung]. After a while, the grasshopper flew away. … For the first time, I realized that the grasshopper’s larvae stay underground and that they grew up to be caterpillars. Grasshoppers come in many different varieties, with brown, blue, or patterned legs. They all lay eggs in a hole in the ground.49
In this entry, he treated the insect as an object of physical observation without contemplating its metaphysical function. By discovering the sheer fact that grasshoppers lay eggs in the ground, he purposed to disabuse Koreans of the popular myth that hoppers mate with earthworms. According to him, some Koreans even believed that grasshoppers not only had sexual intercourse with worms but also that hoppers could enhance male sexual potency. Yi Ik disregarded the popular myth and asserted that accurate knowledge of the hoppers could save people from ignorance. He wished that people could realize “how things are made [differently]” from the observation of those things.
The efforts to understand locusts scientifically implied that grasshoppers might not be a punitive agent of Heaven. This new idea paralleled with Xu Guangqi’s early analysis of locusts. Xu Guangqi pioneered new entomological debates early in the sixteenth century when he worked closely with his Jesuit friends like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). As a scholar-official of the Ming Empire, Xu Guangqi proposed a plan for controlling the locust population by artificial means. His famous proposal later inspired similar ideas of pest control in the following Qing Empire. Chen Fangsheng, for example, wrote an essay “Bu huang kao [C]” (An Analysis of How to Catch Locusts) that was included in Si ku chuan shu [C] (Complete Library of the Four Treasures) in 1781.50 The Qing Empire highly evaluated the scholarship of Xu and Chen and their claim that nature could be controlled by scientific knowledge.
As Yi Ik esteemed the works of Xu Guangqi and his Jesuit friends, Xu’s concept of insects deserves our attention. Xu thought that natural disasters were preventable; in other words, that there was no proof that such disasters reflected the intention of Heaven. “If a state failed to prepare food for the future and remained unprepared for a famine, it is all the responsibility of humans,” Xu remarked.51 He admitted, however, that drought and flood could occur no matter how hard people tried to prevent them. But when it came to a plague of locusts, people could control the hungry insects before they got out of control. Xu argued confidently, “the cost of having a swarm of locusts is the heaviest, but the prevention of it is the easiest.” China had two different names to identify the stage of the locust in the metamorphosis. The first name was called “Huang” [C], meaning the nymph stage. It was born from an egg the size of a grain, but soon grew to the size of a large fly. In the stage of “Huang” it could not fly, and it only jumped and lived in a group. A few days later, though, it became able to fly. When it reached to the mature stage, people called it “Nan” [C]. The adult grasshopper began to lay eggs underground and in eighteen days a new life cycle of “Huang” began. Therefore, Xu believed that accurate perception of biological life cycle, not moral quality, should be the first step in knowing things.52
Korean entomological discourses shifted in the same direction in the time of Yi Kyu-kyŏng. Yi Kyu-kyŏng was not only aware of the work of Chen Fangsheng but also tried to upgrade the information with more factual details that he discovered in Korea. Similar to his ideas on wasps and moths, he did not believe that the Chinese authors had flawless knowledge about things in Korea. He learned from the Chinese debates that “Huang nan [C], Hwangnam [K]” could cause immense damage to people’s lives. However, he wondered if Koreans perceived the grasshopper in the same way. The gap between the Chinese concept and the Korean perception was reassured by his examination of Korean locusts. In his record, a swarm of locusts occurred in 1759 on the western shores of Hwanghae, Ch’ungch’ŏng, and Chŏlla province. They appeared all of a sudden. Yi Kyu-kyŏng wrote, however, that their external shape looked more like a cicada than a grasshopper. Also, the size was much smaller than what he had learned in Chinese books.53 When the locusts arrived, they destroyed crops and vegetables. When the disaster occurred, he noted, the local administration conducted a religious ceremony (P’oje) for soothing a spirit of the plague.54
Before analyzing the identity of the insect, we should consider the possibility that Yi Kyu-kyŏng’s information was inaccurate. In the Chosŏn wangjo sillok (the Veritable Records of Chosŏn Dynasty), there is no record of the same ceremony in 1759. Table 1 shows the years of the ritual and their locations.
The year 1759 does not appear on the list. Instead, the closest years of the happenings were 1733–1734 and 1763. In both, the swarm appeared in Hwanghae province, which had a broad rice field. Because Yi Kyu-kyŏng was born in 1788, his memory could be wrong on the exact date of the occurrence.
On the other hand, his account of what happened in his lifetime looks more credible. He wrote of another swarm in 1828 in which he claimed that the insect had the shape of a cicada. Sillok has the same record on the outbreak in 1828. A royal inspector Chŏng Ki-sŏn submitted a report saying that he saw a small insect. In his report, he described how “Fourteen counties, including Taegu, are now under attack of what looks like a cicada. It is small like a mayfly.”56 Yi Kyu-kyŏng saw the same insect. Yi wrote, “All mishaps caused by the insect are equivocally called the plague of locust. But [in fact] they are not grasshoppers.”57 He identified the insect as “Myŏlmyoch’ung.” It was a hopper in the shape of a cicada and the size of a mosquito. Given the description, there is a high chance that the insect was a brown planthopper (Nilaparvata lugens), a member of the Delphacidae family, that has continued to be a major threat in rice farming until today.58
In the early twentieth century, modern biologists faced the same question that Yi Kyu-kyŏng raised for the first time in Korea. In 1921 and 1924, Japanese biologists Muramatsu Shigeru and Okamoto Hanjirō published two conflicting opinions on the identity of agricultural pests in Korea. Muramatsu Shigeru claimed that a grasshopper caused the damage in his time and assumed that the insect was probably to blame for past incidences as well.59 He arrived at that conclusion in 1921 after examining the pests at the Public Agricultural Promotion Centre in Suwŏn. By contrast, Okamoto Hanjirō argued that it was not a grasshopper but a brown planthopper. Later in 1976, Korean entomologist Paek Un-ha agreed with Okamoto that the Korean historical records on the swarm must be attributed to the brown planthopper.60 Paek Un-ha assumed that the brown planthopper must have caused the damage of 1828. However, none of the three biologists above had any chance to see Yi Kyu-kyŏng’s early report of the event.
Yi Kyu-kyŏng’s understanding of the grasshopper also went beyond the previous level of moral philosophy. What interested him the most was physical reality, not ethical meaning. He heard that “[Korean grasshoppers] stay on the leaves of the rice plant. But they consume only dew and do not harm rice.” One way of controlling the population of grasshoppers was to eat them as a snack. Yi reported that people in rural areas caught and ate grasshoppers, claiming that they tasted like shrimp. Sometimes people crushed them in powder and dried them in sunlight. They then added the powder to salty water and drank it. They believed that the locust drink had a therapeutic effect of enhancing the kidney. 61 It seemed to him that grasshoppers were relatively easy prey for human hunting. He wrote, “If people do nothing and let the insects destroy everything, isn’t it a pity?”62
Thus, the invasion of locusts was no longer taken as an unstoppable punishment of Heaven. The grasshopper was subject to human control, and the success of that control depended on scientific knowledge. If the secularized view of the grasshopper started from the time of Yi Ik, it earned more factual details and empirical methods in the stage of Yi Kyukyŏng. His strong interest in the actuality of things made the shift possible in the early nineteenth century. Even if Yi Kyu-kyŏng was rather an exceptional figure of the time, we should not miss that the philosophical fiction of insects was losing its authority at least among Korean intellectuals.
Conclusion
To summarize, Korean perceptions of insects reflected the change in the relationship between humans and non-humans in the late Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism and the ethical understanding of things were once primary platforms upon which Koreans understood the nature of insects. The creatures did not exist ad hoc but were designed to play significant roles in the cosmos of li. In the Neo-Confucian worldview, “the investigation of things” (kyŏngmul) manifested the symbolic meanings of all happenings in the physical world because humans and non-humans had no boundary between the two. Honeybees and caterpillars represented the noble mind, while the overgrowth of locusts meant moral downfall. In ethical entomology, each creature had a pre-determined level of virtue and presented useful lessons to those who “investigated” things. Moral discourses on insects would benefit the self-cultivation of human observers.
However, moral entomology was a philosophical fiction. The presence of a queen bee was incompatible with the social ideology that the male patriarch was deemed the most natural. Thus, the queen must be called the king to defend the moral idealism. That can explain why Yi Ik missed the existence of the queen and female worker bees after all his years of beekeeping. Along with Neo-Confucianism, Chinese knowledge of insects, as an essential element of the fictional world, had enjoyed high status in Korean perceptions of insects. The case of sericulture teaches us how and why Korean entomological knowledge had depended on Chinese books more than the physical reality until empirical knowledge finally appeared in the eighteenth century. Even though Bombyx mori was a foreign species, the ideological framework of agriculture and sericulture required Bombyx mori in Korea. This does not mean that the fictional view of insects hindered the growth of scientific knowledge. On the contrary, the state policy of fostering Bombyx mori had a positive effect on developing Korean skills in the care of the vulnerable caterpillar.
Therefore, it is critical to note that the Korean discovery of new species such as Antheraea pernyi, Antheraea yamamai, Samia cynthia, and Nilaparvata lugens occurred against the backdrop of the philosophical fiction of things. It is indeed a puzzle to understand how the old fictional view of insects gave way to a realistic view of things. In my view, Yi Ik, Yi Pinghŏgak and Yi Kyu-kyŏng give us clues to better understanding this complicated change in Korean epistemology. The three figures represent transition from moral entomology to observational studies. Most of all, they acknowledged the possibility that matter (mul) had its own rules and laws. If the physical world could not be confined to philosophical fiction, a new method of learning was deemed necessary. Observing the behaviours of insects opened their eyes to the strange rules and nature of the physical reality. Korean native caterpillars and grasshoppers unknown in Chinese books and metaphysics thus inevitably became objects of scientific research.
The ancient theory that ethical havoc would cause a catastrophe of locusts was viewed with doubt in the same manner. Since insects were nothing but physical matter, their symbolic roles turned invalid in the minds of observers of nature. After scholars such as Xu Guangqi argued that humans could control nature by scientific knowledge, Korean entomological discourses also paid more attention to matters of fact over spiritual messages. Most notably in the case of Yi Kyu-kyŏng, real-life observation mattered more in his search for truth than the textual sources written by Chinese authors. His discovery of “Myŏlmyoch’ung” (Nilaparvata lugens) deserves our attention for this reason. It not only preceded by about a hundred years the discoveries of modern entomologists in the twentieth century but also marks a new level of pre-modern Korean knowledge of insects in the late Chosŏn period.
Hence, even before the arrival of modern science and biology, the body of Korean scientific knowledge on insects was growing at its own pace. However, it would be an exaggeration to claim these discoveries as a sign of the scientific revolution. Both Yi Ik and Yi Kyu-kyŏng maintained their respect of Neo-Confucian metaphysics and Chinese classics. And they were far from scientists in the modern definition of the term. Their goal, as men of their time, was to reform the Korean perception of things. By recognizing the value of observational discovery, their reform intended to supplement the pre-existing philosophical fiction with a new genre of non-fiction. In my view, their intellectual endeavours to broaden the scope of knowledge had substantial meaning as part of the reform within Neo-Confucian epistemology.
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