Ramblings on random topics (Patreon)

Siege of Ulsan

I finally completed all the maps for my Siege of Ulsan article, then I realised I might have to redo them all over again because OCD is serious business. For the time being though, the article is as complete as it could ever be, and I am quite proud of it. It is the most detailed and accurate reconstruction of the event available in English bar none, if I say so myself.

Topic update

I also noticed some errors in my Bai Gan Bing (白桿兵) article, and will have to revisit it at a later time. In fact I have a long list of articles that need to be or partially updated, and they keeps piling up.

New topic

I am not done with Imjin War yet, and planned to write about various infantry formations of Imjin War in the coming month, which will be tied to the aforementioned Bai Gan Bing update. I also want to/will write about Ding Yingtai debacle and the confusion he caused on Siege of Ulsan in the near future, although I  intend to put that article into a higher Patreon tier.

After that, I think it's time to move on to a different topic, at least for the time being.

New book

I finally get my hands on a copy of 'The East Asian War, 1592-1598: International Relations, Violence and Memory', which is a more recent (2015) publication than the "big three" English Imjin War books (Samuel J. Hawley's The Imjin War, Kenneth M. Swope's A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail, and Stephen R. Turnbull's The Samurai Invasion of Korea 1592-98).

I've quickly skimmed through the book (it's a tough read, and I haven't have the chance to read it in detail yet), with special attention paid to well-known battles of Imjin War as well as Ming involvement. To be honest, I can't help but feel disappointed. The book is a collaborative work of seventeen professors and historians, which has both upside and downside. On one hand, it is much more academic and in-depth compared to previous popular-level books, with input from esteemed experts such as Kitajima Manji (北島万次). On the other hand, quality of the contributors are inconsistent (I personally find chapters written by Japanese contributors to be the best, and Korean to be the worst), and the book is basically a bunch of academic research papers on various subjects being compiled together, with very little sense of coherency and overarching theme. Essentially, every chapter in the book discusses about a stand-alone topic, and its author conducted his own research with little to no communication between author(s) of another chapter. 

Worse still, of the seventeen contributors to this book, not a single one of them come from China. Ming's perspective of Imjin War is only represented through prof. Harriet T. Zurndorfer and, to a lesser extend, Kenneth M. Swope. Yet even their exposure to Chinese researches and sources seems pretty limited (despite the fact that there is already a century's worth of research on Imjin War from China), and their coverage of the battles are mostly inaccurate anyway. There are even gems such as one chapter claiming to "examine the Chinese military intervention from the standpoint of Chinese defense strategies", yet using mostly Korean sources, and the result is not pretty (unfortunately the author pushed a one-dimensional perspective on a complex multi-faceted problem: that Ming army came to Korea only to impose heavy burden and suffering on Korean people and drained the effectiveness of Korea's fighting forces as they were forced to provide for Ming troops, yet it mostly just committed atrocities on Korean people and did little to actually help them. He conveniently left out the fact that it was Korean mismanagement of logistics that hamstrung the effectiveness of Ming army in the first place, not to mention Korean incompetence in general was a major contributing factor to Ming defeats during the war, i.e. the defeats of Second Siege of Pyongyang and Battle of Byeokjegwan were in part caused by Koreans intentionally feeding Ming army false intelligence, Yi Un-ryong's inaction during Siege of Ulsan also contributed to its failure).

Unsurprisingly, this leaves an enormous hole in the historical sources and knowledge about Imjin War, and inevitably researches based on incomplete data produce incomplete and biased results at best, outright wrong conclusions at worst. In fact, just from what I can immediately tell (since I mostly pay attention to famous battles), MOST discussions about specific battles in the book are either inaccurate, misinterpreted, omitted important details that I think should be included, or outright factually wrong.