Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence from power across East Asian cultures, came to live in scholar-official households in late Chosŏn. With the residency of this elegant bird in scholarly households around the mid-eighteenth century, a new knowledge practice that took serious interest in things like cranes emerged. This paper illuminates the roles of these highly cross-cultured things in late-Chosŏn knowledge transformation, echoing material turns in various disciplines. Necessitating knowledge to properly possess and accompany them, cranes led to a new scholarly attachment to things. It opened up an unprecedented intellectual attitude that valued curiosity, taste, and facts concerning things and emphasized usefulness of that newly obtained thing-knowledge. Curiosity, taste, facts, and the usefulness of knowledge obtained new meanings in other parts of the world that experienced similar transitions in knowledge practice by and towards things. While delineating the roles of cranes specifically in late-Chosŏn's transformation through the imprints that they left in scholarly acts and works, this paper proposes a new way to connect knowledge transformations in different parts of the globe, via these newly migrating things, moving away from the narrative that requires an origin and transfers.
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The red-crowned white crane (Grus japonensis) is a large bird that has long been cherished in East Asian cultures for its longevity, fidelity, and elegantly detached air. It was said that it lives forever, turns blue after a thousand years, and black after another thousand years, accompanying immortal Taoist hermits. For a long time people in the region had raised this migratory bird, which reproduces in Siberia and north-eastern China and spends only the winter in Korea and east-central China, with a year-round habitat in Hokkaido, Japan. Lin Bu (林逋, 967–1028) of Song China, who lived a solitary life disgusted by the politics of the time, despite his sought-after talent, presented a most lyricized example of having a “plum wife and a crane son.” The crane followed him around his house surrounded by three hundred plum trees, away from the city, and notified him when guests visited. It symbolized his independence from power.
Crane rearing became a fashionable pastime in eighteenth-century Chosŏn Korea, especially among influential yangban, scholar-official households in or near Seoul, spreading to more modest and rural ones by the nineteenth century (Hong Citation2020a). The popularity of crane rearing coincided with a new scholarly interest in and approach to things—domestic ones like cranes as well as the many foreign things from Qing China that came to populate late Chosŏn, here mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper examines the roles of things in this transformation of knowledge practice, joining material turns in various disciplines (Barad Citation2007; Cook et al. Citation2017; Cronon Citation1983; Ingold Citation2007; Latour Citation1987; Rheinberger Citation1997; White Citation1996). This story of cranes also echoes growing literature in animal studies that demonstrates how animals “impacted ecologies, economies and states as much as individual and social practices and knowledge ideals” throughout history (DeMello Citation2021; Sterckx et al. Citation2018: 1). However, while cranes exerted transformative power in late Chosŏn partly thanks to their lucid cry and almost human-like “intelligence,” this paper treats them as one of so many things that also include humans; it tries to simply follow the traces that their interactions with new scholars left on late-Chosŏn society and texts. Like drawing electric fields, it delineates the imprints that cranes left on scholarly acts and works so that we may appreciate the power of things throughout history.
