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Please see below for information about the first session of the 2024-2025 Enemy Encounters in East Asia webinar series of the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East” at Heidelberg University, Germany. As previously announced the Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598 webinar series has come to a close, but it will be succeeded by this new webinar series.

“Ambivalent Enmity in the Last Days of the Imjin War (1592-99): The Case of Mao Guoke”

Wing Kin Puk (Associate Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

• October 16, 2024, 4:00 PM (Heidelberg, CEST) via ZOOM.
• The webinar will be recorded, but not the question time.
• If you would like to attend the webinars, please contact barend.noordam@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de.

In this session, Wing Kin Puk (Associate Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong) will share his thoughts on ambivalent enmity during the Imjin War in Korea:

It is a well-known fact that belligerents keep fighting and negotiating with each other at the same time. However, in certain historical contexts, negotiation seems unacceptable. For the Imjin War, or the Korea War in the 16th century, the Ming government insisted that it was brought to an end by the glorious victory of the Ming force. But Japanese and Korean archives revealed a more complicated fact: Ming frontline commanders and their Japanese counterparts negotiated a truce and exchanged hostages accordingly, while keeping fighting till the end. This Webinar talk covers the intriguing and interesting story of one of the Ming hostages: Mao Guoke. As a middle-ranking Ming officer, Mao Guoke was “dressed up” as the younger brother of his senior commander Mao Guoqi and sent to Japan as a hostage. He returned to China after almost two years (1598–1600), expecting to be received as a hero but was dismissed as more of a “self-made hero.”



BACKGROUND

For more information about the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”, please go to their website https://ambivalentenmity.org/.</span>

This project has received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).