Even after the establishment of the tributary relationship between the Qing and Choson courts, local people continued to violate borders in search for ginseng, and border transgression incidents, in fact, did not disappear until the end of the ninetee...
Even after the establishment of the tributary relationship between the Qing and Choson courts, local people continued to violate borders in search for ginseng, and border transgression incidents, in fact, did not disappear until the end of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to find that as time passed, responses from the Qing court to Korean trespassers gradually changed: if the early Qing rulers who strove to secure their fragile country in the hostile environment attempted to impose a rather harsher policy to curb their reluctant neighbor, their descendents in the eighteenth century when the Qing empire reached its apex became more lenient to their submissive tributary state. Punishments for Korean trespassers were reduced, while curbing on the Qing side was strengthened through issuing the imperial edicts. In the mid-eighteenth century when Qing local officials in the northeastern frontier proposed to station soldiers at a border post near Choson as a way to prevent Korean trespassing, the Choson made an all-out effort to stop the Qing from approaching near the border and their territory. Finally the Qing emperor decided to accept the Choson appeal and not to place soldiers at the border, a dramatic contrast with the cruel attitude of the early Qing rulers to the Korean border trespassers. Just as much the Qing emperor wished to reinforce the justice of their claim to the Mandate of Heaven within the empire, they wanted to posture themselves as a benevolent ruler to even embrace foreign subjects. For eighteenth-century Qing rulers, border security with an unintimidating neighbor was an issue of less significance than gaining respects from an old tributary state.