The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley announced the 2024 winner of the UC Berkeley Hong Yun Lee Book Award in Korean Studies, Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Professor Sixiang Wang, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA. 

In Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China, Professor Wang offers a sweeping, revisionist account of East Asian diplomatic relations across three centuries. Few subjects have been as widely written about as tributary relations, with historians in China, Japan, Korea, and the United States all making the Sino-Korean relationship a mainstay understanding pre-modern political and intellectual history. Wang moves away from the conventional interpretations of tributary relations by bringing fresh methodological approaches, most notably by not taking at face value the longstanding rhetoric and rituals that, for centuries, framed the relationship. He submits an extraordinarily wide array of sources - from poetry to diplomatic memorials, travelogues to epistolary correspondence, from court records to literary anthologies - to close, contextual readings and demonstrates how Chosŏn and Ming actors co-constructed and mutually invested in a variety of literati stereotypes, tropes, and conventions that in their inconsistencies and contradictions provided sufficient flexibility and capacity for the maneuvering of diplomatic politics. This is storytelling at its best, yet always in service to the author's broader themes. With the astute use of sources, and nuanced approach to reading against the grain, Wang shows a bracing way of rethinking the centuries-long history of Sino-Korean relations. 

The UC Berkeley Hong Yun Lee Book Award in Korean Studies and its $10,000 prize were created to support groundbreaking research and writing that seeks to further the field of Korean Studies. A ceremony to celebrate the award and Professor Wang's academic accomplishment will be held at UC Berkeley on February 7, 2025.