Reeds, river islands, and inter-imperial conflict on the early twentieth-century Sino-Korean border
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Reeds, river islands, and inter-imperial conflict on the early twentieth-century Sino-Korean border Joseph A. Seeley1 Received: 20 August 2020 / Accepted: 19 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper uses disputes over islands in the early twentieth-century Yalu River to examine how river environments critically shape border conflicts. Processes of riparian erosion and sedimentation along this historical border between China and Korea, accelerated by upstream deforestation, helped transform submerged sandbanks into islands known as Hwangch’op’yŏng. After Japan’s occupation of Korea in 1905, these islands in the lower Yalu delta—and the valuable reeds that grew on their marshy surface—became an unlikely battleground between Chinese and Korean reed harvesters, Japanese “continental adventurers,” and competing Japanese and Chinese empires. With the contemporary Sino-North Korean border still a geopolitical hotspot, it is imperative to understand the historical as well as ecological forces that shaped the contested geography of the Yalu River boundary. Such an understanding, this article argues, shows how both Japanese imperial violence and riparian sedimentation contributed to Hwangch’op’yŏng’s battleground status and its transformation, by the end of the twentieth century, into a Korean exclave on the Chinese bank of the Yalu River. Keywords Yalu River · Border dispute · Japanese Empire · Korea · China A floating piece of sand is not much to fight over—at least on its own. But in the case of the early twentieth-century Yalu River border between Qing dynasty China and Japanese-occupied Korea, the accumulation of sediment into newly-formed islands precipitated a major diplomatic conflict. In September 1906, local Koreans led by an opportunistic Japanese settler allegedly stole Chinese-harvested reeds from Hwangch’op’yŏng (Chinese: Huangcaoping)—two uninhabited islands on the lower Yalu River that had been little more than partially submerged sandbanks decades before. Later that year the Japanese military occupied the islands for “field exercises,” turning Hwangch’op’yŏng into a site of international contestation. On July 12, 1907, the Qing Foreign Ministry received an anxious telegraph from Xu Shichang, the Viceroy of the Three East Provinces (now Northeast China–historically known as Manchuria). Unless the Yalu border was clearly defined, the telegraph
* Joseph A. Seeley [email protected] 1
Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
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Fig. 1 Map of the Yalu River. The Yalu’s drainage basin is highlighted in white. (Source: Adapted by author from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yalurivermap.png)
argued, it would be impossible to avoid further conflicts over the marshy space (Academia Sinica Archives of the Institute of Modern History 02-19-007-01-007) (Figs. 1, 2). As geographers and environmental historians have increasingly shown, river borders are hardly the stable, easily definable and defensible
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