From the 1870s to the 1890s, the interactions of Chosoˇn and Qing diplomats were closely watched. Seeking to advance their own interests, the Japanese, Americans, British, and Russians closely examined the exchange of envoys and the flow of communications in search of an explanation of the Qing-Chosoˇn relationship. Chosoˇn-Qing relations became in this period the subject of international inquiry, a phenomenon for investigation, the object of a Western diplomatic gaze.

The Qing government viewed foreign interest in Chosoˇn with alarm and concluded that the existing relationship with Chosoˇn was insufficient to address its security concerns. By the 1880s, the Chosoˇn and Qing governments began to negotiate a new relationship to jointly address the evolving geopolitical dynamics of the region. This re-negotiation of more than two-hundred years of diplomatic precedent was made especially complex by the fact that Qing and Chosoˇn officials were keenly aware of external observation. Potential foreign interpretations were an explicit concern in their policy considerations. It was in these circumstances that Qing and Chosoˇn leaders transformed tributary practice into a politics of representation through which they attempted to redefine themselves and one another through highly public performances explicitly for the consumption of observing Western powers.

Historians have suggested that in this period Chosoˇn was a traditional tributary while others have written of a hybrid arrangement in which Chosoˇn simultaneously participated in a Qing tributary system and a Western treaty system. For some the new relations constituted a strengthening of a traditional tributary relationship while yet others have posited a complete collapse of tributary relations. Despite the disparate positions of these works they are united by a common element: the reification of the tributary relationship independent of the contemporary discourses through which it was constituted. The Chosoˇn-Qing relationship of the 1880s and 1890s, however, was inseparable from the Western diplomatic gaze and the conscious redeployment of tribute as a politics of representation. These representations have had a lasting influence on Western understandings of Qing-Chosoˇn relations and notions of tradition and modernity in East Asia. These are the central propositions to which this dissertation is devoted.