In recent years, South Korean pseudohistorians, who accuse the academic establishment of promoting “colonial-era historiography,” have achieved political influence impacting professional research on early Korea. Their alternative narrative imagines ancient Korea as an expansive continental empire giving rise to northeast Asian civilization. Archetypal to this conceptualization is the apocryphal history Hwandan kogi 桓檀古記 (1979). Placed in the history sections of bookstores, the most accessible edition today is that translated by An Kyo˘ngjo˘n, second-generation patriarch of the syncretic new religion of Chu˘ ngsando. An's Hwandan kogi contains an extensive introduction both synthesizing the full canon of Korean pseudohistory, and incorporating his own millenarian doctrine drawn from Sino-Korean esotericism; An further supplements both these aspects with corresponding Western pseudoscience pertaining to lost civilizations and imminent apocalypse. Situating An's doctrine in diachronic contexts of popular Korean history and new religion, this paper seeks to illuminate one of the lesser known forces currently abetting Korean pseudohistory.

There was little consensus among the Qing leadership―which comprised emperors, provincial officials, and the gentry―regarding policy issues arising from the official and private practices of weights and measures. Spearheading a reform initiative seeking to unify weights and measures, the Kangxi Emperor became personally involved in the definition and dissemination of new standards through government publications. However, with later policy proposals tending to limit the scope of this initiative, a more cautious approach was adopted. While the rigorous enforcement and stringent supervision of the official standards sought to eliminate the dishonest practices of merchants, who defined and used weights and measures for selfish gains, reservations soon emerged that the government's interventionist approach might disrupt existing market customs.

This article explores Tomboy (Huashen guniang 化身姑娘, 1936), arguably one of the most viewed films in China in the mid-1930s, and Yuan Meiyun's 袁美雲 (1917-1999) stardom in prewar Shanghai. Tomboy's popularity was a testimony to the rise of female stardom and female fandom in this decade. The 1930s also saw both the final triumph of the rally for women's rights since the May Fourth period and the Nationalist Party's pro-family, anti-woman backlash. Tomboy catapulted Yuan Meiyun to superstardom in the context of the cacophonous debates on new femininity in China in the relatively conservative mid-1930s. This article thus argues that because Yuan Meiyun exemplified a new type of woman who was modern, attractive, and independent but exempted herself from modern life's vices and hedonism, her eclectic womanhood both on the screen and in the media narrative gained widespread acclaim and thereby contributed to her success as a film star.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on Sin Kyo˘ngsuk's autobiographical novel, Oettanbang (A Lone Room), in which the protagonist factory girl aspires to become a writer. I argue that the protagonist achieves her dream by escaping from her status as a factory girl, the object of sexual violation and stigmatization, and by becoming a middle-class author representing the sexuality of the “factory girl.” At the height of Korean labor literature in the 1980s, the sexuality of women workers was a taboo subject. Oettanbang arrived late on the labor literature scene and broke this taboo. There are repeated episodes in the novel where the author's former colleagues (factory girls) plead with her to write about their stories as well. I argue that the repetition of these episodes reveals the discontent of working-class women with intellectuals speaking on their behalf, as well as the author's own anxiety about appropriation in representing their sexuality