REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 145
fection was brought to an end with the Ch'in unification in 206 B.c. All subse-
quent dynasties only illustrated the fall from perfection, but some of them pre-
sented worthwhile attempts or proposals to recover the essence of classical
institutions.
This interpretation might seem commonplace to students of premodern East
Asian thought, but it takes on significance in light of recent attempts to portray
the so-called Practical Learning (sirhak) group of seventeenth-and eighteenth-
century scholars as protonationalists as well as protomodernizers. Close study
ofYu's writings, however, reveals only that he was aware of the legitimate sep-
arateness and possible distinctiveness of native dynasties and customs. There is
hardly a trace of national pride or any we/they nationalistic dichotomy in his
thought that would produce any exaggeration of Korean accomplishments, expe-
rience, and wisdom at the expense of the universal values deriving from the Chi-
nese, Confucian tradition. On the contrary, Yu's commitment to a transcendent,
cosmopolitan culture engendered a sense of the inferiority of the Korean past
and present; the past presented few models worthy of emulation, and the pre-
sent in Korea represented a situation no better than the so-called later age (huse)
of the Chinese dynastic period.
In tracing the history of recruitment in Korean history, Yu indicated clearly
that there was not much worth talking about until the institution of the exami-
nation system in 958 under the Koryo dynasty. Although he mentioned the tale
in the Chinese classic, the Book of History, about the culture hero, Kija (Ch'i-
tzu in Chinese), a Chinese nobleman and sage adviser to the founder of the Chou
dynasty who was supposedly granted a fiefdom over the state of Ancient
Choson (presumably on the Korean peninsula), he hardly did so with much con-
viction. He assumed that under his rule, "the selection of people and the
appointment to office of worthy men was done by a method that was both sim-
ple and true," but he conceded that there was no evidence to substantiate it.^87
His skepticism was not strong enough to produce a bold and unequivocal rejec-
tion of the epiphany of a sage visitor from China who brought with him a panoply
of perfect institutions by which he raised the Korean peninsula to the lofty heights
of the early Chou, during an era in Korean history that is now thought to mark
only the bare beginnings of a shift from neolithic to bronze culture. Nonethe-
less, he did feel constrained to mention it since the main object of his search for
models to emulate was in ancient China, not Korea. It should surprise no one,
either, that he hardly deigned to mention Tan 'gun, the putative progenitor of the
"Korean people" first recorded by the monk, Iryon, in his Samguk yusa in the
thirteenth century, belief in whose existence is taken by many contemporary
Korean scholars to augur a commitment to the native tradition over Chinese cul-
ture represented by Kija.
Whatever the putative (and highly suspect) glories of Kija's rule at the end of
the second millennium B.C., by the time of the Three Kingdoms period (tradi-
tional dates: from approximately the first century B.C. to A.D. 668) Korea had
obviously regressed to a state hardly advanced from barbarism. "There was