640 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONthing had to be left to the interpreters to handle, a considerable obstacle to proper
understanding.^72
Yu felt that King Sejong's program for Chinese language instruction had to
be rehabilitated to facilitate proper communication with the Chinese, but he
put it in terms that could only send shivers up the spine of any full-blooded
nationalist:If you want to follow the intention of our former king [Sejong] and convert [us]
barbarians to Chinese culture [pvon i wi hal, then though it may be difficult to
change the speech of the common people totally. [you could still have] people
pronounce all characters in the Chinese manner. When the sons of scholars study
the classics lin classical Chinese] and Han'gUl explanations [in the text], you
could have them use The Correct Tones (~lthe Hun8-wu Era, Translated and
Explained, [to learn the tones] for reciting the texts.nYu also wanted all students in his revitalized schools to read the classics in
Chinese pronunciation of the characters, even though classical Chinese was not
spoken in China. He thought that this method would produce men able [0 speak
Chinese, and as a further incentive he recommended examining all officials in
spoken Chinese and either promoting or demoting them depending on their per-
formance. He further devised a law that would require that all civil officials in
the capital be assembled at the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence to recite
two texts, one in Chinese and the other in idu. They would either be promoted
or demoted depending whether they were correct in more or less than half their
pronunciations. In addition, quota students in the National Academy and Four
Schools in the capital and the district schools in the provinces would bc tested
every three months in reciting from standard Chinese language texts.^74
Yu's attitude about encouraging, if not forcing, the study of colloquial Chi-
nese to facilitate diplomatic communication with the Chinese government and
general understanding of Chinese conditions by a wide range of civil officials
was not cxclusively a product of a supine attitude toward superior Chinese civ-
ilization nor a total denigration of the native languagc because he did not criti-
cize the use of idu among Korean clerks or Han'gUl orthography for explanations
and transcriptions of Chinese sounds. Any nationalist would have acknowledged
that knmvledge of spoken Chinese would have been far more useful than the tra-
ditional "written conversations" that most educated Koreans had to conduct with
Chinese on their trips to China. On the other hand, his remark about learning
Chinese pronunciation as the means for "converting [us] barbarians to Chinese
culturc" could only have been uttered in an cra when respect for the universal
and cosmopolitan standards of Chinese, particularly classical Chinese, culture
overrode the particular and hence deficient standards of native Korean culture
in the mind of the educated Korean elite.