Happy New Year!
What will 2017 bring us? Here at Lotus & Persimmon, there are many plans afoot. I will continue to bring you blog posts about art and culture from around the East and Southeast Asian region, of course. 2017 will also see the launch of L&P's retail operations. Launch date: 4 July. As we get closer to that date, the nature of the blog posts will change as retail products become the focus.
I also plan to start work on translating a rare early book about Korea:
As far as I can make out, La Corée (1883) is one of the first books about Korea in a European language to be written and published after the opening of Korea's ports to international commerce. It seems to have been part of a series of monographs on Asian and African countries put out by the now-defunct French Geographic Society.
It's heavily reliant for its information on another French book published almost a decade earlier, Charles Dallet's History of the Korean Church (1874), which was the first European book about Korea since Hamel's captivity narrative appeared in Dutch more than 250 years earlier:
The picture above shows the shows the frontispiece of the original book reproduced in a recent edition of the Korean translation. I am the co-translator with Prof Gary Ledyard of Volume I of this work as well. Regrettably, it's still in manuscript as we have been unable to find a publisher.
Why are these works in French, you may wonder? In short, it's because French missionaries were covertly active in the so-called Hermit Kingdom for more than 40 years before visitors of any other nationalities arrived. The missionaries' letters and other writings are the main source material for these 2 books. Oddly, no one's ever thought to translate them before. Perhaps that's because earlier generations of Anglo-American scholars would have had a reading knowledge of French.
In any case, my plan is to serialize La Corée, which I'm simply going to call Korea, on the blog. I will post chapters as I complete them.
Please come back regularly to read blog posts, and please, PLEASE come back in the summer to look at the one-of-a-kind artworks and vintage/antique artifacts that will be for sale from 4 July. Images of some of them are in fact already visible elsewhere on this site. If you're not already doing so, please 'like' and follow the Lotus & Persimmon page on Facebook, and also the Lotus & Persimmon gallery on Instagram.
I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2017!
An Anglican missionary priest comments on same-sex desire and behaviour in Old Korea.
I love all kinds of Korean food, but I've narrowed my favourite dishes down to just 3.
L&P shops for books about Macau and Timor at an antiquarian bookshop in Lisbon.
King Gojong/Emperor Gwangmu (Korea)
On the anniversary of the end of the Russo-Japanese War, L&P profiles the man who had the most to lose by it.