History of science and technology in Korea

"Korea’s science and technology are worth knowing and thinking about in connection with technology transfer for special reasons. Unlike China, Korea’s styles in thinking systematically and objectively about nature and in developing instruments and techniques of material culture were always defined in the shadow of a large sophisticated nearby civilization. The Korean experience differs from Japan’s in that its influences from China flowed in more freely and directly, across a shared land border or a short stretch of sea. It was from Korea in fact that new sciences and arts were carried into Japan during the early centuries until regular contact between Japan and China became possible. As recent Korean and Japanese scholarship begins to cohere, it is becoming plain that we have not yet adequately recognized what a great part immigrant Koreans played in the formative phases of Japanese civilization as men of learning, craftsmen, and indeed nobles. Korea thus presents for our reflection the case of a country seeking to maintain its identity against pressures too imminent to be shut out."

"(Jeon Sang-woon) is a Korean, and his pride in certain inventions and techniques is perceptibly greater than if he were a foreigner writing about Korean science. He knows that he is addressing a world-wide readership most of whom did not dream before they picked up his book that Korea is entitled to exert any claim upon the universal history of science. He knows that many educated people in Europe and the United States are just recovering from the shock of learning Joseph Needham’s lesson, that the Chinese tradition is as indispensable as that of the early West in determining the potentialities of science. This book opens up still another range of awareness by demonstrating that peripheral societies must be examined with equal seriousness if we are not to overlook real originality. The author also knows that this implication will be equally surprising to most of his fellow Koreans. In Korea today the power to exploit nature is seen as an importation, as foreign in its essence. Few people are aware that, say, Korea in 1400 may very well have had the most advanced astronomicalobservatories in the world. Is it possible that science is not fundamentally Caucasian and Judeo-Christian (and all sorts-of other things Koreans are not) after all?"