Doksa Sillon



Doksa Sillon or A New Reading of History (1908) is a book that discusses the history of Korea from the time of the mythical Dangun to the fall of the kingdom of Balhae in 926 CE. Its author––historian, essayist, and independence activist Shin Chaeho (1880–1936)––first published it as a series of articles in The Korea Daily News, of which he was the editor-in-chief.

As the first work to equate the history of Korea with the history of the Korean race (minjok), Doksa Sillon rejected the conventional Confucian histories that focused on the rise and fall of dynasties as well as the Japanese Pan-Asianist claims that Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese were all part of the "East Asian" or "yellow" race.

Influenced by Social Darwinism, Shin portrayed the Korean minjok as a warlike race (which he called "Buyeo" after the name of an ancient kingdom) that had constantly fought to preserve Korean identity but had later been weakened by Confucianized elites like the yangban of the Joseon Dynasty. Doksa Sillon was one of the earliest expressions of Korean ethnic nationalism and it laid the foundation for Korean nationalist historiography, which used the study of ancient Korea to resist Japanese colonial scholarship while Korea was under Japanese rule.