Long used exclusively in relation to the Jewish Diaspora (and later encompassing the African experience of slavery), the term ‘diaspora’ has undergone a significant expansion in its usage and definition. At its most imprecise, diaspora has become synonymous with migration; almost any migrant group is now labelled a diaspora. The term is more useful, however, when it draws our attention specifically to the kinds of connections migrants maintain with their homelands and with others of shared origin dispersed around the world. ‘Diaspora’ can be used to describe a process of migration and dispersal, and also the condition of living in diaspora – that is to say, a form of consciousness that arises from the experience of migration and exile.

Contemporary discussions of diaspora draw heavily on the recent experience of diasporas in the multi-cultural democracies of Western Europe, and especially North America. This chapter shows that the formation of Asian diasporas within Asia developed from the distinctive characteristics of Asian migration in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Chapter 1): the relative proximity between homelands and destinations; the dominance of sojourning or circular migration; the relative absence of women; the sheer scale of the movement.

Over the past 150 years, the scale of human migration within Asia has been vast, greater than at any other time and place in human history. This book argues that migrants have been central to enduring and significant changes in modern Asian history: to economic and environmental transformations; to the spread of new political ideas and religious practices; to social and demographic change. Until recently, most histories of Asia have emphasized the perspectives of states, empires, and sedentary peoples. This book seeks to place migrants at the heart of modern Asian history.

Migration has been a widespread experience in many regions of Asia, but one that has, over time, come to be seen by states (and many historians) as anomalous or exceptional. ‘We imagine that mobility is border crossing, as though borders came first, and mobility, second’, David Ludden wrote in 2003. Historians have been too quick to project into the past the modern world of nation-states with strict controls over movement into and out of their territories. This book seeks to consider Asian history in more mobile terms, by emphasizing the importance of movement and by seeking to illustrate the connections that migrants made between distant places. Borders did not pre-date mobility.

Between 1850 and 1930, migration in Asia reached massive and unprecedented proportions. This expansion of migration took place amid widespread political and economic transformations. In these decades, most of Asia came under the domination, if not the direct control, of European empires. Asian peasant producers were more closely integrated – or subordinated – to world markets. Human migration and intensified production brought about fundamental ecological change. Many parts of Asia remained frontiers in the mid-nineteenth century: they were lightly populated, inhabited by shifting cultivators, and covered by jungle. Less than a century later, there were few Asian frontiers left.

At the same time, historical change in Asia became ever more closely connected with change on a global scale. From the middle of the nineteenth century, C.A. Bayly wrote, ‘contemporary changes were so rapid and interacted with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be described as the “birth of the modern world”’. Imperial states grew in power and capacity, and made greater demands on their subjects; ideas travelled around the world more rapidly and spread more widely than ever before; industrialization began to connect markets around the world more closely together. There was a ‘step change in human social organization’.

The stage of the language known as “Middle Korean” lasted from the tenth century until the end of the sixteenth century. It began with the establishment of the Koryŏ dynasty in AD 918, when the new government moved the capital from Kyŏngju, in the southeast, to Kaegyŏng (later to be renamed Kaesŏng) in the middle of the peninsula. It nominally ended when the Japanese invaded Korea in 1592, and the resulting chaos disrupted the written record of the language.

Middle Korean can be most conveniently divided into two parts: Early Middle Korean and Late Middle Korean. The language of the Koryŏ period (918~1392) is considered to be Early Middle Korean, while the language of the first two hundred years of the Chosŏn period is taken to be Late Middle Korean. That division is not made to mark sweeping changes in the language. On the contrary, political and social developments point more toward linguistic stability than significant change between the Koryŏ and the Chosŏn. At the end of the Koryŏ, in 1392, the founders of the new, Chosŏn dynasty chose a place not very far away to build their capital. Unlike the move from Kyŏngju to Kaesŏng, the move from Kaesŏng to Seoul (then called Hanyang) took place over a relatively short distance and is usually thought to have had a minimal effect on the language. The regional base of the language did not change.

Where does the Korean language come from? This origin question is of ultimate interest to linguists, but it has also captured the imagination of the Korean lay public, who have tended to conflate the question with broader ones about their own ethnic origin. Linguistic nomenclature has added to the confusion. When specialists speak to the public about “family trees” and “related languages,” the non-specialist naturally thinks that the Korean language has relatives and a biological family like those people do. And when a people as homogeneous as Koreans are told that their language belongs to a family that includes Mongolian and Manchu, they envision their ancestors arriving in the cul-de-sac of the Korean peninsula as horse-riding warriors. It becomes a personal kind of romance.

In this way, linguistic theories presented in a simplistic way tend to overshadow complex ethnographic and archeological issues. But the linguistic question is no less complex, all the more so because, unlike archeological evidence, linguistic evidence cannot be dug from the ground. Artifacts have been extracted from the Korean earth that speak to the structure of earlier societies and cultures, but there is nothing of comparable age to be found in records of the language. To explore the history of the language at that time depth, far beyond what has been actually written down, linguists can only rely upon the comparison of Korean with other languages and hope to find one that has sprung from the same “original” source.

The story of Korean begins with the invention of the Korean alphabet. Ever since it was introduced in 1446, the Korean alphabet has been the source of precise and detailed information about the phonological and morphological structure of the language. In that year, some three years after an announcement of its creation had been made in the dynastic annals, the reigning monarch, King Sejong, promulgated a handbook introducing the new script and explaining its use, and from that point on Korean has been a language structurally accessible to future generations of linguists. Before the alphabet, there is virtually nothing in the way of quality documentation; with the alphabet, Korean structure is laid out for us to see. (The invention, how it happened, and what we know as a result, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.) Thus, lucid and precise written records of the Korean language go back slightly more than five and a half centuries.

That length of time may seem ancient by most standards, but it is not particularly long on the time scale of East Asian history, or even of Korean history. Chinese writing is thought to have begun around the seventeenth century BC; and it was certainly a fully developed writing system by the fourteenth century BC. That means histories were being written and literature composed almost two thousand years before the Korean alphabet was invented. That was of course in China.

In the world today, few nations are as homogeneous as Korea. There are no ethnic or linguistic minorities anywhere in its indigenous population. But the kinship-like bonds of this nation, together with its ties to the land itself, have fostered a monolithic view of the past. There is a tendency among Koreans to think of every artifact taken from Korea's soil as the handiwork of their forebears, every ancient tribe as ancestors, all prehistoric languages as forms of early Korean. However, in the remote past the Korean peninsula was a multicultural place.

Just when Korea became so homogeneous is not altogether clear, but certainly, there was a time when many diverse groups of people lived in that part of the world. Such was clearly the case around the beginning of the Christian era. In 108 BC, when Han Chinese forces first established commanderies on the peninsula, the region was already filled with local polities. In their interaction with these local groups, a process which had already been going on for centuries, the Chinese transcribed a scattering of names as best they could in phonograms. Some of the group names are thus preserved in Chinese historical annals; and from these records we know a little about where they lived and how they related to each other. But little institutional memory of the languages remains. For the most part, the vague records left about the peoples on the Korean peninsula provide room largely only for guesswork.