Abstract
This paper start with the record of the arrival of Ming's envoy in May of the 19th year of King Gongmin(1370) to officially appoint King Gongmin as the King of Goryeo, and try to find and give meaning to the record of the cefeng(冊封) of King Gongmin while keeping in mind the situation of the early formation of the Goryeo-Ming relationship. In the Goryeo history, only the existence of gaoming(誥命) appears as a document delivered when King Gongmin was appointed as King of Goryeo by Emperor Hongwu(洪武). And in the records of the Ming side, the same content of gaoming is transmitted in almost the same form of Goryeo history with only some characters changed. The problem is that the Ming records are subtly different. While Veritable Record of Ming Taizu records both the royal edict(詔書) and the gaoming to appoint King Gongmin, the actual content of the royal edict was identical to the edict to appoint King Wu of Goryeo. In other words, the royal edict sent to appoint King Wu was mistakenly recorded as the edict sent to appoint King Gongmin. As a result, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether Emperor Hongwu sent only the seal and the gaoming, or both the edict and the gaoming, when he appointed King Gongmin.
 However, this paper have found that there is a royal edict of Emperor Hongwu that is similar in overall content to the gaoming but different in text, and this paper assumes that it is the royal edict that was issued at the time of the King Gongmin's appointment. This document, which was included in the collection of Wanghui(王褘), a literary bureaucrat who served under Emperor Hongwu from the late 1350s, can be used as evidence to support the existence of a document for the cefeng of King Gongmin apart from the gaoming for the appointment of King Gongmin. In the end, it can be assumed that Emperor Hongwu sent the royal edict, gold seal, and gaoming together when he appointed King Gongmin as King of Goryeo as recorded in the Veritable Record of Ming Taizu.
 However, it is unclear why this document is only found in the collection of Wanghui and not at all in records compiled by the state, such as the Goryeo History or Veritable Record of Ming Taizu. Whether this was an intentional omission or a mistake on both sides, or whether the document was only recorded in a collection of documents and never actually delivered to Goryeo, remains to be seen. It is hoped that future advances in the study of Goryeo-Ming relations and further research will shed light on many of these questions.
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