A Study on the Imagery of Liu Bang (劉邦) in the Geumhwasa Mongyurok (金華寺夢遊錄)

Abstract

As the founding emperor of the Han Dynasty, Liu Bang made outstanding contributions to the development of the Han nationality in China and the formation of a unified country. So, he has become a key character in many literary works, historical works, folk legends and traditional dramas. The Korean novel Geumhwasa Mongyurok depicts dozens of famous emperors in Chinese history, among which Liu Bang is the most important. When the author portrays the image of Liu Bang, he mainly uses three perspectives, namely, ‘the perspective of a scholar in the dream’, ‘the perspective of Liu Bang himself’ and ‘the perspective of the Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty’. It can be seen from the comparison that the image of Liu Bang in the Geumhwasa Mongyurok demonstrates not only a direct acceptance of Chinese historical books by Korean writers, but also demonstrates unique creations of him by Korean writers. With regard to Liu Bang’s appearance, different versions of the Geumhwasa Mongyurok all take the Chinese historical book Records of the Historian as the basis. But when portraying Liu Bang’s temperament, because there was no specific historical book to refer to, Korean writers used the changing dragon to highlight Liu Bang’s noble temperament as an emperor according to the Chinese cultural tradition. In different versions of Geumhwasa Mongyurok, the authors expressed positive or negative attitudes towards Liu Bang, which is very similar to the way that Chinese drama writers in the Yuan and Ming dynasties used to portray the image of Liu Bang.