Karye 家禮 [Ch. Jiali; Family Rituals]

20, 28, 10; 14, 38; 22, 23, 25 folding leaves. Printed with metal movable type. One kwŏn of illustrations & seven numbered kwŏn in three vols. Small folio (334 x 220 mm.), orig. semi-stiff wrappers (rubbed), handwritten titles on upper covers, old stitching. [Hansŏng]: [Kyosŏgwan], colophon: 1759.


A rare and early illustrated Korean edition of the Family Rituals, printed with musinja 戊申字 metal movable type at the royal publishing house, Kyosŏgwan 校書館.


The Family Rituals, a collection of ritual prescriptions compiled by the great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), was one of the most influential ritual texts in Chŏson Korea, more widely read, studied, adapted, reprinted, and circulated than the earlier and more canonical Classic of Ritual (Ch. Liji 禮記) itself. This popularity of Family Rituals likely owed to the social influence of Confucian academies (K. sŏwŏn 書院), local educational institutions that rendered Confucian learning available and accessible to aspiring scholars. As Martin Gehlmann observes in “Ritual and Confucian Academies in Korea” (in All About Rites, Collège de France, 2023), the Family Rituals figured largely in classroom curricula and were well represented in the library holdings of the academies, to a large degree because it was “eas[ier] to digest” over the “bulky classic” of rituals (16). Furthermore, the practical and accessible nature of the Family Rituals lent itself to local adaptations by Korean scholars, many of whom “continued to produce ritual works based on the Family Rit[uals] in order to simplify or recontextualize its concepts for the Korean readership” (14).


This early Korean edition of family rituals opens with about 35 woodcut illustrations of ritual grounds, ceremonial attires, layouts of shrines, designs of artifacts used in funerary processions, and so on. They are followed by the text of Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals, printed with the musinja movable type, cast in the year 1668 and transferred to the royal publishing house, the Kyosŏgwan, in 1672. The colophon on the last page, 己卯四月日芸閣校印, states that it was printed at the Kyosŏgwan in the fourth month of the kimyo year. Our copy appears to be the same edition as a digitized copy held in the National Library of Korea (일산古1252-37), which lists the publication date as 1759.


Very good copy, with some light staining and worming, mostly marginal. Preserved in a jil. This edition of the Karye is very rare outside of Korea. We find two copies in WorldCat, both held at Columbia (50242238 & 35216490). Small red seals on the first folio of each volume read 憑驗.