Gyuwon sahwa

The Gyuwon sahwa (Korean: 규원사화) is a forged text from the early twentieth century, claiming to be a history written in 1675 that describes ancient Korean history.

Authenticity

The existence of the book is first recorded in 1925.

In 2017, South Korean historian Cho In-sung writes:

"The debate over authenticity [of the Gyuwon sahwa] may be said to be already over... The Gyuwon sahwa is a hoax made after 1914."

Evidence for the Gyuwon sahwa's lack of authenticity includes:

The work includes a dating error found in a text published in 1823, in which a quotation from the Goryeosa about an event that occurred in the tenth regnal year of Seongjong of Goryeo is misattributed to the tenth regnal year of Gwangjong of Goryeo. This suggests that the Gyuwon sahwa copied from the 1823 text.

The work uses the word 文化 munhwa in the sense of the Western term "culture," which is a wasei-kango invented in nineteenth-century Japan and not found in Korea before the twentieth century.

The seventh-century reign of Queen Seondeok is said to have been "a thousand and several hundred years ago."

Neither the work nor any of its content is found in anthologies of Dangun-related information published by Daejongists in 1913 and 1921.

The aforementioned 1914 Daejongist anthology included a text written by the Japanese army in 1889, but mistranslated a line. The identical mistranslated line is found in the Gyuwon sahwa, suggesting that the latter's authors copied from the 1914 translation of an 1889 Japanese source.

The work contains content and rhetoric very similar to those found in articles published in 1924 and 1925 by the nationalist historian Sin Chae-ho.