The seventeenth century saw the fall of the Ming dynasty and subsequent rise of the Qing empire, a dynastic change that had a significant impact on established constellations of power in East Asia and beyond. For the Ryukyu Kingdom and Joseon Korea, two tributaries of the imperial court in Beijing that derived a considerable part of their legitimacy from their close affiliation with the Son of Heaven, the shifting dynamics on Chinese soil entailed a readjustment of their geopolitical positioning and concomitant renegotiation of cultural identities. In Ryukyu, a disastrous defeat in war in 1609 had forced the royal court to recognise the Tokugawa shogunate as a second suzerain, putting the kingdom under tight control of the Japanese feudal domain Satsuma. The firm establishment of Qing rule by the end of the century, however, enabled the kingdom to regain some of its lost autonomy and emphasise local identity by balancing Chinese and Japanese influences. In Joseon Korea, a different impetus gave rise to similar developments. While compelled to confirm its role as tributary to Beijing, the Joseon dynasty never fully accepted the Qing, regarded them as barbarian usurpers of the heavenly mandate, and viewed itself as the true inheritor of the Ming era Confucian ecumene. Starting to challenge received narratives of a Sinocentric world, Joseon scholars thus rediscovered the genealogical roots of Korean statehood.

In both cases, historiography and genealogy served as battlefield and medium of what can be considered early examples of state-sponsored identity construction in East Asia. Crucial to these endeavours was a focus on the autochthonous origins of the Ryukyuan and Korean monarchies in the form of the mythical figures Tenson and Tan’gun. Analysing these key elements of Ryukyuan and late Joseon state ideology comparatively, the paper traces similarities and differences regarding the Ryukyuan and late Joseon experiences of identity formation.