Yi Kyubo (1168–1241) was the foremost writer and poet of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated is a miscellany of work from his Tongguk Yi Sangguk chip, a collection containing more than two thousand texts and considered the earliest substantial oeuvre of a Koryŏ writer to date. The present work comprises translations of poems, tales, letters, epitaphs, and funeral orations, as well as "The Cantefable of King Tongmyŏng," Yi’s famous poem chronicling Koryŏ’s mythological past. Also included are forewords and afterwords to books no longer extant that shed light on the intellectual, literary, and printing habits of the time.

Yi is best remembered as a literary figure, but for much of his career, he served as a composer of official government texts. Accordingly, a large number of his writings tell us about Yi the bureaucrat and administrator and military rule in early thirteenth-century Koryŏ. Many of the administrative changes brought about during this period of intense transformation are recounted in Yi’s writings, such as the dethroning and enthroning of rulers by the Ch’oe military and the government’s official reaction to the collapse of the Jurchen Jin state, Koryŏ’s nominal suzerain. Almost up until the day he died, Yi remained the main author of diplomatic texts sent to the invading Mongol armies.

Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated not only reveals the existential truths of human life as recorded by the brush of medieval Korea’s most gifted poet, but also offers a many-faceted view of a formative period in Korean history.

Remco E. Breuker is professor of Korean studies at Leiden University.