Shin Chaeho
In nationalist historiography, Korea is valorized as having an indigenous culture separate from those of China and Japan. Evidence of Chinese cultural influence on Koreans, as well as of common ancestral origins for Koreans and Japanese, is denounced as an "evil plot" of "Japanese imperialistic historiography" ("Ilche sagwan") to "annihilate the Korean people" ("minjok malsal"). Shin Chaeho strove to make "Korea" a primary, bounded unit of East Asian history, which he believed had been distorted by Confucian historians who measured Koreans by a graduation between Chinese and barbarian. Archaeologists in both North and South Korea have claimed, contrary to earlier scholarship, that Korea experienced a Bronze Age culture separate from that of China, with artifacts resembling those in Siberia and Manchuria.