António Corea
Since 1932, it has been theorized that Corea has living descendents in the Italian village of Albi, Calabria on the basis of numerous people there with that surname.
[2] Francesco Carletti was a Florentine merchant and traveler, who was in the process of a westward circumnavigation of the Earth around this period.
[3] António Corea (his European name) was a Korean who was captured during the Japanese invasions and taken to Nagasaki, Japan as a slave.
[5][6][7] Carletti briefly wrote of this in his travelogue My Voyage Around the World: Out of [the more maritime provinces of Korea,] they brought an infinite number of men and women, boys and girls, of every age, and they all were sold as slaves at the very lowest prices.
[12] Carletti wrote: I made an agreement with the pilot of that ship, who had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope eighteen or twenty times, and promised to give him [money to] cover my expenses for the whole voyage up to arrival at Lisbon for me and the three servants I was taking with me: one of the Japanese nation, a Korean, and the other a Mozambique Negro [sic].
[16] The Dutch apologized and claimed that they did not intend to fight, but responded after the Saint James initiated the battle.
[17] According to Carletti, the Dutch then laid a trap to kill or extort the remaining occupants of the Saint James.
[19] They arrived on the island of Fernando de Noronha on 6 April, made further repairs to the Saint James, then departed again on 2 May.
[21] Carletti went[a] to Paris, Lyon, Turin, Milan, Bologna, then finally arrived in Florence on 12 July 1606.
[23] The proliferation and persistence of these theories has been considered to have been exacerbated by the exciting nature of Corea's story, as well as insufficient factchecking by both the media and by several academics.
[23][24] In 1932, Japanese historian Yamaguchi Masayuki (山口正之) claimed that Corea's descendents had settled near Catanzaro in Calabria as early as 1620, on the basis that a village called Albi had more than 500 people with that surname.
[23] In early November 1992, the South Korean Ministry of Culture invited some of Corea's supposed descendents (including one man also named António Corea, who was head of a Korean cultural society in Italy), as well as the mayor of Albi, to visit Korea.
[23] On 30 September 1993, MBC published a documentary entitled António Corea (안토니오 꼬레아), in which it was briefly mentioned that genetic studies on people in Albi did not significantly suggest Korean descendency.
[25][26] The portrait drew significant attention; in 1983 it was sold at a Christie's auction for £324,000, which was the highest ever sum paid for such a sketch.
[24] Kwak Cha-seop wrote in his 2004 book about this theory, and leaned supportive of it on the basis of his own analysis of the subject's clothing.
[23][24] However, a 2016 paper by Weststeijn and Gesterkamp drew international attention for proposing an alternate theory about the subject.
[28] After Kim Seong-u's 1979 article, Corea's story captured the imagination of the South Korean public.
That year, a musical entitled The Everlasting Flute (불멸의 피리), which was reportedly inspired by Corea's story, was produced.
In 1993, author O Se-yeong (오세영) published a novel inspired by Corea's story entitled The Merchant of Venice (베니스의 개성상인).
