Ch 15 - A Crumbling Dynasty

The Silk Letter

Choson's fledgling Catholic church became embroiled in the maelstrom of Yi domestic politics. Anti-Catholic factions condemned it as subversive and its adherents as traitors. Hwang Sa-yong, an aristocratic Catholic convert, wrote a letter to the Bishop of Beijing describing the religious persecutions in Choson and pleaded for help, including massive western military force to subdue Choson and subordinate it to the Qing emperor.

Crown Prince Changhon's death in July 1762, set off another round of factional disputes within the dominant Noron faction. Those who justified King Yongjo's action split to form the Sipa faction, the Party of Expediency. Those who deplored the fate of the young prince formed the Pyokpa faction, the Party of Principle. With these new disputes cutting across major factional lines, the government soon faced the intractable complication of factions within factions. The true irony of this tragedy was that King Yongjo's successor, King Chongjo, Prince Changhon's second son, was not the favored choice of any of the factions.

King Chongjo proved himself an able ruler and as fine a scholar as any of his ministers. Unfortunately, he became so engrossed with learning that he displayed virtually no interest in political matters. He left politics in the hands of Chief Royal Secretary Hong Kug-yong. To satisfy his intellectual bent, Chongjo established the royal research institute, where scholars gathered to discuss the classics and histories of ancient China. With the king's encouragement, they published numerous valuable books.

Following King Chongjo's accession to the throne in 1776, friction intensified between the powerful Hong clan of Pungsan, members of the Pyokpa faction, and the Kim clan of chongp'ung, members of the Sipa faction. With support from the Chongsun queen, King Yongjo's principal wife, whose male relatives belonged to the Pyokpa faction, both the Sipa faction and the Southerner faction were attacked for their association with Catholicism and Western learning. The moderate policies of King Chongjo and the efforts of his powerful minister Chae Che-gong brought a degree of control over factional rivalries;  at least there were no major persecutions. During King Chongjo's brief four year reign, while the clans battled in the background, the Chongsun queen, now Queen Dowager Kim, increasingly consolidated power in the halls of government.

To ensure a peaceful succession, Chongjo placed his eleven-year-old son under the protection and guidance of Queen Dowager Kim. He entrusted the tutelage of his son to one of his most trusted ministers, Kim Cho-sun, a Catholic convert and a member of the Andong Kim clan of Kyongsang Province. As Regent, Queen Dowager Kim carefully steered the boy to the throne as King Sunjo, but carefully kept control of state affairs in her own hands. She appointed Kim Cho-sun to assist her in governing the kingdom. A man with grand ambitions, Kim Cho-sun secured his own ties to a royal lineage by arranging for his own eleven-year-old daughter to marry the young King Sunjo, thereby making himself the royal father-in-law. As a member of the moderate Sipa faction, Kim Cho-sun personally held a number of the leading government posts and managed to concentrate political power almost entirely in his own hands. As a consequence, he was ideally positioned to ease the way for many in his own clan to rise quickly to vital positions in government.

Members of the royal family - usually the brothers, cousins and uncles of the reigning queen's clan - held important ministerial posts in government, yet behind the scenes they maneuvered and plotted to control succession to the throne by marrying their daughters to the crown prince. The Andong Kim clan owed its position of power in Seoul largely to King Sunjo's young wife, the Sunwon queen. The ascendancy of the Andong Kim clan marked the beginning of the "rule of the consort clans" - domination of the court and government by the male relatives of the queen. Two powerful consort clans - the Andong Kim clan and the Pungyang Cho clan - ruled Choson for the next sixty years, a period marked by misgovernment, bureaucratic corruption, nepotism, and favoritism, characteristics already common in a society where family and clan loyalty were often held above loyalty to the state.

A new phenomenon arose in the Yi court as royal in-laws increasingly exercised the true power of the state by dominating the authority of the throne. Just as the literati purges of the early Yi Dynasty ended a brilliant era in Choson during the fifteenth century, the Catholic persecutions that opened the nineteenth century swept away the eminent achievements of the seventy-six year period of rule under kings Yongjo and Chongjo. Both men believed in rule by moral persuasion and moral teaching. They felt that if the people were educated in orthodox Confucian teachings, the Catholic religion and other heretical teachings would simply disappear. They established and enforced policies to moderate factionalism and preferred persuasion to prohibition. Despite government persecutions, Choson's small Catholic church managed to increase its membership from about 4,000 in 1795 to around 10,000 by 1801. Any hope for continued growth died however, with the passing of Prime Minister Chae Che-gong in 1799 and King Chongjo the following year, both of whom had been tolerant of Catholicism. Things quickly took a dramatic turn for the worse.

In late 1790, Franciscan Bishop Alexandre de Gouvea began enforcing the papal assessment that Confucian rituals conflicted with Christian teaching and ordered Christians not to engage in these rites. From its first introduction into Choson just four years later, that papal edict had created an irreconcilable problem among Choson's Catholics that split them into two divergent groups:  those who abandoned Catholicism altogether and those who clung to their faith, but abandoned the tradition of offering commemorative rites to their deceased ancestors. To abandon ancestral worship was not only unthinkable in Choson, it was considered immoral and depraved.

The Andong Kim clan belonged to the stridently anti-Catholic Noron faction, old enemies of the politically ousted Southerner faction. Many prominent ministers in the Southerner faction were very much pro-Catholic at the time, a position considered subversive by the ruling authority. In their rise to government power, the P'yokp'a faction, a highly vocal anti-Catholic clique of the Noron faction, saw a chance to settle an old score with not just the Sipa faction, but the Southerner faction as well. They soon began to issue instructions in the name of Queen Dowager Kim that strictly prohibited all heretical teachings. Thus, Choson's fledgling Catholic church became unwittingly embroiled in the maelstrom of Yi domestic politics. Anyone who followed Sirhak, or Western Learning, particularly the Catholics, were condemned as heretics, people with "no kings, and no fathers (to bow to)."

One of Queen Dowager Kim's first acts as King Sunjo's regent was to issue an edict that associated Catholicism with such "crimes" as heresy, the abolition of ancestor worship, the suspension of traditional custom, the destruction of morality, and subversion against the state. Adherents of the "evil learning" would be treated as being guilty of high treason. On September 10, 1801, during the first year of King Sonjo's reign, the following official ban was issued:

"... according to reports that we hear, the evil teaching is prospering day by day, reaching from Seoul to Kyonggi and Chungchong Provinces. Humanity is in keeping the cardinal human relations;  and the ruling of the people is based upon good teaching and moral persuasion. The so-called evil teaching today is a doctrine which has no respect for father, no loyalty to King, and is destroying the cardinal human relationships, violating the right teachings;  and it causes people to return to the state of animal and barbarian. The foolish people colored by the evil teaching, are walking in the wrong ways more and more;  and this is like a child being drowned in the well ..."

"How sad it is, indeed!"

"Provincial and local chiefs should tell the people to change believers' minds and punish them so that non-believers may be afraid of the evil teaching. The people should not be allowed to betray the wise rule of former kings. Those who do not obey even after this stern prohibition should be punished as treasonous."

In its efforts to root out the heretical belief, the Seoul government ordered the royal edict spread throughout Choson so everyone would know about it and ordered rigid enforcement of the "five-household mutual guarantee system," a neighborhood watch program intended to find, arrest and punish all Catholics. The central government, primarily the Office of Inspector General, became deeply involved in the Shinyu Persecution of 1801 and actively sought to uncover and prosecute any official connected with Catholicism. Before it subsided, the bloody religious purge took the lives of nearly 300 Catholic martyrs. Hundreds were imprisoned or exiled. Many of these martyrs died protecting the whereabouts of Father Zhou Wenmo, the Chinese priest who illegally entered Choson in December 1794.

Government authorities executed many Catholics in their desperate search for Father Chou, including the members of a small Catholic study group formed in 1777, which included the older brother of the prominent Sirhak scholar Chong Yag-yong. Chong was exiled to Kangjin, where he remained for seventeen years. His younger brother was removed to Huksan Island. Not even the royal household was safe from the purge. Yin In, Lord of Unon, his wife and daughter-in-law were forced to commit suicide. Eventually, Father Chou surrended himself to the police in a vain belief that his death might halt the persecutions and spare the lives of others. Father Chou was beheaded in the village of Saenam.

No other incident exemplified the intensity of anti-Catholic feeling in Choson in the early nineteenth century better than the tragic case of Hwang Sa-yong, a Catholic convert and close follower of Father Zhou Wenmo. Hwang was a bright aristocratic young man with impeccable credentials, a member of the ruling elite who fled south soon after the outbreak of persecutions and hid in a cave in Chungchong Province. While in hiding, he wrote a letter to the French Bishop Alexandre de Gouvea in Beijing that described the religious persecutions underway in Choson and pleaded for help for Catholics. His letter, dated October 21, 1801, contained 13,311 characters written on a silk cloth using very small letters so it could be easily concealed. Hwang wrote, in part,

"There is a reason why orientals persecute the Holy Teachings. It is not because they are harsh and violent. In fact there are two reasons. The one is the factional fight in that Catholicism is used to attack other factions, and the other is that their knowledge is very narrow and they only know Song Confucianism. They believe that the slightest deviation from it is anathema. This is like a child who has grown up only in the house and is therefore astonished when he meets a stranger."

The letter was to be delivered by a convert scheduled to go to Beijing that fall as interpreter for a tributary mission to China. Late in the autumn of 1801, government troops intercepted the two messengers carrying Hwang's "silk letter," confiscated the message, and handed it over to government authorities. The letter carefully explained in detail why and how the persecutions underway in Choson began, described the development of events, and outlined the current situation. Hwang appealed to the Bishop to call upon the Pope to request that the Chinese emperor command the king of Choson to grant economic relief and freedom of worship to all Catholics in his kingdom. He further proposed the creation of a Chinese garrison in northern Korea, headed by a Qing imperial prince who would oversee the Yi court and government. Finally, Hwang proposed the Christian nations of the West should send an army of 50,000 to 60,000 men and a fleet of one hundred warships to subdue Choson and subordinate it to the Qing emperor. He expressed the hope that China would then force the Yi government to accept Western priests and allow the spread of the faith throughout the kingdom.

It is not possible to know what might have happened had Hwang Sa-yong's letter actually reached Bishop de Gouvea in Beijing. At the time, France was embroiled in the Napoleonic wars and could not have spared a single ship even if it desired to intervene in Choson's internal affairs. The French would most likely have ignored the request. Nevertheless, Hwang's "silk letter" had a significant impact on the Seoul government. At first, Catholicism had found disfavor in the royal court because of its apparent conflict with Confucian etiquette and propriety. Hwang proposed not just protection for Christians, but a virtual takeover of Choson by China with Western military support. It confirmed the Yi government's worst suspicions about Christianity.

The Roman Catholic Church was not merely propagating a faith that was fundamentally incompatible with Confucianism, the foundation of Choson's social and political order, but it now seemed to be engaged in a sinister scheme to seize the whole country either by internal subversion or by force;  something they dreaded. Hwang Sa-yong's message not only shocked and stunned the government, but provided it an even stronger incentive to step up the intensity of the current crackdown against Catholics. The Yi court attempted to counter Hwang's implied threat of force by immediately sending a distorted account of the incident to the imperial court in Beijing, hoping to obtain Chinese authority for the persecutions already underway in Choson.

Government authorities captured Hwang Sa-yong a few days after intercepting his letter and summarily executed him along with his cohorts for treasonous activities. His family was exiled throughout the kingdom on widely separated islands. From then on, whenever anyone tried to explain the merits of Christianity to the Choson government, authorities quickly pointed to the danger outlined in Hwang Sa-yong's infamous letter. That one letter instantly transformed what might have been a minor incident into a wholesale massacre of Christians in which over 100 were executed and over 400 exiled. On those occassions when Asians persecuted men of other faiths, they did so for reasons that had little to do with either religion or philosophy. It was a political matter and principally a matter of self defense. Before European powers began their military conquests on the Asian continent, conversion to Christianity was neither forbidden nor punished. Afterward however, Asians found it very difficult to distinguish between the religious West and the military West. Confucianism and Buddhism were so nearly inseparable from the State that Asians came to believe the Western church was literally the spearhead for a military penetration of East Asia.

The Catholic position was rendered even more precarious by 1805, when the Manchus in China also turned against the Church and started their own persecutions. Just as it had done in ancient times when Christians were persecuted by the Romans, the Church thrived on martyrdom. Knocked down in one place, it sprang to life in another. Despite the constant danger involved, thousands of people saw in the Catholic church a release from the social and spiritual straightjacket imposed on them by Confucianism. To nurture this spiritual devotion, a succession of selfless French priests continued to enter Choson, even with the knowledge that their discovery meant certain death.

What made Catholicism so attractive was its creed of equality, the tenet that the whole of humankind are the children of God and all are alike in His eyes. The idea that chungin and commoners alike could number themselves among the children of God and worship Him on an equal basis with yangban surely must have been a revelation to the lower classes of Choson society. Drawn upward by this belief of equality, it was the poor, uneducated lower classes rather than the wealthy, educated upper class who were most attracted to this Western religion. With believers mainly concentrated in Seoul and the surrounding areas, Catholicism became and remained a faith for urban dwellers, rather than a religion of the villages.