Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

The first attempt of a foreign missionary to enter the hermit kingdom from the west was made in February, 1791. Jean dos Remedios, a Portuguese priest from Macao, offered himself, was accepted, and left Peking for the Border Gate with some Chinese guides. After a twenty days’ journey in midwinter, he arrived on the frontier, and there awaited the precarious chances of recognition, according to certain signs agreed upon. For ten days he scanned the faces of the noisy crowd, hoping every moment to light upon friends, but in vain. The Christians, kept at home by the violence of the persecution, feared to venture to the border. The fair closed, the embassy crossed the Yalu River, while the foreigner and his Chinese guides returned to Peking. There the disappointed priest soon after died.

About the same time, the Bishop of Peking addressed a letter to the Pope detailing the origin, development, and condition of the new-born church in Corea.

Hearing no word from the Corean Christians during the next two years, it was determined to send succor. For this perilous mission, a young Chinese priest named Jacques Tsiu, twenty-four years old, of good bodily strength and pronounced piety, whose visage closely resembled a Corean’s, was selected. Fortified with extraordinary ecclesiastical powers, he left Peking in February, 1794, and in twenty days arrived on the neutral ground. There he met the Christians, who urged him to wait nearly a year, on account of the vigilance of the sentinels. This he did among his fellow Christians in Shing-king, and on the night of December 23, 1794, crossed the Yalu, reached Seoul in safety, and at once began his labors. All went on well till June, when, through a treacherous visitor, the official spies were put upon his track. In spite of his removal to another place, three Christians—two who had guided him to Seoul, and one an interpreter, who in sublime self-sacrifice [[354]]tried to pass himself off as the Chinaman—were seized and tortured. With arms and legs dislocated, and knees crushed, they refused to betray their brother in the faith, and were put to death in prison, June 18. The three headless and battered trunks were flung in the Han River, which for the first, but not for the last time was streaked with martyr blood.

Meanwhile, the Chinese priest was at first hidden for many days under a wood-pile by a Christian lady, who, having gained over her mother-in-law, sheltered him in her house, where, protected by the law which forbids a noble’s dwelling to be invaded, he remained three years. In September, 1796, he wrote a letter in Latin to the Bishop of Peking, and the native Christians writing in Chinese, the copies on silk were sewed into the garments of two believers, who, having bought positions as servants in the embassy, arrived in Peking, January 28, 1797. Among other things Jacques proposed that the King of Portugal should send an embassy to the King of Chō-sen to obtain a treaty of friendship, and allow the residence of physicians, astronomers, and scientific men in Corea.

Though no Portuguese envoy was sent out to treat with the court of Seoul,[1] a foreign vessel appeared in the autumn of this same year, off the eastern coast, floating the British flag. It was the sloop of war Providence, carrying sixteen guns, commanded by Captain W. R. Broughton, who cast anchor in Yung-hing Bay, October 4th, and touched at Fusan.[2] One of the natives who visited the ship was suspected by the government and arrested; though the English visitors were ignorant of the existence of Christians in Corea, and the local magistrates were equally uninformed as to the difference in religion and nationality between Britons and Portuguese.

House and Garden of a Noble.

The four political parties into which the Corean nobility was at this time divided, as described in Chapter XXV., were ranged into [[356]]two general groups, the Si-pai and the Piek-pai, “the government” and “the opposition.” The Si-pai were devoted to the king, and ready to second his views, the Piek-pai were more attached to their special views. The king, Cheng-chong, who had ruled since 1776, was opposed to persecution of the Christians, and had done much to restrain the bitterness of partisans. The Si-pai included the Nam-in, or “Southern” wing, in which were the Christian nobles, while all their enemies belonged to the Piek-pai. So long as the king lived, the sword of persecution slept in its scabbard, but in 1800[3] the king died, and was succeeded by his son, Sunchō, a boy still under the care of his grandmother. This lady at once assumed the conduct of national affairs,[4] and no sooner were the five months of public mourning decently over, than the queen regent dismissed the ministers then in office, and installed three others of the No-ron group, all of whom were bitter enemies of the Christians. A decree of general persecution was issued a few days after, in the name of the king. Two converts of noble rank were at once arrested, and during 1801, the police were busy in haling to prison believers of every rank, age, and sex. Alexander Wang, who had written a book in his native language on “The Principal Articles of the Christian Religion,” and had begun another on systematic theology, was arrested. From the reading of these works, the magistrates imagined the essence of Christianity was in hatred of one’s parents and the king, and the destruction of the human race.[5] The Church Calendar was also seized.

The Chinese priest was outlawed by the government, in a public proclamation. On reading this, the brave man left the house of the noble lady in which he had been sheltered, and refusing to endanger longer the lives of his friends, voluntarily surrendered himself, [[357]]and received the death-stroke, May 31, 1801, at the age of thirty-two. His hostess, Colombe, thrown in prison herself, while awaiting death wrote out his life and works on the silk skirt of her dress. At her execution the noble lady begged that she might not be stripped of her clothes, as were other malefactors, but die in her robes. Her request was granted, and with the grace of the English Lady Jane Grey, she laid her head on the block. Four other women, formerly attendants in the palace, and an artist, who for painting Christian subjects was condemned, were beheaded by the official butchers, who made the “Little Western Gate” of Seoul—where a Christian church may yet be built—a Golgotha. The policy of the government was shown in making away with the Christians of rank and education, who might be able to direct affairs in the absence of the foreign priests, and in letting the poor and humble go free.

From a letter written on silk in sympathetic ink to the Bishop of Peking by Alexander Wang, and, with the aid of treachery, deciphered by the magistrates, they suspected a general conspiracy of the Christians; for in his letter this Corean proposed an appeal to the Christian nations of Europe to send sixty or seventy thousand soldiers to conquer Corea![6] The bearer of this letter was immediately beheaded, and his body cut into six pieces; while the visitor to Captain Broughton’s ship in 1799, for having said that “one such ship as that could easily destroy one hundred Corean vessels of war,” was put to the torture and condemned. Alexander Wang, who had witnessed a good confession, before the king, a year before, and bore on his wrist the cord of crimson silk showing that he had touched the royal person, was likewise decapitated.