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Chapter 4. The Tonghaks Have Again Arisen, 1864–1894
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90 CHAPTER 4 The Tonghaks Have Again Arisen, 1864–1894 A letter from the missionary Siméon-François Berneux (1814–1866) to the Missions-Étrangers in France described Kyŏngsang Province in late 1863 as “the only district that had serious harassment [of Christians].” Monseigneur d’Acones (d. 1866), who was working in Kyŏngsang at the time, explained to Berneux that local officials had fostered a climate of religious persecution when they launched a search for followers of a sect named “tong-hac (doctrine de l’Orient)–to distinguish themselves from the Christian designation under the name sen-hac (doctrine de l’Occident)...[allowing officials to profit] from this occasion by taking money and fulfilling their vengeance,” and officials had used the search as a pretext to arrest a large number of Catholics. “Many other [Christians] abandoned their homes and their fields,” he wrote, “and they were reduced to extreme misery.”1 In the view of their colleague Jean-Antoine Pourthie (1830–1866), problems in the countryside stemmed from an unstable political situation. In November 1863, he wrote: “Today, in Korea, high and low, officials and commoners, everyone is busy; everyone is upset; your king is at the point of death. It is not his reign, but it is the family of [the Andong] Kim, which belongs to the reign of the first wife, who governs in his name...Bereave, the whole kingdom!”2 By late 1863, when the central government dispatched an investigator to Kyŏngju, even “girls of the inns and boys in the valleys” were reciting Tonghak phrases throughout Ch’oe’s home province.3 While it investigated the popularity of the doctrine, the central government overlooked the heavy Confucian tone of Ch’oe’s works, aligning it instead with Catholicism . This depiction of Tonghak as an evil practice was intended to limit its influence in order to protect the hierarchical privileges sustained by the Neo-Confucian social order and state monopoly on religious practice. After Ch’oe’s execution, some followers continued to support him, and a The Tonghaks Have Again Arisen 91 new generation of leaders fought to restore the image of Tonghak’s founder and remove the stigma against the community. Hence, this chapter focuses on the leaders who carried on the Tonghak legacy following Ch’oe Cheu’s execution. Tonghak was profoundly marked by state repression, Catholic persecution, and experiences in opposition. This chapter shows how the shifting political context influenced new iterations of Tonghak teachings. Under Ch’oe Sihyŏng, these iterations emphasized nonviolence in order to protect the community from the government. Finally, this chapter explains how Tonghak leaders molded a spiritual message into one with nationwide overtones in 1894. The Tonghak uprising sprang partly from government suppression of a community that rallied around new narratives and doctrine that spoke to the needs of followers. Faced with ongoing heterodox status, some followers chose to rebel to protect their ability to practice in public in the changing religious environment of the late nineteenth century. Resurrecting Ch’oe Cheu In 1866, shortly after its first attempt to eradicate Tonghak, the government unleashed a massive nationwide hunt for Catholics, initiating a vast purge of anyone with Catholic connections in an attempt to eliminate the teaching from the peninsula. Twelve French missionaries were captured and killed, but two escaped to China. Most of the charges against Korean Catholics were dropped when they agreed to apostatize. Some of these Catholics would later return to the church. Thousands were tried for treason as collaborators with foreign countries and around eight thousand killed, nearly uprooting the church. These massacres comforted central government officials and their supporters with the belief that the Catholics no longer threatened the country. Only three Catholics were killed between 1872 and 1875, and none were killed in 1876. There was a revival in persecution from 1877 to 1879, however, when forty-nine deaths are recorded, with the last recorded death in 1880. In 1872–1880, most deaths were by strangulation, but some simply “died in jail” or from “unknown” reasons.4 Between 1866 and 1871, there were several attempts by foreigners to penetrate the country—the French military landing on Kanghwa Island, the destruction of the US merchant ship The General Sherman on the Taedong River near P’yŏngyang, Oppert’s attempt to open trade by stealing the bones of the taewŏn’gun’s ancestors, and the US marine invasion of Kanghwa—that took the government by surprise and transformed...