Sinyu Catholic Persecution
Catholicism had spread among Korean commoners and a minority of reform-minded yangban during the late eighteenth century, offering an alternative meaning-system outside the rigid neo-Confucian hierarchy that the Joseon order enforced. The faith's rejection of ancestral rites struck at the ideological foundations of the dynasty and alarmed the conservative establishment. The death of the reformist King Jeongjo in 1800 removed the converts' chief protection. In 1801 the regent Queen Dowager Jeongsun, allied with the dominant Noron faction, ordered a sweeping persecution: hundreds of Catholics were executed or exiled, including the Chinese priest Zhou Wenmo, the only foreign missionary then in the country. The purge was inseparable from factional politics, since many prominent converts and sympathisers belonged to the rival Namin (Southerner) faction associated with the blocked Sirhak reform movement. The Sinyu persecution — followed by further waves in 1839, 1846, and 1866 — demonstrated that the Joseon state met the social and intellectual strains of its over-stabilised system through violence rather than accommodation. By crushing both the new religion and the practical-learning scholars who might have modernised its institutions, the court ensured that critique remained abstract and that Korea entered the nineteenth century with its structural pathologies intact.
- Year: 1801 CE
- Category: Political
