Silk Letter of Hwang Sa-yeong

Background

In 1801 (the first year of King Sunjo's reign), the Joseon court carried out mass arrests of Catholic believers. This event is known as the Sinyu Persecution. Many believers were executed, including the Chinese priest Zhou Wenmo, who had secretly entered Joseon and was ministering there.

Hwang Sa-yeong, a native of Seoul, is said to have passed the state examination at the age of sixteen. According to tradition, he showed such promise that King Jeongjo personally pledged to appoint him to office. He nevertheless became a Catholic and served as a leader of the early church. When the persecution began, he evaded arrest by hiding in an earthen cave in the mountains at Baeron, in present-day Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province.

Course of Events

• Composition: In the cave at Baeron, Hwang Sa-yeong wrote a letter addressed to Bishop Alexandre de Gouvea, head of the Diocese of Beijing. He wrote more than 13,000 characters in fine brushstrokes on a piece of white silk measuring approximately 62 cm wide and 38 cm high. Because the text was written on silk (baek, 帛), the document is called a baekseo (帛書), or "silk letter." The plan was to send it to China sewn into the clothing of a secret messenger.
• Contents: The letter consists of a greeting, an account of the progress of the Sinyu Persecution, the deeds of the martyrs, proposals for rebuilding the church and securing religious freedom, and a closing. The proposals were as follows: to request financial support from the Western church; to establish a secret line of communication with Beijing; to have the pope write to the Qing emperor so that Joseon would accept missionaries; to have the Qing emperor place Joseon under his supervision (gamho); and to send Western ships and troops to put pressure on the court.
• Attempted delivery: Hwang planned to have the letter carried by the believers Hwang Sim and Ok Cheon-hui, who were to travel with the winter solstice embassy (dongjisa), the delegation sent to China each year around the time of the winter solstice.
• Discovery: Ok Cheon-hui was arrested at Uiju in the sixth month of 1801 while returning from Beijing. Hwang Sim was arrested on the fifteenth day of the ninth lunar month. Following Hwang Sim's confession, Hwang Sa-yeong was arrested at Baeron on the twenty-ninth day of the ninth lunar month, and the silk letter was seized at that time.

Consequences and Influence

• The court treated the silk letter as evidence of treason. Hwang Sa-yeong was condemned for high treason and, at the age of twenty-seven, suffered death by dismemberment (neungji cheocham, an extreme form of capital punishment in which the body was cut into pieces). Punishment of those connected with the affair and the suppression of Catholicism also grew more severe.
• Jeong Yak-yong, who was already in exile, was banished anew because of this incident, this time to Gangjin in Jeolla Province, where he spent eighteen years in exile.
• The court feared that copies of the silk letter might reach China and reveal that it had executed Father Zhou Wenmo. It therefore assigned the winter solstice embassy departing in the tenth month of that year the additional role of an explanatory embassy (jinjusa, an envoy sent to explain circumstances), so that it could justify the persecution. Around this time the court also produced a greatly abridged version of the original, the so-called False Silk Letter (gabaekseo, 假帛書). The False Silk Letter omitted the passages concerning Qing supervision or suzerainty but retained the request for Western ships and troops, thereby asserting the legitimacy of the persecution.
• The original was kept by the Uigeumbu (State Tribunal) until it was discovered while old documents were being sorted after the Gabo Reform of 1894. It then came into the possession of Bishop Gustave Mutel, who headed the diocese at the time. At the 1925 beatification of seventy-nine Korean martyrs (the Catholic rite by which martyrs are officially proclaimed "Blessed"), Bishop Mutel presented it to Pope Pius XI. It is now held in the Vatican Ethnological Museum and was displayed in Korea during a 2014 exhibition at the Seoul Museum of History.

Assessment

Catholics regard the silk letter as a valuable historical source in which a contemporary directly recorded the course of the Sinyu Persecution and the deeds of the martyrs. It is considered useful not only for understanding the early history of the Catholic Church in Korea but also for understanding domestic conditions in late Joseon.

At the same time, because the letter sought to enlist the power of the Qing emperor and even Western military force to obtain religious freedom, it has consistently been criticized as an expression of sadaejuui (deference to a greater power) or of dependence on foreign powers. Defenders of the letter, by contrast, interpret it as the writing of a believer in desperate circumstances who had endured severe persecution, and maintain that it was not intended to overthrow the dynasty. Some also argue that the intense reactions of later generations were based in part on the False Silk Letter abridged by the court rather than on the original text.

The incident involved the Catholic Church and occurred more than eighty years before Protestantism reached Joseon. It is one of the earliest instances of conflict between Joseon society and state power on the one hand and Western religion on the other.