A Stranger in a Neighbor’s Home:
Western Missionaries in Beijing, as seen by Korean Envoys in the Mid-Qing Period

Ge Zhaoguang
Fudan University

Chinese Studies in History, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2011

Abstract: Among extant documents of the Choson kingdom pertaining to the emissaries who traveled to Qing-era Beijing to offer New Year’s greetings or pay tribute, there are many materials concerning Western Catholics in China, Japan, and Korea in the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, covering especially their activities in Beijing. From these materials, we can see the Korean literati’s curiosity toward and observation of Western nations and Catholics, their interaction with contemporary Beijing missionaries, as well as the evolution of the literati’s attitude toward Western Catholics. Through the “Taoxieni zouwen”(讨邪逆奏文, Memorial on Heresy), which Choson presented to the Qing court at the turn of the nineteenth century, we can see clearly that Western Catholics’ efforts to proselytize in Korea via China met setbacks following the “Sinyu Persecution” of 1801. The interactions between these different ethnicities, nations, and religions not only help us understand the history of exchange between Eastern and Western cultures, but also demonstrate the differing attitudes and strategies that the East Asian countries of Japan, China, and Korea adopted to deal with Catholic missionaries and, furthermore, allow us to analyze the political and cultural disparities which informed these dissimilarities.