Roux Pierre Emmanuel

10.18399/acta.2016.19.1.001

Chosŏn Korea Qing China Beijing Catholicism circulation of knowledge

The Korean Catholic Church is usually considered to be a unique case in the whole history of Christianity, since its evangelization was supposedly started without foreign missionaries in the 1780s. The early Korean converts did indeed study Jesuit books and convert prior to the arrival of European priests in Chosŏn. This article is aimed at rethinking this topic beyond a Korea-centered perspective. More precisely, it focuses on Chosŏn envoys in Beijing through a comparison of Chinese and Korean historio-graphies. My main idea is to present Beijing as a “contact zone” where the Catholic experience of Chosŏn envoys was not just limited to visiting the four churches and their European missionaries. To be sure, Chosŏn officials also gained much knowledge about Catholicism through their encounters with Chinese literati and converts. Stated differently, this article explores several facets of the early encounters between Koreans and the Catholic faith. It demonstrates that these encounters and the birth of the Korean Church were not only linked to reform-minded Korean literati, but also to the complexity of Sino-Korean relations in Qing times and missionary methods used in Beijing (such as the conversion from top to bottom and the apostolate through books). This article more generally suggests a new research direction which explores the emergence of the Korean Catholic Church beyond national boundaries and on different scales.