2025 Theses Doctoral

Chinese Law and Korean Practice: Illegal Border-Crossing and Suppressing Catholicism in Late Chosŏn Korea (1791–1846)

Lee, Meng-Heng

The government-launched anti-Catholic movements in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) have attracted scholarly attention and produced fruitful research. Existing scholarship unpacks the origins of the Korean anti-Catholicism by focusing on the Confucian ritual controversy, power struggle in the Chosŏn court, and Catholic teaching’s potential to destabilize the established social hierarchy. While these studies enriched our understanding of anti-Catholicism in the Korean peninsula, the hitherto academic discussions seem to provincialize this issue to a domestic, over-politicized religion-discriminated movement, with limited consideration from the aspect of legal justification.

This dissertation thus aims to reinterrogate the historical significance of the suppression of Catholicism in late Chosŏn Korea through the lens of legal history and Sino-Korean relations. Specifically, it investigates the legal statutes and punishments applying to Catholics during the major government-launched persecutions. By examining the laws and penalties applying to Catholics during the major persecutions from 1791 to 1846 through close readings of various archival records, the present dissertation points out that the Chosŏn state mobilized both legal statutes from The Great Ming Code and kullyu—i.e., the Korean-developed legal practice prohibiting miscellaneous crimes, including the Sino-Korean border-crossing—to justify the execution of Catholics, distinguishing its legal choices from its Qing counterpart’s.

As this dissertation further argues, this distinct and mixed legal practice became a suitable and preferred option during the persecutions as the Chosŏn state needed to address both the Chinese and European presence and their associated threats in the peninsula throughout the nineteenth century. In other words, the hybrid legal practice, from which I find Chosŏn legal pluralism, not only illustrated how the Chosŏn state legally addressed “the Catholic crisis,” but also indicated the ways in which the Chosŏn state struggled to deal with the reconfiguration of nineteenth-century East Asian world order, including the maneuvering of Ming-Qing China’s authority. By highlighting and exemplifying Chosŏn legal pluralism in the anti-Catholic campaigns in late Chosŏn Korea, my dissertation articulates how contingencies and premodern inter-states relations shaped Korean historical trajectory.