362 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
For centuries the new script was relegated to women and merchants who began
producing a vernacular literature. Only gradually did Hangul become more
important than written Chinese in Korea.
King Sejong took measures to promote Hangul and Confucian teachings
widely. His government commissioned dozens of publications in Hangul con-
sisting of illustrated stories demonstrating Confucian virtues. One such story
goes as follows:
Kumchi is a daughter of the people of Chinji. When she was twelve years
old, she went with her mother to work in the fields on the side of the moun-
tain. A tiger appeared and took hold of her mother. She grasped her mother
by one hand and then smashed the tiger with a hoe in her other hand. The
tiger dragged them one hundred feet and finally let go of the mother’s dead
body. Kumchi took her mother’s body home and cried all night long. She
sold some of her clothing to buy a coffin to bury her mother. After this
story was reported to the royal court by the provincial government office,
the government ordered a special gate built to commemorate Kumchi, a fil-
ial daughter.
This simple story is very far from the philosophical writings that a civil service
candidate might be required to comment on, but it conveys simple Confucian
values, and shows government support for them at every level. Neo-Confucian
officials in both China and Korea were erecting gates to honor individuals who
demonstrated such filial piety. And a student in rural areas could be proud to
read the story in Korean, in the simple Hangul script.
Some scholars of Korean culture question whether early literature written
by Koreans in classical Chinese should even be categorized as Korean litera-
ture. The consensus has shifted over the years, with some nationalist scholars
of the early twentieth century moving to exclude it from the Korean literary
tradition since they were trying to establish a pure Korean national tradition in
the face of Japanese colonialism. In recent years, all works by Korean authors
has generally been accepted as Korean literature, even if they wrote in Chinese.
Some of the most treasured classics of Korean literature were written by
women in the vernacular, though derided as vulgar by the Confucian scholars
of their day. This vernacular literature conveys women’s voices across genera-
tions and centuries with fluency and linguistic beauty (Kim 1996:3–10).Turmoil in Late Choson: The Tonghak Movement
While the Choson Court deemed Christianity to be a threat and persecuted
Christians in the early nineteenth century, the religion still began to gradually
gain adherents. After 1945, Christianity expanded rapidly in South Korea,
including Protestants and Catholics, and the controversial Unification Church
of Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012). Christianity has taken root in South Korea,
with millions of Protestant and Catholic adherents there, combining to total
nearly 30 percent of the 50 million people. Christianity in Korea does not nec-
essarily exclude consultation with a mansin or the performance of Buddhist rit-