Choe Je-u was arrested at the end of 1863 and executed at Daegu in the spring of 1864 on a charge of deluding the people with heterodox doctrine. Leadership passed to Choe Si-hyeong, who spent more than thirty years in hiding, organising a network of local units and editing his predecessor's writings into the two books that remain the movement's scripture.
The organisation outgrew its origins. In 1894 Donghak adherents were central to a peasant uprising in the southwest, directed first against local corruption and, in its later phase, against Japanese intervention. The uprising was crushed with Japanese assistance, Choe Si-hyeong was executed in 1898, and the movement was left with the double character it has kept in Korean memory: a religion and a rebellion. The documentary record of the revolution was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2023.
In 1905 Son Byong-hi reorganised the surviving body as Cheondogyo, the Religion of the Heavenly Way, giving it a public and legal form. It was in that form that it took a leading part in the March First Movement of 1919: fifteen of the thirty-three signatories of the Korean declaration of independence were Cheondogyo members, including Son himself. Cheondogyo is a living religion with congregations in Korea today, and is described here rather than assessed.