This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Son Byong-hui, religious name Uiam, was the third leader of the Donghak movement Choe Je-u had founded in 1860, inheriting a movement whose founder had already been executed in 1864, decades before Son himself took up its leadership. By the early twentieth century Donghak's fortunes had declined further under mounting Japanese pressure over Korea, leaving Son a weakened inheritance rather than a movement at the height of its influence.
In 1905 Son formally renamed the movement Cheondogyo, the Religion of the Heavenly Way, giving it the institutional and doctrinal form it carries today. That renaming under colonial pressure was not a retreat into obscurity: rather than a movement fading quietly under the name Donghak, Cheondogyo emerged from Son's reorganization as a distinct religious institution built to endure the specific colonial conditions his predecessor had not lived to see.
The reorganization's significance became clear over the following decade and a half, as Cheondogyo grew under Son's leadership into a movement with the organizational reach to help shape one of the defining events of Korean national history, a scale of influence Donghak under its original name had never approached.