Joseon

Joseon is the clearest case anywhere of a state remaking a society around a body of philosophical texts. The dynasty founded in 1392 adopted Neo Confucianism, and specifically the synthesis associated with Zhu Xi, not merely as a court philosophy but as the standard for law, education, family structure and worship. Peter Bol's account of Neo Confucianism as a historical movement is useful for seeing what that involved, because the programme was never only about ideas. Mourning periods were fixed by degree of kinship, ancestral rites were prescribed for households, inheritance and adoption were reorganised so that a patrilineal main line was preserved, women's remarriage was restricted, and the civil service examinations tested the approved commentaries. Buddhism, which had been the state religion of the preceding Goryeo dynasty, lost its landholdings and its place in the capital and continued largely in mountain monasteries.

Roger Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli's ethnography of Korean ancestor rites shows how far the resulting household practice persisted into the twentieth century. The kings maintained the royal ancestral shrine at Jongmyo and the altars of soil and grain, and their own rites were the model the rest of the society was expected to scale down from.

Catholicism entered Korea in an unusual way. It was not brought by missionaries. In the later eighteenth century Korean scholars encountered Christian works in Chinese, brought back from the annual embassy to Beijing, studied them among themselves, and organised a community before any foreign priest had set foot in the country. A member of one such group was baptised in Beijing and returned to baptise others. That origin gave Korean Catholicism a lay character from the beginning, and it also put it directly at odds with the Joseon settlement, because the rejection of ancestral rites by the church at that period struck at the practice on which the whole social order rested.

Refusal to perform the rites was treated as a rejection of the state itself, and a series of persecutions across the nineteenth century produced a large number of executions, from which the Korean martyrs are drawn. The atlas records the persecutions as historical fact and the doctrinal question behind them as one the Catholic Church later revisited, since the ban on the ancestral rites was substantially relaxed in the twentieth century. The pattern of a religion arriving as text rather than as mission is rare enough to be worth marking.