Pyengyang

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” and the first Protestant missionary to enter Korea, gave his life on the banks of the Taidong River. A Scotch Presbyterian, Rev. Mr. Thomas, was a colporteur of the Scotch Bible Society, and in 1865, he came to Pyengyang on the “General Sherman.” This ill-fated vessel approached the Korean shores in September, and despite numerous warnings sailed up the Taidong River as far as Pyengyang.

Pyengyang is a city with a glorious past. The little pagoda with upturned tiled roof atop a hill commanding a prospect of the Daido River where the court nobles were wont to take the view still stands high above the city wall. The marble banquet pavilion of the Emperor, built more than five hundred years ago, remains standing in a good state of preservation by the river’s edge. Perhaps the ghosts of all the Emperors who called Pyengyang their capital since 2333 B.C. (up until five hundred years ago when Seoul usurped the place) still gather for a ghostly banquet in the old pavilion. What a wonderful sight it would be to see them clad in the costumes of the periods! Royalty enjoyed taking its pleasures on the beautiful Daido River, so too perhaps do their ghosts.

The most bloody of all the persecutions broke out in 1866. Thousands of Korean Christians were slain, together with two French bishops and seven of their priests. In that same year, the Koreans massacred the crew of the General Sherman, an American vessel that had persisted in sailing up the Taidong River to Pyengyang, where it had run aground.