Christianity in Korea
Hangul, a phonemic Korean alphabet invented around 1446 by scholars in the court of Sejong the Great, was little used for several centuries because of the perceived cultural superiority of Classical Chinese (a position similar to that of Latin in Europe). However, the Catholic Church became the first Korean religious organization to officially adopt Hangul as its primary script. Bishop Siméon-François Berneux mandated that all Catholic children be taught to read it. Christian literature printed for use in Korea, including that used by the network of schools established by Christian missionaries, mostly used the Korean language and the easily learned Hangul script. This combination of factors resulted in a rise in the overall literacy rate, and enabled Christian teachings to spread beyond the elite, who mostly used Chinese. As early as the 1780s, portions of the Gospels were published in Hangul; doctrinal books such as the "Jugyo Yoji" (주교요지) appeared in the 1790s and a Catholic hymnal was printed around 1800.
Origin of Hangul
Although the "Hunmin jeong-eum haerye" (hereafter "Haerye)" explains the design of the consonantal letters in terms of articulatory phonetics, it also states that Sejong adapted them from the enigmatic 古篆字 ""Gǔ" Seal Script". The identity of this script has long been puzzling. The primary meaning of the character 古 "gǔ" is "old", so 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" has traditionally been interpreted as "Old Seal Script", frustrating philologists, because the Korean alphabet bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 "zhuānzì" seal scripts. However, Gari Ledyard, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University, notes that the character 古 "gǔ" also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 "Měnggǔ" "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 "gǔ)" than the 蒙古 "Měng-gǔ"". Ledyard deduces from palace records that 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 "měnggǔ zhuānzì" "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ’Phags-pa alphabet of the Mongolian-origin Chinese Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire. There were ’Phags-pa manuscripts in the Korean palace library from the Yuan Dynasty government, including some in the seal-script form, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of the political situation in the contemporary (ethnically Chinese) Ming Dynasty. The topic of the recent Mongol domination of China, which had ended just 75 years earlier, was politically sensitive, and both the Chinese and Korean literati regarded the Mongols as barbarians with nothing to contribute to a civilized society.