There are twelve French Jesuit priests living and preaching in Korea and an estimated twenty-three thousand native Korean converts by the time the Heungseon Daewongun assumes de facto control of the government in 1864.
Korea has maintained a policy of strict isolationism from the outside world throughout the history of the Joseon Dynasty (with the exceptions being interaction with the Qing dynasty and occasional trading with Japan through the island of Tsushima).
However, it had not succeeded entirely in sealing itself off from foreign contact.
Catholic missionaries had begun to show an interest in Korea as early as the sixteenth century with their arrival in China and Japan.
Through Korean envoy missions to the Qing court in the eighteenth century, foreign ideas, including Christianity, had begun to enter Korea and by the late eighteenth century Korea had had its first native Christians.
However, it had been only in the mid nineteenth century that the first western Catholic missionaries had begun to enter Korea.
This had been accomplished by stealth, either via the Korean border with Manchuria or the Yellow Sea.
These French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society jad arrived in Korea in the 1840s to proselytize to a growing Korean flock.
Bishop Siméon-François Berneux, appointed in 1856 as head of the infant Korean Catholic church, estimated in 1859 that the number of Korean faithful had reached nearly seventeen thousand.
At first, the Korean court had turned a blind eye to such incursions.
This attitude changes abruptly, however, with the enthronement of the fourteen year old King Gojong in 1864.
By Korean tradition, the regency in the case of a minority would go to the ranking dowager queen, In this case, it was the conservative mother of the previous crown prince, who had died before he could ascend the throne.
The new king’s father, Yi Ha-ung, a wily and ambitious man in his early forties, is given the traditional title of the non-reigning father of a king: Heungseon Daewongun, or “Prince of the Great Court”.
He is also known to period western diplomats as Prince Gung.
Though the Heungseon Daewongun’s authority at court is not official, stemming in fact from the traditional imperative in Confucian societies for sons to obey their fathers, he quickly seizes the initiative and begins to control state policy.
He will become one of the most effective and forceful leaders of the five hundred-year-old Joseon Dynasty.
With the aged dowager regent’s blessing, the Heungseon Daewongun sets out upon a dual campaign of both strengthening central authority and Korean isolation from the disintegrating traditional order outside its borders.
