Note 6 — Chapter XL · PERSECUTION AND MARTYRDOM—1801–1834.

From a letter written on silk in sympathetic ink to the Bishop of Peking by Alexander Wang, and, with the aid of treachery, deciphered by the magistrates, they suspected a general conspiracy of the Christians; for in his letter this Corean proposed an appeal to the Christian nations of Europe to send sixty or seventy thousand soldiers to conquer Corea!6 The bearer of this letter was immediately beheaded, and his body cut into six pieces; while the visitor to Captain Broughton’s ship in 1799, for having said that “one such ship as that could easily destroy one hundred Corean vessels of war,” was put to the torture and condemned. Alexander Wang, who had witnessed a good confession, before the king, a year before, and bore on his wrist the cord of crimson silk showing that he had touched the royal person, was likewise decapitated.