| Chapter : | Introduction |
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After Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, the Tonghak leaders formed the greatest independence movement in Korean history on March 1, 1919, now known as the March First Movement. In that year, Tonghak was renamed Ch'
ndogyo (Heavenly Way Religion). The movement was better organized and more broadly supported than Mohandas K. Gandhi's anti-British independence movement, which coincidentally began in the same year. It also influenced the Chinese May Fourth Movement of 1919. Currently, in North Korea, there exists a Ch'ndogyo-related political party known as Ch'ngwudang, or the Young Friends' Party. In South Korea, no similar political party has arisen from the Ch'ndogyo; however, it has become one of the six great religions officially recognized in Korea, along with Confucianism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Taechonggyo (a traditional Korean religion, which is linked to the founder of Tan'gun Chos
n, established in 2333 B.C.). Ch'ndogyo was the largest religion in Korea in the 1910s and now has approximately 600,000 members out of a population of 48 million in South Korea. Ch'ndogyo represents one of the most enduring modern religions in East Asia and survives as one of the region's most dynamic sociopolitical forces.
To summarize briefly, then, the Taiping was the largest millenarian uprising in Chinese history, and the Tonghak was the largest millenarian uprising in Korean history. Both arose from the classes of people who were discriminated against by the governments that presided over national crises in the 19th century. A majority of them not only claimed individual salvation but also clamored for social, political, and national salvation from suffering.
Most modern East Asian scholarship on the Taiping and the Tonghak has mainly adopted the framework of the political, social, economic, and nationalist historiography and concentrated on studying and interpreting those movements against the backdrop of traditional political, social, economic, ideological orders, and alien expansion. While all of these approaches are valid in themselves, scholars have hitherto neglected to study these movements as millenarian movements. Without understanding the Taiping and the Tonghak as millenarians, it is