Paul Chong Hasang was born into the persecution: his father, Augustine Chong Yak-jong, one of the first generation of Korean Catholics — a Church founded uniquely by lay scholars who had discovered the faith through books from China — was martyred in 1801 when Paul was six, and the family was stripped of rank and property. Raised in poverty by his mother, St. Cecilia Yu So-sa, Paul took up his father's work as soon as he was grown.
For a quarter of a century he was the hinge of the Korean Church. Taking service as an interpreter's attendant, he crossed the border to Beijing nine times, carrying secret letters begging for priests — and at last addressed a petition to the Holy See itself. It succeeded beyond hope: Gregory XVI erected the Apostolic Vicariate of Korea in 1831, and Paul guided the first French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society over the frontier, hiding them in his own house. Bishop Imbert judged him ready for the priesthood and began preparing him for orders — he would have been the first Korean priest, a distinction that fell instead to the boy he helped send abroad to study, Andrew Kim Taegon.
When the Gihae persecution broke in 1839, Paul was among the first taken. To the state council he submitted his famous Sangjae-sangseo, the 'Letter to the Prime Minister' — the first Korean apologia for the Christian faith, arguing with a scholar's calm that the doctrine was true and the persecution unjust. The court answered with the sword: he was beheaded at the Seosomun gate on September 22, 1839, aged forty-four. His mother and sister followed him in martyrdom within months.
John Paul II canonized the 103 martyrs of Korea at Seoul in 1984 — the first canonization ever celebrated outside Rome — naming the company for the priest Andrew Kim Taegon and the layman Paul Chong Hasang together: the two vocations of the Korean Church, ordained and lay, honored in one title. The Seosomun execution ground is today a shrine at the heart of Seoul.