Robert Jermain Thomas was a Protestant Christian missionary who served with the London Missionary Society in late Qing Dynasty China and Korea.
While serving as a Welsh missionary to China, Robert Thomas developed a strong desire to work among the people of Korea. At the time, Korea was closed to foreigners because of the government's fear of foreign influence. Many Koreans had been converted by Catholic priests in the late 1700s, but the fearful government slaughtered 8,000 of those converts in 1863.
Thomas made his first visit to the Korean coast in 1865, making him the first Protestant missionary to Korea. He learned as much as he could about the people and their language during his two and a half months there, distributing tracts and New Testaments in Chinese because they were not available in the Korean language.
In 1866, Thomas took a job on an American trading ship, the General Sherman, as an interpreter for the crew. The leaders of the armed trading ship intended to sail to Pyongyang to establish trade between Korea and the United States, even though uninvited trade was forbidden. And Thomas intended to use his visit to Korea to spread the gospel.
As the ship sailed up the Taedong River loaded with cotton goods, tin and glass, Thomas tossed gospel tracts onto the riverbank. Not surprisingly, Korean officials repeatedly ordered the American boat to leave at once. When the ship ran aground on the muddy river bottom near Pyongyang, the Koreans attacked the ship with machetes. The Americans, who were armed with guns and cannons, held the attackers off for two weeks. The Koreans' cannon balls bounced harmlessly off the ship's ironclad hull.
Eventually, the Koreans launched a burning boat upstream, which in turn caught the General Sherman on fire. The crew had to jump ashore or burn to death. As the sailors fled, machete-wielding Korean soldiers killed them. Thomas leapt to shore carrying a Bible, which he offered to his attackers while crying, "Jesus, Jesus!" in Korean. Thomas was beheaded, and the ship's entire crew was killed.
According to accounts of the event, Thomas' executioner, convinced that he had killed a good man, kept one of the Bibles. He used its pages to wallpaper his house, and people came from all over to read the words on his walls. Eventually, a church was established in the area, and a nephew of Thomas' killer became a pastor.[1]
According to Sungho Choi, lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology, Korean Christians may not know that Wales is a country with its own language and history, but they do know that Wales is the place from where Thomas came to them.[2]
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