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! [22] 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. It now devolved upon the king of Chō-sen to explain to his suzerain the execution of a Chinese subject. In a letter full of Confucian orthodoxy, he declares that Chō-sen from the time of Ki Tsze, had admitted no other dogmas than those taught by the sages of China—“all other doctrine is strange to the Little Kingdom.” He describes the Christians as “the monstrous, barbarous, and infamous” “sect of brigands” “who live like brutes and birds of the vilest sort,” and who in their plot, “have interlaced themselves as a serpent and knotted themselves together like a cord.” The plan to conquer “the Little Kingdom at the corner of the earth” by myriads of men and vessels from Europe is detailed, with an apology for the execution of Jacques, not as a Chinese subject, but as chief conspirator. Dallet suggests that, in answer to this letter, the Dragon Monarch read the king a tart lecture, and hinted that a rich stream of silver would soothe his ruffled scales. “China had not been China had she lost so fair an occasion to fleece her cowering vassal.” A fresh edict, made up of the usual fixed ammunition of Corean rhetoric, was fulminated against “the evil sect,” January 25, 1802. The result was to advertise the outlawed faith in every corner of the realm. Nevertheless, the condition of the Christians scattered in the mountains and northern forests, or suffering poverty, hunger, and cold at home, was deplorable, under the stress of political as well as religious hatred. The first exchange of Muscovite and Corean courtesies took place in 1808, when several of the commissioners from Seoul were in Peking. [23] Presents were mutually given, which in both cases were products of the then widely separated countries, which were destined within fifty years to be next-door neighbors.