ABSTRACT
Buddhist missionaries from China, and Buddhist texts in Chinese reached Korea around the turn of the millennium, and by the fifth century Korea was a Buddhist state using Chinese as the language of administration and culture. The subsequent spread of Confucianism in the Korean Middle Ages reinforced the status and the use of Chinese. It is not surprising that after nearly two thousand years of unremitting exposure to Chinese influence, well over 50 per cent of Korean vocabulary consists of Chinese borrowings.
