A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  who were captured in a particular spot and executed for their faith. To Korean Catholics, this experience of mass persecution represented the searing trial that ultimately strengthened their faith and church. To the historian, the Catholic persecutions represented yet another sign of domestic turmoil in the nineteenth century.

  THE ARRIVAL OF IMPERIALISM

  The persecution of 1866 was significant also because it helped trigger the arrival of imperialism to Korea, a force that had already struck its East Asian neighbors. Qing dynasty China had suffered the woes of actual military confrontation against these “barbarians from the oceans” (the British) beginning in the 1830s, and this set the tone for China’s tragic difficulties with both internal and external challenges through the rest of the century. While not lacking in institutional reforms, the Chinese response to the impending crisis, for complicated reasons, did not amount to a fundamental reorientation of the country’s sociopolitical system. Japan, on the other hand, managed to escape foreign depredation. This was due mostly to its relatively mild initial confrontation with the West, in the form of the US, which nonetheless sparked fiery domestic struggles that led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and to an intensive drive for institutional reform. By the 1870s Japanese leaders sensed that influence over (and even conquest of!) Korea would constitute the logical extension of this self-strengthening effort, and hence they applied the same kind of gunboat diplomacy practiced by the West to “open” Korea to unequal terms of trade and diplomacy. The resulting Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876, for good reason, is commonly seen as the beginning of Korea’s modern era.

  The opening shots of imperialism, however, were fired a decade earlier along the banks of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. The American officers and owner of the General Sherman had set sail from China in the summer of 1866. They had loaded the ship with trade goods and were determined to force open trade relations with the recalcitrant “hermit kingdom.” When the ship first stopped near the mouth of the river, the local magistrate sent word that the Korean government forbade such relations with foreigners and demanded that the visitors leave. The Americans ignored this request by sailing further up the river and, buoyed by some heavy rains, made it past the shallows to Pyongyang itself. After the rains subsided, however, the ship found itself stuck on a sandbar. Negotiations between Pak Kyusu, the city’s governor, and the General Sherman’s officers reached an impasse, and when the Americans abducted a government representative and held him hostage, hostilities broke out. After a few days of cannon, rocket, and archery fire going back and forth, the end of the standoff came when the ship was set ablaze, forcing the crew members to swim to shore, where they were beaten to death.

  Within a month, however, it became clear that these incursions were not going away, as a French armada raided villages and fortresses on Kanghwa Island on the west coast, establishing a temporary base. Soon, it made its way up the Han River leading to Seoul, proclaiming itself a punitive expedition and demanding reparations for the nine French priests who had been killed in the Catholic persecution earlier in the year. The Korean defenses successfully beat back the ships after several days of fighting, but not without heavy casualties and the loss of something equally valuable: hundreds of books and cultural artifacts taken by the French forces from Kanghwa Island. The fear of the Korean leaders, especially the xenophobic Prince Regent, the Taewn’gun (father of the boy king), that had led to the mass persecution in the first place had been their belief that Catholicism was simply an instrument of Western imperialism. The French invasion seemed to validate these fears.

  Image 13 “The Martyrdom of Reverend Thomas,” depicting the attack on the General Sherman in 1866. Painting by Kim Haksu. (Courtesy of the Council for the 100th Anniversary of the Korean Church.)

  Kanghwa Island and the lower reaches of the Han River again served as center stage five years later in 1871, this time for a punitive expedition carried out by American marines in response to the destruction of the General Sherman. As the French had done, the American invasion force left behind a path of destruction on the island and along the banks of the river, suffering only a handful of casualties while killing hundreds of Korean soldiers. But once again, the invaders ultimately beat a retreat without accomplishing their aims of battering the capital. And once again, this episode intensified the anti-foreign sentiment among Confucian scholars, high government officials, and a court still dominated by the Prince Regent’s policies of anti-foreign resistance. His response was to erect stone tablets in front of government offices throughout the country inscribed with a stern warning: “Western barbarians are invading. Failure to fight amounts to appeasement. Appeasement is treason.”

  A countering sentiment, however, was also forming among some influential scholar officials, led by none other than Pak Kyusu himself. Soon after the 1871 episode, Pak went on a diplomatic mission to Qing dynasty China. He returned with a resolve to convince the Korean court to break away from its policy of disengagement. Despite his central role in repulsing the General Sherman, Pak was actually intrigued by the possibilities of learning from the outside world. He belonged to a small circle of such advocates for greater opening, which included also two gentlemen who, unlike the aristocratic Pak, came from the secondary status group of technical officials: O Kyngsk and Yu Honggi. O, an interpreter, had brought back books and stories from his trips to China that aroused the interest of both Pak and Yu. Together, these three men stood as the founders of the Korean enlightenment movement, tutoring the first group of young activists who would gain prominence in the 1880s and 1890s, and helping to drive a shift in government policy. Such a change in the court’s diplomatic stance finally materialized in 1875, when King Kojong, now with full royal authority, was persuaded to open formal trade relations with Japan instead of continuing to resist these forceful overtures. As officials, both Pak and O played key roles in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Kanghwa the next year.

  The “Uphold Orthodoxy and Reject Heterodoxy” movement

  The teleological tug of the nineteenth century tends to direct the observer’s gaze toward the forces calling for “opening” among the Korean reactions to imperialism, but the more substantial and influential responses came from the opposing view that adamantly condemned the West. Advocates of this perspective formed a concerted movement beginning in the 1860s called wijng ch’ksa, or “uphold orthodoxy and reject heterodoxy.” This term starkly delineated the moral differences, and reiterated the urgency of acting on those differences, between the Confucian and Western civilizations. The practice of labeling opposing ideas as heterodoxy had a long history in the wrangling over Confucian propriety in the Chosn dynasty, but this time, as with the Manchus in the seventeenth century, the notion of heterodoxy carried an ethnicized contempt. In contrast to the Manchus who conquered Korea and China but sought to maintain Confucian civilization, however, the “barbarians from the oceans” challenged Confucianism’s supremacy. Though later eclipsed by the forces of imperialism and internal reform, this fervent rejection of any contact with the West exerted a tremendous influence on the subsequent trajectory of conservative responses to the outside world and of nationalism itself. Indeed this nineteenth-century movement’s successors included not only the Righteous Armies that fought the Japanese takeover in the opening years of the next century, but ultimately also the isolationist “self-reliance” ideology of Juche that came to define North Korea.

  Though most readily associated in historical lore with the Prince Regent, or Taewn’gun, who carried out the Catholic persecution and feverishly beat back the American and French incursions in 1866, the intellectual leader of the “reject heterodoxy” movement was Yi Hangno. Yi was actually one of the most accomplished Confucian philosophers of his time, but it was through his explication of the rationale for rejecting all intercourse with the West that his influence became paramount. Based on the premise of Confucian civilization’s unalterability, Yi found the news of China’s own fall at
the hands of the British deeply disturbing, and he claimed that these developments portended grave dangers for Korea as well. Even the slightest accommodation with these corrupting external overtures, he noted, would place the Chosn state, populace, and civilization on a slippery slope toward disaster. Before Yi died in 1868, he served as mentor to the next generation of “uphold orthodoxy and reject heterodoxy” advocates, including those, such as Ch’oe Ikhyn, who led the Righteous Army campaigns half a century later. For Yi, the events of 1866 only reinforced his original warnings, and although he eventually fell out of favor with the court, his advice of absolute resistance resonated with the Prince Regent, who made this stance the state policy.

  The official North Korean historical view claims that Kim Il Sung’s own great grandfather led the people’s charge against the General Sherman that year. In an odd way, this might as well have been true, for the “self-reliance” isolationism of North Korea brought to full circle the historical trajectory that began with these events. The makeup of the dangerous outside changed from Westerners to Westerners pushing capitalism, but the claims that contact with the external world endangered the survival of Korean civilization itself remained in force.

  What followed quickly was a series of study missions sent by the Korean government to Meiji Japan and Qing China to imbibe the basics of modern statecraft and technology. Participants in these trips, from high officials to young students, returned and helped implement major changes in government organization and direction in the early 1880s. The full-fledged “enlightenment” movement behind these developments challenges, in turn, the conventional view of the nineteenth century as one of decay and decline, a historical anomaly that led directly to the tragedies of the early twentieth century. Rather, the enlightenment movement, which drew partly upon the late Chosn reform movements—and, indeed, even on the rise of the Tonghak religion—showed that the nineteenth century represented the logical outgrowth of the late Chosn era. The developments in the nineteenth century also paved the way for the emergence of a fiercely indigenous voice in the opening stages of modern transition.

  14

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  1894, A Fateful Year

  CHRONOLOGY

  1882 Soldier’s uprising in Seoul; establishment of diplomatic relations with US

  1884 Failed coup attempt (“Kapsin Coup”) of Korean government by radicals

  1894 April The Tonghak uprising

  1894 July Japanese occupation of royal palace

  1894 July Establishment of the Deliberative Assembly

  1894 August Start of Chinese–Japanese War

  1895 April End of Chinese–Japanese War

  1895 October Assassination of Queen Min

  1896 January Flight of Korean king to Russian legation

  THE OCCUPATION OF THE ROYAL PALACE BY JAPANESE SOLDIERS, JULY 1894

  In July of 1894, Otori Keisuke, Japanese minister in Korea, presented to the Korean government a set of demands for domestic reforms that would protect Japan’s security interests. Otori could act with such impudence because his soldiers were encamped in and around Seoul. They had been sent to the peninsula in the wake of China’s own entrance into the country, which had come, officially at the behest of the Korean court, to help pacify the Tonghak rebellion. This uprising had exploded in the southwest earlier in the spring and threatened to bring down the five-century-old Chosn dynasty itself. When the Korean government refused to respond directly to Otori’s demands, Japanese troops

  stormed the royal palace and sent most of the government leaders scurrying. The Taewn’gun, father of the Korean king and former Prince Regent, now re-established his power with the support of the Japanese and formed a Deliberative Assembly, with sweeping governmental powers, to take charge of reform efforts. The Deliberative Assembly consisted of conservative opponents of the Korean government (like the Taewn’gun), as well as moderates and progressives who had long been chafing at the bit to take control over a court dominated by the royal consort family, the Min.

  This hodgepodge of elements in the Deliberative Assembly, however, soon developed into one of the most significant forces in Korean history. Thus what began as an uprising against local corruption soon engulfed the country in a region-wide confrontation and helped to usher in a new age in Korea, a process driven by the elite admirers of foreign ways as much as by the peasant followers of the native Tonghak religion. Over the long term, therefore, one could argue indeed that the Tonghak rebellion led to the downfall of the Chosn dynasty, or at least of Korea’s long-established sociopolitical system.

  THE TONGHAK SPARK

  In the summer of 1894, the ill will from the Tonghak uprising was still festering in the countryside, for the end of the rebellion’s fiercest battles earlier in the spring had not brought an end to the underlying troubles that had touched off the uprising in the first place. Venality by local officials had been a constant problem in the nineteenth century, but the exploitation practiced by the magistrate of Kobu county in Chlla province, in the form of debilitating local taxes, appears to have come at a particularly sensitive moment. The local followers of the Tonghak religion had been unhappy with deteriorating economic conditions, local corruption, and foreign, especially Japanese, commercial influence. They were also upset at the difficulties of rehabilitating the reputation of their martyred founder, Ch’oe Cheu (Chapter 13). When their grievances about excessive local taxes went unheard, these Tonghak villagers, led by their local religious leader Chn Pongjun, swiftly ransacked the Kobu county office and redistributed the ill-gotten grain taxes to the people. The rebellion thereafter spread like wildfire through the southwest, and within a few weeks, many county governments in this region had been seized. The battles against government troops, now supplemented by Chinese reinforcements, abated in the early summer of 1894 through a settlement, only to revive in the fall in protest against the Japanese occupation of Seoul. The bloody confrontations that ensued between the Tonghak followers and the joint Japanese–Korean force ended the rebellion in the winter, but not before costing the lives of tens of thousands of peasants.

  Interpretations of the Tonghak rebellion and its historical significance have tended to focus either on the systemic ills of the late Chosn state, or on the suffering of the common people besieged by a stifling social hierarchy, government exploitation, and poor economic conditions. The former perspective tends to view the Tonghak rebellion as the culmination of a gradual decay in the central government over the course of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the latter historical perspective, which accentuates the plight of the people, establishes the Tonghak rebellion as the basis and inspiration for the modern struggles against domestic oppression and foreign domination. The manifestos, declarations, and demands that the Tonghak leaders issued in 1894 do indeed appear somewhat forward-looking: calls for an end to hereditary social discrimination, for an expulsion of seedy foreign influences, and even for the redistribution of property seem, upon first glance, not merely progressive but revolutionary. While both historical viewpoints concerning the Tonghak movement are somewhat problematic when examining the sources, especially regarding the claims for economic redistribution (likely an embellishment added later), on the whole there are also strong merits to both perspectives. The implications for Korean history, furthermore, were not limited to internal developments. The Tonghak rebellion’s most widespread impact, in fact, might have come from serving as a trigger to events that overturned the millennia-long regional order in East Asia.

  A SHRIMP CAUGHT IN A WHALE FIGHT

  The Japanese incursion into Korea following the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876 would not go unmet by the Chinese, who understandably were not keen on allowing any challenge to their special supremacy in Korea. (This was, after all, a relationship that had endured, for the most part, since a unified state came into existence on the peninsula in the seventh century.) Thus in the 1880s Korea became entangled in the growing feud between China and Japan over dominance in northeas
t Asia, a situation that Koreans referred to proverbially as “the breaking of a shrimp’s back when caught between fighting whales.” This rivalry took many forms—in the availability of intellectual and institutional models, in diplomatic influence, and in competition among merchants—and twice grew into military skirmishes in Seoul. In 1882, a group of common Korean soldiers, unhappy with their treatment compared to the new crack unit trained by Japanese advisors, rose up in revolt against the Korean government’s growing ties to foreign influence. Taking the Taewn’gun as their inspiration and leader, the soldiers instigated attacks on Japanese compounds and threatened members of the royal family. Although the initial target was the Japanese presence, the Chinese military was dispatched to put down this rebellion, which it quickly did. With the staunchest anti-foreign activist, the Taewn’gun, seized by the Chinese and taken to China, the pro-reform elements in the Korean elite circles, favorably disposed to following the Japanese model, were emboldened. In 1884 a particularly brazen group of young radicals, impatient with the slow pace of change despite the signing of treaties with Western powers (beginning with the US in 1882), killed conservative high ministers and took over key government buildings. Despite the tacit support of the Japanese officials, as in 1882, this putsch, known as the Kapsin Coup (“Coup of 1884”), met its end at the hands of the Chinese military. The coup plotters able to escape the backlash fled all the way to Japan.

  Gaining the firm upper hand through this event, the Chinese established preeminent influence over the Korean government for the next decade through a “residency” headed by the powerful Chinese official Yuan Shikai. While scholars have termed this a “dark period,” characterized by stifling Chinese intervention and commercial exploitation, a languid pace of Korean institutional reforms, and the house arrest of enlightenment activists such as Yu Kilchun, the Chinese impact was not so clear-cut. Qing China in fact played a central role in the establishment of the first Korean telegraph lines, the Korean Customs Service, and even formal diplomatic relations with Western governments. Furthermore, Korea’s government restructuring efforts continued, the enlightenment movement grew further through publication and educational activities, and moderate reformers in government remained in power, supported by a sympathetic monarch often hemmed in by his queen’s ties to the Chinese. These tendencies might have produced an interesting result had the Tonghak uprising not triggered a clause in a treaty, signed in 1885 by the Chinese and Japanese, acknowledging each other’s interests in Korea.