A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  As an emblem of modern technology and material change, however, the railroad came to dominate the popular and historical consciousness in Korea during the opening decades of the twentieth century—serving, as it did around the world, as a metaphor for progress and transformation. The fanfare that greeted the opening of the Seoul–Inch’n line on September 18, 1899, reflected the momentousness of the event, as dignitaries from the political, diplomatic, and business worlds gathered in a station on the south bank of the Han River, just outside Seoul, for the inaugural ride. News reports and official pronouncements heralded this event as a momentous step toward a new era. One newspaper account noted with awe that, “On the inside, the rail cars were divided into three classes—high, medium, and low—while the outside of the cars was decorated in such a [lavish] way as to be indescribable.” The train departed with the first group of passengers at 9am, and “within a short time” found its way to Inch’n, where a magisterial welcoming ceremony awaited them at the station. At the festivities, according to another newspaper report, the head of the Japanese company that operated the rail line concluded his congratulatory address with three cheers of “Long Live the Korean Emperor” and “Long Live the Japanese Emperor.” He was followed by Korea’s Foreign Minister, who also ended his remarks by leading three shouts of “Long Live the Korean Emperor.” The reporter noted that the throng of people at the Inch’n station looked “like a cloud,” and pondered, along with a bystander, that this might have signaled Koreans’ overdue achievement of “enlightenment.” They also noted regrettably, however, that this wondrous technology had been built by foreigners.

  An American company had won the concession from the Korean government to construct the Seoul–Inch’n rail line, which broke ground in 1896, but a few months before completion had sold these rights to a partially government-owned Japanese company. In hindsight it was clear that the Japanese had eyed this short stretch as the prelude to the larger prize of building two “trunk lines” that would extend from the capital to the port city of Pusan in the southeast and to iju in the northwest. These two lines, with the former completed in time to aid the Japanese effort against Russia in the 1904–5 war, would greatly aid Japan’s expansionist aims. But the Korean imperial government had sold many concessions to representatives of various countries for transportation and communication networks, mines, and industries. These concessions all had in common favorable terms for the foreign enterprise and a potential, often met, to retrieve great returns on the investment. From the Korean government’s (or monarchy’s) vantage point, selling these rights did not constitute a giveaway, but rather an opportunity to import commercial and industrial technologies while expanding the coffers of the state. The Korean rulers could hardly have envisioned that some of these ventures, especially the railroad, would also serve literally as a vehicle for imperialist aggression.

  Furthermore, as Korean governments later in the twentieth century discovered, it was difficult to separate the general well-being of the country from the influx of foreign capital, technologies, and industries. The economic gains in the Korean Empire period would not have materialized without foreign commercial intercourse.

  The rise of Korean port cities

  An unlikely symbol of the ambiguous position of the Great Korean Empire period in modern Korean history is the city, or more precisely, the rapid growth of urban centers from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. As with so much else associated with the modern era in Korea, the emergence of modern cities is entangled with the unsettling impact of external forces, in particular the transformation of the country into first a target of imperialism, then a Japanese colony. Imperialist and colonialist interests, especially regarding trade and transportation, launched the rise of many of the familiar cities today. These places include Siniju, Kaesng, and Hngnam in the North, and in the South, Kunsan, Mokp’o, and especially Taejn, now South Korea’s fifth largest metropolis, which went from small town to provincial capital during the colonial period. Outside the traditional centers of Pyongyang and Seoul, however, the two largest cities by the end of the colonial era were Pusan and Inch’n, which grew through the regional trading system beginning in the late nineteenth century.

  Pusan and Inch’n had long served as ports in the Chosn era, but their significance increased dramatically after the 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa with Japan. Afterwards they served as two out of the three official “treaty ports,” along with Wnsan (now in North Korea), where officially sanctioned foreign trade could occur. Through the accelerated influx of foreign merchants, interests, and conflicts at the turn of the twentieth century, the stage was set for these two ports to grow rapidly as Korea’s meeting points with the larger world. Inch’n, the gateway to the capital, grew into a hotspot teeming with Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and other foreign merchants, who set up their own communities and worked with the native population to gain favorable terms for extending their commercial ventures into the interior. Though the port became a battleground for the imperialist rivalry between China and Japan, by the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 Japanese interests had gained the firm upper hand and soon began to construct not only railroads but also electricity, gas, and telegraph lines. Presently South Korea’s fourth largest city and home to the country’s gleaming flagship airport as well as other enormous development projects, Inch’n (Incheon) now touts its long ties to China and its status as Korea’s most visible global hub.

  Pusan, by contrast, was always a creature of Korea’s relations with Japan. A port that had long facilitated the minimal official trade between the two kingdoms during the Chosn era, in the late nineteenth century Pusan quickly developed into an almost extra-territorial base for Japanese commercial, agricultural, then military ambitions. By the turn of the twentieth century the harbor area had a large Japanese settlement and served as the primary entrance point for Japanese merchants wanting access to Korea’s internal trading networks, and for Japanese companies supplying the amenities of the modern commercial world. Railways and electricity lines that began as short networks within Pusan during the pre-annexation period, for example, soon extended to neighboring areas in the southeastern region of the peninsula. And, not surprisingly, this Japanese largesse continued into the colonial period, when Pusan’s expansion swallowed up its adjacent towns and eventually turned the city into an official provincial capital. The rapid development of Pusan served it well when, during the opening months of the Korean War in 1950, it functioned as the interim capital of South Korea that held at bay the North Korean siege until American reinforcements, through an invasion of Inch’n, provided relief. Today Pusan (Busan), as South Korea’s “second city,” ranks as one of the largest ports and most dynamic metropolises in the world.

  What is also lost in the narrative of imperialistic encroachment in Korea at the time is the blossoming of native enterprise and the training of thousands of Koreans in the labor and expertise needed for an increasingly diversifying economy. From the workers who laid the tracks, mined the mines, and toiled in the nascent textile sector, to the operators of the streetcars and telegraph lines,

  Koreans began to forge a modern commercial realm. They were joined by those who established the first Korean banks, with some even succeeding sufficiently in this difficult venture to survive for decades to come. And many Koreans, like these early bankers, formed the first group of modern entrepreneurs by learning how to integrate their ventures into the regional and global trading system. These businessmen had an indelible impact, whether as transporters or handicraft manufacturers peddling their goods in the ports, or as traders taking advantage of their connections to the heartland, or even as officials using their political connections to gain access to capital and materials. Dozens of companies, including joint-stock companies, were founded during the Korean Empire.

  One of the best known representatives of this early Korean business class was Yi Snghun. Yi hailed from the county of Chngju, north of Pyongyang and famed for its late-Chosn
commercial prowess as well as for producing many prominent cultural figures in the early twentieth century. Yi traversed a variegated life course, but he was first and foremost a manufacturer-merchant. He got his start as an apprentice in a local enterprise that produced brass wares, and by the late 1880s he had borrowed enough money to establish his own brass factory. During the Korean Empire period Yi expanded his business activities through his trading company based in Pyongyang. This company eventually gained a prominent position in the rapidly developing commercial sector, especially along the trading networks on the west coast between Pyongyang, Inch’n, and Seoul. In addition to brass and other handicraft goods, his company traded in petroleum, medicinal products, and paper items. He also accumulated a small fortune as a renowned investor in new enterprises. He was a founder in 1908, for example, of one of the earliest joint stock companies in Korea, the Pyongyang Porcelain Company. He was, in some ways, the first modern Korean tycoon.

  THE SPIRIT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

  For all of his success as a leading figure in the first wave of modern Korean entrepreneurs, Yi Snghun is better known for his activities, made possible by his wealth, in the realms of education and publishing. He stood at the forefront of the cresting enlightenment movement through his sponsorship of educational ventures in his home region. The schools that he and other activists founded around the country would educate the first generation of Korean school children in the “new learning,” the popular term for Western knowledge and enlightenment in general. Yi established and ran, most notably, the Osan School in Chngju, founded in 1907, which would go on to produce some of the best-known literary and intellectual figures of modern Korea. Yi’s passion for spreading new knowledge and raising national consciousness also resulted in his sponsoring the activities of acclaimed nationalists, including An Ch’angho. Yi’s most celebrated accomplishment, in fact, came in 1919, when he served as one of thirty three signers of the March First Declaration of Independence from Japanese colonial rule.

  Yi Snghun also became active in newspaper publishing, a realm that began to wield social influence during the Korean Empire through the activities of the Independence Club, a civic group founded in 1896 by S Chaep’il. S (anglicized to “Philip Jaisohn”) was a plotter of the Kapsin Coup of 1884 who had fled to the US and lived there for a decade before returning, with an American education and an American wife, to his homeland in 1895. The Club’s ideas and ideals, which centered on “independence” from old ways as well as from China, appeared in The Independent newspaper, the first modern newspaper in Korea. In its inaugural issue in April 1896, The Independent served immediate notice of its radical program by its choice of the written language: the Korean vernacular, with even a page in English. When S opted to head back to the US in early 1898, another enlightenment activist schooled in America, Yun Ch’iho, stepped in as the next leader of the Independence Club. Under Yun’s guidance the Club and The Independent maintained the spirit of the Kabo Reforms, constantly prodding the Korean government and monarch toward autonomy, reform, and self-strengthening. The Club sponsored the erection of the Independence Gate, still extant, at the site of the old gate where the Korean monarch used to greet ritually the Chinese envoy, and it organized a series of mass, open-air debates that promoted the participation of people regardless of social status.

  In late 1898 the Independence Club was shut down by the government, which suspected the Club of republican leanings. The Independent newspaper had to follow suit a year later, but not before spawning a revolution in mass culture. People associated with the Club started other newspapers, which all sustained the general spirit of using these organs to disseminate information and knowledge, and thereby to build a strong, independent nation and state. Of particular note was the establishment of the Cheguk sinmun (“Imperial Post”) and Hwangsng sinmun (“Capital Gazette”) in 1898, the former written in native script and targeted at the masses, the latter written in mixed Sino-Korean script and aimed at a more educated population. Both newspapers survived largely intact until 1910, serving as the twin pillars of the growing world of publishing during the Great Korean Empire. This sphere of public discourse received its next major boost after 1905, as the forced implementation of the Japanese protectorate in Korea provoked an urgent outpouring of publishing, from newspapers and intellectual journals to books.

  As with the railroad and other technological changes, the enlightenment movement’s embrace of the “new learning” to further the aims of Korean self-strengthening and reform constituted a double-edged sword that marked the Korean Empire as a whole. As noted above, the railroad, for all its benefits, ultimately served in 1904–5 to facilitate Japan’s prosecution of its war with Russia over supremacy in northeast Asia. Likewise, the discourse of “civilization and enlightenment” that dominated the public debate during the Korean Empire period proved just as useful to the imperialist forces wanting to conquer Korea as to those who touted this creed in defense of autonomy. To the Japanese (and many Koreans), Korea fell far short in its degree of civilizational advancement, and this served to justify another power’s ambitions to take control of the country. For centuries dating back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, after all, Europeans had deployed the same rationale to colonize much of the known world. Not surprisingly, Japanese and even many Korean elites argued that Japan had not only an interest but a duty in shaping Korea’s destiny—out of security concerns, if nothing else, for Korea was too weak to withstand the pressures of Western imperialism. The promotion of railroads, streetcars, electricity, mines, and other hallmarks of modern technology and infrastructure ultimately would prove incapable of overcoming these geopolitical tides.

  Thus we return to the problematic place of the Great Korean Empire in the story of Korea’s modern transition. Long stained historically by a perception of failure on the part of the state, elites, and even the masses to withstand imperialist pressures, which led directly to the Japanese takeover, the Korean Empire has recently enjoyed a historiographical resuscitation and an increase in popular and scholarly interest. At one level, the responsibility for the loss of autonomy has shifted more to imperialism as a whole—and not just that of Japan—which exacerbated the complex political rivalries among Korean elites, including the monarch himself. Korea, then, could not have possibly escaped unscathed in this era. At another level, contemporary historians and shapers of popular opinion have accentuated the need to appreciate all the major advances that marked this period, whether in culture, economy, or politics. But such a position has served only to sharpen the condemnation of Japanese actions, for the Korean Empire developments demonstrated that Korea was heading toward an autonomous modernity had Japanese imperialism not intervened. The subsequent colonial period from 1910 to 1945 represented, then, a dreadful “distortion” of national history that robbed the Koreans of the capacity to forge their own modernity. This goes too far—one cannot write off thirty five years of history, after all—but one can understand how the Korean Empire can be considered a major moment in the annals of Korean civilization, and at the very least a key component in Korea’s modern transformation.

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  The Japanese Takeover, 1904–18

  CHRONOLOGY

  1904 February Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War; signing of the Korea–Japan agreement

  1904 August Signing of treaty allowing Japanese intervention in Korean government affairs

  1905 September Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War, recognizing Japanese supremacy in Korea

  1905 November Protectorate treaty establishing Japanese Residency General in Korea

  1907 June Arrival of secret Korean emissaries in The Hague for the World Peace Conference

  1907 July Forced abdication of Emperor Kojong; signing of a treaty giving Japan appointment power

  1907 August Disbandment of Korean army, swelling of ranks of Righteous Armies

  1909 October Assassination of first Resident General
Ito Hirobumi

  1910 August Signing of the Annexation Treaty, commencement of Government General of Korea

  1910–1918 Comprehensive land survey by colonial government

  THE SECRET MISSION TO THE HAGUE, 1907

  On June 25, 1907, three curious-looking Asian men carrying the Korean flag and a fierce determination appeared on the grounds of the Second World Peace Conference in The Hague, Netherlands. They had been sent clandestinely by the Korean monarch, Emperor Kojong, and after a long

  journey had arrived in Europe to plead the case for Korea’s independence from the encroaching Japanese empire. The three “secret envoys,” however, were turned away by the Conference’s officials and denied a platform to make their case before the gathered diplomats. These representatives from dozens of sovereign states were seeking to codify and institutionalize a global peace regime for a world marred increasingly by conflict. From their perspective, they could not grant the Koreans formal recognition because Korea itself simply had no diplomatic presence on the world stage, having been stripped of its autonomy in foreign relations by the onset of the Japanese Protectorate in late 1905. But the Koreans were ready to demonstrate that the “treaty” that the Japanese claimed authorized its Protectorate had been garnered fraudulently.