Season 13, Episode 9: The Hermit Kingdom
In the latter half of the 1800s, the Korean Peninsula occupied a similar space in the western imagination as the islands of Japan. A mysterious kingdom on distant soil which was largely forbidden to foreign visitors and traders certainly sounds like a familiar description. Many western dignitaries learned of the existence of the Joseon Kingdom via their counterparts in the Qing Dynasty. When British diplomats inquired about potentially opening trade with Korea, Chinese officials on Hong Kong informed them that the Qing Dynasty could not force Korea to open to trade because Korea was not part of China. They helpfully added that Korea could not open itself to trade because it also was not independent.
I found that anecdote in the book “Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History,” by historian Bruce Cumings. I highly recommend reading that book if you’d like a more complete picture of Korean history from the foundation of the Joseon Dynasty to the present. I will be using it to guide much of our discussion today.
Joseon Korea’s status in the broader tapestry of east Asia was somewhat murky. Technically they were vassals and tributaries of the Qing Dynasty, whom they had initially resisted violently. However, the Chinese government under the Qing were not interested in trying to further “sinicize” the Korean people and were largely satisfied with receiving their diplomatic delegations several times a year: usually the new year, the Qing Emperor’s birthday, and the crown prince’s birthday. An embassy was also sent to celebrate the winter solstice in later years.
Like Edo Period Japan, the Joseon Kingdom had established very strict boundaries for foreigners who wanted to enter. While there was ongoing diplomatic intercourse with China and limited trade with Japan, the authorities of Joseon generally pursued a hostile policy toward visitors from western nations. You may recall that last season we recounted the adventures of Hendrick Hamel, a Dutch sailor whose ship wrecked on the Korean Peninsula and was, along with his crew, held as a prisoner for 13 years before escaping and writing a book recounting his life among the mysterious Koreans.
The motivations for Korea’s exclusionism were varied. Their nation had a long history of occasional foreign invasions -- from China, from the Mongol Empire, from the Japanese under Toyotmi Hideyoshi, and most recently from the ascendant Manchus in the 1600s. These hostile events served to encourage, over time, an arms-length approach to unknown foreign powers like those who had, in the mid-1800s, begun regularly interacting with China. There was also a real value of self-sufficiency and self-reliance among the Korean people, who were encouraged by their government to live simply and to fear foreigners bearing gifts.
By the mid-1800s, the sore-headed feelings of centuries past over the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing had largely been put aside. Regardless of where their ancestors hailed from, the Qing Dynasty held the Mandate of Heaven and Korean officials still largely considered China to be the absolute center of civilization.
On the southern edge of the Peninsula, near the bustling city of Busan, there was a Japanese trading colony which was established near the beginning of the Edo Period. There had been a long period of near radio silence between the Japanese and Koreans throughout the Edo Period, as neither the Shogun nor the Korean sovereigns saw any reason for maintaining regular contact with the other. Korea considered Japan a fellow tributary nation to China but still distrusted the Japanese in general. The trading colony near Busan was enclosed by large walls and the entries and exits were controlled by Joseon soldiers. Korean merchants would visit and exchange goods, but Japanese merchants were not allowed to explore the peninsula’s interior.
When we last left our friends in Joseon Dynasty Korea, King Cheoljong had just taken the throne in 1853 at the age of 18, inheriting a kingdom which was in the throes of political turmoil. This young monarch had lived as a commoner before his ascension, which made him especially concerned about the plight of the common people. He was known to use treasury resources to ease their suffering during times of drought or famine, and he even criticized the national examination system which had become a corrupt institution plagued by fraud and bribery. In spite of his best intentions and in spite of being named as the king, he had very little power. While the poor no doubt appreciated his charity, all of his other attempts at reform came virtually to nothing.
During his reign, the Andong Kim Clan was ascendant in Korean politics and they controlled the ship of state. The national administration was full of their family members and partisans, and there was little anyone could do about it, for the moment. Throughout the 1850s, there were repeated incidents involving foreign vessels scouting the shoreline of the peninsula and occasionally even sailing upriver. Most of these encounters were purely visual in nature and any attempts to trade or interact with locals was swiftly denied. However, in 1856 a ship full of French soldiers returning from the Crimean War ransacked several villages along the peninsula’s western coast. Then came the disastrous year of 1860.
We discussed the Second Opium war last season in Episode 7: When Empires Collide. Toward the end of this conflict, English and French soldiers sacked Beijing and burned the Qing Emperor’s Summer Palace to the ground. Because of Beijing’s proximity to the Korean peninsula, news of this event sent shockwaves through the political elite, and some even fled the capital, fearing imminent invasion from whomever had just destroyed the capital of China. Accounts from the time claim that some even donned cross necklaces in hopes that when the foreigners came to destroy the Joseon Kingdom, they would be spared for their alleged religious affiliation.
Catholicism continued to spread throughout Korea, albeit very slowly due to the intense persecution of the state. There were probably tens of thousands of Roman Catholics practicing in secret throughout Joseon, but the government was extremely suspicious of this foreign religion and took active measures to suppress it. The people who seemed most attracted to Catholicism were part of a group known as the Minjung, a term which literally means “the people,” but specifically refers to marginalized subjects.
Meanwhile, Korean Confucianism in the mid-1800s was in the midst of a crisis. By this point, its scholars and adherents had divided into two factions - one that promoted a more traditional orthodox Confucian philosophy while the other was full of firebrand reformers bent on revitalizing and even re-defining Korean Confucianism for the next generation. As reports of hidden Catholics being discovered around the nation seemed to increase during the 1850s, some of the reformers decided that drastic measures were needed.
One of these reformers was Choe Je-u, the adopted son of a Confucian scholar who married his mother because he wanted an heir. Choe Je-u experienced, from a young age, the hard edge of contemporary Confucian belief. His position in social order, as the adopted son of a widow, was considered very low. Although his adopted father trained him in Confucian belief and practices, young Choe Je-u was not allowed to take the national civil service examination because of his low status.
He seemed to find difficulty throughout his young life and he sought shelter in religious rituals across the spectrum - Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and even Shamanism. Like most Koreans, he was shocked by the news that Beijing had fallen to an army of western imperialists and he pondered what must make these nations so powerful. His conclusion, based purely on his own suppositions, was that the foreigners’ powerful militaries must rely on societies where spiritual harmony had been realized. From his point of view, Joseon Korea was a fallen nation where religion was used to prop up the powerful while corruption ran rampant and the poor suffered. His conclusion, therefore, pointed to national religious revival as the solution to Korea’s present problems.
In 1860 he received his first spiritual revelation from a being he identified as Sangje, the “Lord of Heaven.” He claimed he was told to draw a symbol on a piece of paper, burn that paper, then mix the ashes with water and drink it. He was also instructed to repeat a sacred incantation. These activities together were, according to Choe Je-u, a sure path of restoring one’s health by aligning the practitioner with the will of Sangje. He was then ordered to spread the word about these practices to all Koreans in order to revitalize the nation and end this present evil age.
While not a lot of western practices found their way to Korea, the few that were adopted via China or the trade with Japan were called “Seohak,” meaning “Western Learning.” Choe Je-u named his new spiritualist movement “Donghak,” meaning Eastern Learning. What began with a rather simple set of rituals evolved quickly into a syncretistic religion which combined elements from Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Shamanism. Donghak spread widely among the peasantry, in spite of the government’s attempts at stamping it out. At first the authorities thought it was a new splinter version of Catholicism and for some time Choe Je-u had to hide out in Jeolla Province to avoid arrest and potential execution.
Meanwhile, in 1862, in Gyeongsang Province on the peninsula’s southeast, the peasants rose in a mass rebellion. Modern scholarship suggests that this uprising was caused by a reaction to corrupt local authorities but at the time it was blamed on Donghak and its leaders. The precise number of Donghak adherents from this period is difficult to calculate, with the lower estimates being in the tens of thousands and the higher estimates in the hundreds of thousands.
In late 1863, Choe Je-u was arrested for spreading heretical teachings. He was tried in the spring of 1864, found guilty, and beheaded. In spite of their founder’s rather grisly fate, practitioners of Donghak continued spreading his teachings and practices. During his time hiding out in Korea’s southwest, he had composed several texts which would serve as scripture for his followers.
King Cheoljong, meanwhile, never produced a direct heir. This was a problem for his patrons in the Andong Kim Clan, and they proceeded to trump up charges against other royal descendants and have them executed in order to preserve their power. Some of these descendants very cleverly eluded the attention of the ruling party by living among low-ranking commoners and spending their time on intentionally frivolous pursuits. This ruse generally worked; the Kim did not bother hunting those whose ascension would be a laughable development.
In early 1864, King Cheoljong died and, because he did not have a natural heir, the three dowager queens decided upon a successor. After a suitable amount of political jockeying and gamesmanship, dowager Queen Sinjeong, the oldest and therefore highest-ranking queen, chose a new sovereign, one of the last remaining royal descendants of Joseon’s founder. King Gojong was eleven years old when he took the throne in 1864, which meant, once again, that a regency was needed until the king came of age. In this particular instance, the young king’s father Heungseon was installed as regent, a decision which would have far-reaching consequences in Korean history. He was granted the title Daewongun, a princely title which was often granted to regents who were fathers of the king who had not, themselves, served as king.
Shortly after Heungseon Daewongun was installed as the official regent, Dowager Queen Sinjeong withdrew from court and left day-to-day governance in the hands of Regent Heungseon. This was a surprising and unwelcome event for the Andong Kim Clan, who had been expecting the dowager to essentially act as the regent and for the title which Heungseon had been granted to be merely a powerless honorific. Instead, Heungseon proceeded to absolutely dismantle their power base, one brick at a time.
Heungseon was an energetic reformer who believed in a strong central government. He began a public anti-corruption campaign which uncovered a great deal of fraud and bribery being committed by the yangban class, the scholar-official aristocrats who had enjoyed oversight-free regional power for years. He bullied the royal clans back into submission and raised taxes on aristocrats across the nation, both very popular measures among the common people. These measures were cast not as a revolutionary new political movement, but as a return to the tradition of Joseon’s earlier kings.
The actual effectiveness of his many reforms is a matter of debate, but it is generally agreed that his policies shattered the overwhelming power of the Andong Kim Clan. Private Confucian academies, which existed as partisan structures to support various kin groups at court, were disenfranchised and shuttered.
In terms of foreign policy, Bruce Cumings helpfully sums up Heungseon’s philosophy as follows, (quote) “No treaties, no trade, no Catholics, no west, and no Japan.” (endquote) He supported Korea’s continued exclusionist policies, which were occasionally put to the test by foreign visitors.
When Commodore Perry forced Japan to open its ports to foreign trade in 1853, he was granted considerable rewards when he returned to the United States of America. Hoping to earn a reward of their own, the crew of a small merchant schooner named the “General Sherman” decided to attempt to force Korea to do the same in 1866. After purchasing various goods in northern China, they sailed to Korea in August of 1866, entering the Taedong River which is on the western coast of modern-day North Korea. They made their way upriver and, because they had a missionary on board, they handed out bibles to every village they encountered while also offering trade to the locals.
The General Sherman was warned several times by local officials that Joseon Korea was closed to foreign trade. Their captain and crew ignored those admonitions and made their way deeper into the country. Regent Heungseon began receiving reports about the General Sherman’s activities and worried that their intentions may not have been as charitable as they claimed. Specifically, he came to believe that they were actually a French warship which had been sent to avenge the deaths of Korean Catholics in a persecution which occurred twenty years prior.
Regardless of its intentions, the vessel ran aground on a sandbar in late August. The crew sent a landing party on a small craft to forage the area for food and were eventually confronted by a Joseon official, whom they took hostage. They agreed to release him if they were given gold, food, and some local trade goods. Meanwhile, as they were very near the shore, a mob of Korean commoners gathered nearby and began to pelt the craft with rocks and with hwacha - rudimentary rocket batteries which made impressive flash-bangs but were not generally very lethal. In the midst of the attack, the captured official was rescued by some Korean commandos.
A desperate battle ensued. The General Sherman fired on the gathered mob with 12-pounder cannons. Local military was mobilized and fired upon the craft with matchlock muskets. An improvised turtle ship was thrown together but was soon destroyed by American artillery. Finally a series of fire ships were roped together and cast toward the General Sherman in three separate waves. The first two failed to connect, but the third wave successfully set the enemy craft alight. The crew abandoned ship but were soon killed by Korean civilians who rushed them from the shore. The missionary’s death was later portrayed as a martyrdom and he was depicted handing a bible to the man who killed him.
In the immediate wake of the General Sherman Incident, as it would later be called, the Joseon state engaged in a fresh round of persecution against its Roman Catholic Subjects, an event which would come to be known as the Byeong-In Persecution. More than 8,000 people were executed for converting to Roman Catholicism during this time.
In 1868, another attempt at opening Korea to trade took place, this time at the hands of a German merchant named Ernst Oppert. This enterprising young man worked alongside a French priest to determine that the best way to force Korea to become open to western trade was to rob the grave of the regent’s father, steal his bones, and hold them hostage. They managed to enter the peninsula’s interior but apparently could not acquire the remains in question. On their way back to their ship, the landing party was ambushed by Joseon troops and the survivors were forced to run back to their vessel. This incident especially made the Joseon state sour at the idea of trading with foreign powers.
The efforts of Regent Heungseon to ensure that Korea was protected from foreign influence of any kind resulted in a new impression of the Joseon Kingdom by foreign powers: a hermit kingdom. While such tactics may have been roughly successful in former periods, the late 1800s were not forgiving of such regressive political ideals. Whether the regent liked it or not, the fact was that Korea was falling behind its peer nations in terms of productivity, governmental innovations, and standard of living.
In 1866, the regent chose a wife for his son, King Gojong, who was still a powerless figurehead. The new queen hailed from a suitably aristocratic family, the Yeoheung Min Clan, and she soon began engaging in a long-term campaign to seize power from the regent, who was perceived by much of the court as being something of a dictator. In 1873, her coalition was complete and she made her move; she arranged for the regent to be forced into retirement so that her husband, King Gojang, could rule the nation without his father’s oversight. Of course, this was an illusion; what it actually meant was that she would rule the nation instead of Regent Heungseon.
While the queen was still assembling her coalition, Korea had been subjected to two punitive foreign expeditions. In 1866, a French fleet attacked Ganghwa Island in retaliation for the execution of seven French Catholic missionaries earlier that year, part of the anti-Catholic reaction that erupted after the General Sherman Incident. The French fleet bombarded the island for six weeks and the Joseon government managed to organize a successful counterattack that drove the European ships away. The second was an American expedition, as the United States was still demanding answers regarding the fate of the General Sherman.
The American ships attempted to enter a river by passing first through the straits of Ganghwa and were fired upon by cannons ensconced in guard towers nearby which were charged with preventing entry to the river. On board the ships were about a hundred marines, who soon landed on Ganghwa and proceeded to methodically overrun and capture fortifications across the island. Korean casualties were significant, partly because they were fighting with weapons which were long-outdated and downright inferior to those employed by their enemies.
Thinking that surely the Joseon kingdom would recognize when it had been defeated, the Americans called for a parlay, hoping to secure a promise that Korean officials would open negotiations and perhaps even open the country to trade. Local officials, however, were unmoved and several large bodies of reinforcements were already approaching from Hanseong. The marines abandoned the fortifications they had captured and their fleet departed soon after.
These incidents called into question the defensibility of the exclusionism policy, which was one of many policies which the newly-ascendant Queen Min hoped to change when she forced Regent Heungseon from power in 1873. The forced retirement of the regent was soon followed with a new challenge from a foreign power -- one which resided much closer to home. In the fall of 1875, the Japanese gunboat Un’yo came near Ganghwa Island on a survey mission. The ship approached Ganghwa Island and sent a shore party, ostensibly to request water and provisions from the locals. Doing so meant that the craft entered restricted waters, and the shore batteries on Ganghwa opened fire.
The Un’yo returned fire, destroying much of the coastal defenses. Then they landed marines who faced off against Korean defenders and made short work of them. Once again old, inferior weaponry was insufficient. Thirty-five Korean soldiers were killed in the skirmish.
A few months later, in early 1876, the Japanese government sent a fleet of warships to blockade Ganghwa while sending official dispatches to Joseon demanding an apology for firing on a Japanese ship. A diplomatic mission was sent to Korea, led by Kuroda Kiyotaka, a former Satsuma domain samurai who had been involved in the Namamugi Incident which we discussed last season, wherein an English merchant was killed by Satsuma samurai after refusing to yield to a daimyo’s official procession.
The 1876 Kuroda Mission to Korea yielded an impressive result for the still-fledgling Meiji government. The mission ended with the signing of the “Treaty of Ganghwa Island,” also known as the “Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876.” The provisions in this treaty were exceedingly generous and they included Joseon officially ending its subordinate relationship to Qing Dynasty China, granted extraterritorial rights to Japanese residents in Korea, and appointed three of Korea’s southern port cities as officially open to Japanese trade.
During the research phase of this season, I was absolutely shocked to learn that it was not France, nor Britain, nor Russia, nor the United States who forced Korea to open its trade, but instead it was the still-developing Empire of Japan. Most nations in east Asia reacted with shock and, in the case of China, disappointment. The loss of Korea as a tributary vassal, combined with the nearly-simultaneous annexation of the Ryukyu Islands and invasion of Taiwan, was perceived as unwarranted aggression on the part of the Japanese and Qing envoys roundly condemned this inexcusable theft and expansion.
For several years after forcing their own unequal treaty upon the Joseon Kingdom, Japan enjoyed a monopoly on access to Korean trade goods. The Joseon court, meanwhile, opted for a national policy of moderated modernization in response. The philosophy they crafted to underpin their new course was tongdo seogi, which means “Eastern Ways, Western Machines.” The goal was to synthesize western technology within the context of their eastern culture and traditional worldview. However, like many such “why not both?” attempts at domestic policy, this particular course tended to anger the radicals on both sides of the debate - those who favored the exclusionism of Regent Heungseon and those who favored a Japanese-style jettisoning of so-called eastern ways entirely.
The Japanese justification for meddling in Korea was a fairly simple equation. Korea was obviously weak, given its recent poor performances defending itself against imperial incursions from France, the United States, and Japan itself. If Korea were conquered by a hostile power, the peninsula’s proximity to Japan alone would make the Meiji state vulnerable to future foreign aggression, regardless of which imperial power decided to take Korea for its own. In the same way that Meiji leaders reasoned that Japan must become a powerful empire to avoid being absorbed into one, they reasoned that the only way to save Korea was to bring it more fully under their control. The Joseon court, meanwhile, had become likewise convinced that their kingdom would not survive a more serious conquest attempt by a western power and, for the moment, decided they were better off learning from the Japanese.
Japan began sending officers to train a new model army for Korea, much in the same way that the Second French Empire had done for the shogunate during Bakumatsu. By 1881, they had formed the Pyeolgigun, which means “Special Army.” Composed of about a hundred young men from aristocratic families who were expected to use their training to reform the rest of Joseon’s army, the Pyeolgigun enjoyed a much higher rate of pay than the rest of Joseon’s armed forces. In fact, the treasury had been dwindling in recent decades, and many of the soldiers in Korea’s regular army were still waiting to be paid, some having not received their salaries in over a year. Naturally, this double-standard led to no small amount of resentment, which exploded in 1882.
In late July, soldiers gathered to receive a promised month’s worth of rice as payment on the order of King Gojong, who was horrified when he heard how backlogged the soldiers’ pay had been. However, the official put in charge of the distribution, a nephew of Queen Min, sold most of the rice and purchased some millet, which he mixed with cheap staples and sand. When the soldiers received their “payment,” they were outraged. A riot broke out shortly thereafter which quickly escalated into a full-scale rebellion.
By the next day, the rioters had murdered one of the Japanese officers of the Pyeolgigun and surrounded the Japanese embassy, threatening to kill everyone inside. The Japanese legation managed to escape but several were wounded and eventually set out into the open sea where they were rescued by a passing British ship.
The rebels, meanwhile, forced their way into the royal palace itself and killed the official who had cheated them out of their rightful pay. They also hunted for the queen but she managed to flee to safety. In the midst of this domestic trouble, regent Heungseon attempted to take back control of the government. He had publicly sympathized with the unpaid soldiers and they respected him. However, it soon became clear that restoring the regent was not an acceptable solution for the international powers who soon became involved. Japan had obvious reasons for not wanting him to return to power, but the Chinese also disliked the regent, who had promoted a Korean exclusionism which also excluded China. Both Japan and China sent troops into Korea to restore order and remove the regent, but it was China who succeeded at both.
This was a problem for Japan, who in spite of the power they had managed to wield over Korea thus far were still recovering from the aftershocks of the Satsuma Rebellion. Decisions were made to beef up both the navy and increase enrollment in the conscript army. Meanwhile the Joseon government signed a treaty with Japan agreeing to pay an indemnity for the damage caused by the rebels.
The Korean government was left with an unfortunate choice: accepting suzerainty from the Chinese or Japanese. Queen Min led the charge to choose China, which was largely motivated by practical political ends because China had the regent in custody and if Joseon had opted for Japanese overlordship, they would probably release him and then it would be nothing but work, work, work all the time.
The parties which emerged at court were broadly conservative, which favored remaining within China’s sphere and rejecting Japan and the west, and the progressive party, which broadly favored Japan and westernization. In 1884, China got itself into a dust-up with France which we will discuss in the next episode. As a result, some of the Chinese troops now stationed in Korea were withdrawn to assist in their nation’s war effort. Sensing an opportunity, the progressive party conspired with the Japanese embassy to stage a coup.
With the help of guards from the Japanese legation, the progressive party members, who had recently been largely denied offices within the new China-centric government, approached King Gojong at a banquet and told him that Chinese soldiers were creating a disturbance and they needed to get him to safety. When he complied, they proceeded to massacre conservative leaders and stage a coup d’etat. After taking control of the royal palace, they announced the formation of a new government and proclaimed a new dawn for Korea, one full of western innovation, an end to the social class hierarchy, and that welcomed Japan to assist in this endeavor.
The Gapsin Coup, as it was later called, lasted only a few days. While some of the Chinese troops had been withdrawn, there were still several thousand in the country. It took only one thousand five hundred troops to counteract the coup, which had only a few hundred soldiers acting on its behalf. Many of the soldiers assisting the coup were Japanese, and their loss to the Chinese troops made some in the Meiji government reconsider their previous opinion that China was weak and possibly vulnerable. The Joseon ringleaders largely fled, though some were killed, order was restored, and any orders given during the coup were countermanded by the newly-liberated King Gojong.
Thus Korea in 1884 was firmly under China’s wing and Japanese interests appeared to be on the wane. However, in spite of this resurgence of sino-centric solidarity, the Qing Dynasty was still not in a strong enough position to ensure that it would last for long. Next time, we will catch up with our friends in the Qing Dynasty and discuss their activities during the latter 1800s.