THE WAR OF 1894: COREA AN EMPIRE.
In Asia and in semi-civilized states, as in the old European world,
each sovereignty is a church nation. Religion and the state are one.
China, Corea, and Japan, in their normal oriental condition, are all
acute illustrations of the evils of the union of church and state. Like
Turkey and Russia, they are persecuting nations, allowing no freedom of
conscience to the subject. Any attempt to think differently from the
orthodox and established cult, or philosophy, is sure to call down
persecution, torture, and death. Modern Japan, by ceasing to be
oriental and adopting freedom of conscience, has simplified the
relations between ruler and ruled. China still persecutes in bigotry,
and during the course of her history has shed more blood in the name of
religion and government than probably the mediæval states of Europe.
[59] In all Asiatic countries in which religious despotism still
flourishes, practical Christianity, especially that form of it which is
founded on the Bible in the vernacular, is the great disturbing force,
even as it is the hope of the future. It comes at once into collision
with the theory of the union of Church and State. Giving the common man
a new outlook on the universe makes him exactly the kind of man that
despots and men of privilege and prerogative most bitterly fear, hate,
and oppose. Of this truth Corea is a striking illustration.
The religious history of the people in the Corean peninsula is first
that of fetichism and shamanism, then of Buddhism, which brought in
culture and made a nation, giving also to the land its permanent
monuments, its art, manners, and most of its folk-lore and general
traditions. In the intellectual clash which, in every country in
eastern Asia, has at one time or another taken place between
Confucianism and Buddhism, Buddhism remained victorious. Running a
splendid career for over a thousand years, it finally reached
corruption through wealth, worldliness, and political ambition. Yet
intrenched in office and revenue, it held its own until overthrown with
the dynasty in 1392, when Confucianism, after a long struggle, became
the state church system. Buddhism, left to stagnation and decay, and as
the religion of the peasants, remained in a frightfully corrupt form,
while the scholars and thinking men were almost wholly devoted to
Confucianism. As this system of Chinese ethics lends itself most
admirably to despotism and the continuance in power of the privileged
classes over the masses, so also under stereotyped Confucianism,
Corea’s type of civilization, as we see it to-day, seems to mean for
the nation at large only a general degradation as compared with the
splendor of the mediæval Buddhist age. Allied with Chinese bigotry of
race and ignorance of the world, Corean Confucianism degenerated still
further into the savagery of conceit, of which the Tai-wen Kun seemed
an incarnation, and made Chō-sen, as a body politic, a country eaten up
with parasites—one-tenth of the population living on the other
nine-tenths. In the persecution of the Christian converts to that form
of Christianity which entered in 1777, Corean Confucianism showed
itself as barbarous and as devilish as the Spanish Inquisition, or
anything else in history which masks man’s lower nature under the garb
of noble pretexts. Nevertheless, the very patience of the Christians
under their tortures, the zeal and consecration of both the natives and
their foreign priests, so impressed a Corean scholar named Choi, that
in 1859 he set himself to ponder the question whether, after all,
Christianity, though foreign, were not the true religion.
After severe sickness and a revelation, as he believed, from the Lord
of Heaven, Choi felt himself called to found a new religion. He
proceeded to do so after the time-honored manner most fashionable in
China, Corea, and Japan, where originality is not too common, that is,
make an eclectic system. From the ethics of Confucius and the
philosophy of his commentators, from the writings of Lao-tsze and his
interpreters, and from the Buddhist sutras and their accretions, he
composed a book entitled the Great Holy Scripture and wrote out the
brief prayer which his followers still daily repeat. As Christianity
was a Western sect, he gave to his new religion the name of Tong Hak,
Eastern Doctrine or Culture. Many, perhaps most, of his followers laid
their emphasis in the new religion upon the idea of maintaining
Orientalism as against Occidentalism. Beginning in the town of Kion
Chiu, forty-five miles north of Fusan, the movement spread quickly into
the provinces of Chung Chong and Chullado. Entering the sphere of
politics, it gave the downtrodden peasants hope and new life, in the
midst of the awful night of ever-increasing official corruption and
oppression. It was about this time that the tenure of office by the
provincial governors was changed from three years to one year. This
move, made in the interests of the official class, vastly increased the
burdens laid upon the people, since the political spoilsman, who
usually bought his office, having now less time wherein to recoup and
fill his own chest, became threefold more grasping than before.
The influence of Christianity is very manifest in the history of the
Tong Haks and in the literary, dogmatic, and devotional manifestations
of their leader. Within six years, under the fierce initiative of the
Tai-wen Kun, Choi and his disciples were officially charged with being
“foreigner Coreans” and followers of the Lord of Heaven, that is, Roman
Catholic Christians. Choi was tried, tortured, and beheaded, and his
doctrines were outlawed. As with the Boxer and other common delusions
among the ignorant, the Tong Haks believed that “by the influence of
their god they could dance the sword dance and ascend into the air.”
The sect kept on spreading year after year, its animus blending with
that spirit of revolution and resistance to intolerable official
oppression then rampant in the southern provinces, the two movements
melted into each other and became one.
Early in 1893, before the palace gate at Seoul, there was a wonderful
sight. With pathetic ceremonies and long and patient waiting, fifty of
Choi’s followers presented a petition that their founder be
rehabilitated and their sect be tolerated even as the Christians were.
They intimated that if they were kept under ban they would drive all
aliens out of the country. Their prayer for toleration was refused, and
they were driven away by the palace guards. In the springtime the Tong
Haks led a great uprising of the peasantry in the southern provinces.
The soldiers sent to Seoul to put down the insurrection were scattered
like chaff before the wind. The insurgents occupied the chief city of
Chullado and the danger seemed to threaten the whole kingdom. The
Corean general, Hong, notified the Court of his inability to cope with
the situation. Then the pro-Chinese faction in Seoul, instigated by
Yuan, applied to Peking asking for military aid to put down the Tong
Hak rebels. According to the Li-Ito convention of May 7, 1885, neither
China or Japan could send soldiers into Corea without first notifying
the other Power.
Meanwhile Kim Ok Kiun was in Japan. Though the Government at Seoul
repeatedly demanded his extradition and both in Corea and Japan
assassins continually plotted to kill him, he received the same asylum
and protection which, under the laws of civilization, the Government in
Tokio gave to all foreigners. Finally, in 1894 Kim Ok Kiun was lured to
Shanghai by a false telegram and a forged bank-draft. On his arrival at
the hotel he was promptly murdered. His assassin was rewarded with
honor, fame, and money from Seoul, and in China looked on as a hero.
With indecent haste, but following its ancient barbarous traditions,
the Chinese Government made itself the express company which carried
the victim’s body in a man-of-war to Corea, where it was cut to pieces
and the head and limbs exposed on the public highway. This action of
China raised a storm of popular wrath in Japan, while about the same
time, China, first on June 7th forwarding her troops into Corea, in
violation of the treaty of 1885, sent a defiant insult to the Tokio
Government. Following this action, a despatch was sent to the Japanese
legation in Peking, in which were the words which we italicize: “It is
in harmony with our constant practice to protect our tributary states
by sending our troops to assist them.... General Weh has been ordered
to proceed to Zenra ... to restore the peace of our tributary state.”
Thus by force of arms China defied Western diplomacy, and, trampling on
the treaties, asserted her ancient claims of suzerainty over Corea as
her vassal state.
The reply of the Tokio Government was the announcement, on June 12,
1894, of the despatch of a body of the Mikado’s troops under strict
discipline to Chō-sen. On June 17th China was invited to co-operate
with Japan in financial and administrative reforms in Corea, in order
to preserve the peace of the Far East. China curtly refusing this
request, demanded the immediate return to Japan of her soldiers, at the
same time ordering her Tartar forces in Manchuria to cross that ancient
Rubicon of Eastern Asia—the Yalu River. Chartering the British ship Kow
Shing, she put on board eleven hundred soldiers with ammunition and
artillery to reinforce the Chinese camp at Asan in the northwest of
Chung Chong province. The reply from Tokio was, that, pending an
amicable settlement of the questions in dispute, any further despatch
of Chinese troops into Corea would mean war.
As soon as it was known in Tokio that the Tartar forces had been
mobilized and that the Kow Shing was being loaded, the Japanese fleet
sailed and orders were given to the troops, railways, and steamers to
be ready for the embarking of an army. Within twelve days a Japanese
army corps was landed at Chemulpo, marched to Seoul, the Han River
bridged by pontoons in twenty minutes, and the military cordon around
Seoul completed. On the 20th of July Yuan fled the Corean capital,
leaving his nationals to shift for themselves. On the 23d Mr. Hoshi
Toru, envoy of the Mikado, with a military guard entered the palace and
demanded of the King an answer to the question of Corea’s independence
and willingness to stand by her treaty with Japan. The royal answer was
in the affirmative. The King called in the Tai-wen Kun to allay his
fears and aid him in the formation of a new cabinet, to which he
invited, for the most part, the Liberals exiled in 1884. Prince Pak
Yong Hio, who had been declared an arch-traitor and his house razed to
the ground, was again received into royal favor.
On July 25th the Japanese cruiser Naniwa, under Captain, now Admiral,
Togo, met the Kow Shing. After four hours of parley and refusal to
surrender, the transport was sunk by the guns of the Naniwa. On July
29th and 30th the Japanese met the Chinese forces at Asan, routed them
and occupied their stronghold. The declarations of war between the
emperors of China and Japan, the old rival Sons of Heaven, were
published to the world on the same day, August 1, 1894. The former was
full of arrogance and ignorance, the latter was clear in phrase and
temperate in tone. The Chinese lady then on the throne called on her
soldiers to “root the pigmies out of their lair.” With the conceit and
stupidity of the giant, China went to war against the intelligent and
splendidly armed Jack of the islands. In results it was an affair of
Goliath and David over again. Ancient and overweening orthodoxy met
culture and intelligence in the field and on the wave, to be confronted
by what was despised as too small to do harm. At bottom the
Chino-Japanese war meant the right of a nation to change its
civilization. Japan, already a signatory to the Geneva Convention and
her officers trained in the ways of civilization, even though her
people were dubbed heathen by some semi-enlightened folks of the West,
went to war in Christian style. The Japanese had a superb Red Cross
organization, a corps of surgeons, and a body of fifteen hundred
trained nurses, while their hospitals were equipped according to
scientific ideas. With each army corps and fleet went a lawyer versed
in international law, to see that nothing should be done against the
laws of nations. The literary fruits of these precautions and this
loyalty to the high standards of civilization are seen in Mr.
Takahashi’s masterly work “International Law During the Chino-Japanese
War,” and in Mr. Ariga’s “La guerre Sino-Japonaise au point de vue du
droit internationale.” The Chinese had not yet (or before the year
1904) recognized the laws of civilization and had scarcely the
beginning of hospital corps, hospitals, or surgeons. It was not
wonderful, therefore, that her wounded usually crawled away to die like
dogs, or that her ignorant soldiers frequently fired upon those
bringing succor to the wounded. The official organization of the
Chinese was honeycombed with corruption, but with their thirty thousand
drilled troops and fleet, including battle-ships, of which the Japanese
had none, they expected easy victory. Occupying Ping-an, they built
between fifty and sixty forts. At sea their fleets were busy in
convoying transports full of soldiers to the mouth of the Yalu River to
prevent the Japanese from advancing beyond Corea and in the hope of
overwhelming them at one onset. On the site of their previous victory
three centuries before, they expected to rout the Japanese and then to
drive them southward and out of Corea.
The Japanese, centuries ago, learned the difference between bulk and
brain, and are but slightly overawed in the presence of mere weight or
size. They knew that the military reputation of China only existed on
paper, and their excellent system of jiu-jitsu had taught them how to
turn an enemy’s strength against himself. Her soldiers had grown up in
the new era of ideas which had come to fruit under Christian
civilization. Borrowing these ideas and forces and combining them with
their own resources and informing them with their own genius, they gave
the world a surprise. They had long grieved in spirit over their
non-recognition by the world at large of their peaceful ambitions and
of the principles that lie at the basis of their civilization. They
mourned that war and bloodshed were necessary to impress the world and
secure respect. Within six months they humbled China and compelled her
to sue for peace.
In three divisions, up from the south, eastward from the mouth of the
Ta Tong River, and westward from Gensan, the three columns of the
Japanese army marched and met at Ping-an (Ping Yang). After two days’
fighting, September 15th and 16th, the Chinese hosts were routed. The
next day, at sea, off the mouth of the Yalu River, the Chinese fleet,
in the first great battle of modern steel ships, was disabled and was
never afterward able to resume the offensive. Before October 1st Corea
was entirely cleared of Chinese. On the continent of Asia, chiefly in
Manchuria, they held an area larger than their own empire. Port Arthur
fell on November 21st, and the great fortress of Wei-hai-wei was
surrendered January 31, 1895.
Then Russia unmasked. Calling to her aid France and Germany, this
triple alliance compelled Japan to give up all claims upon the
continent and to be content with an indemnity and the island of
Formosa. Had the Japanese possessed a fleet of battle-ships, they would
have refused this insolent demand and declared war on Russia. As it
was, the treaty of Shimonoséki, between Li Hung Chang and Ito and
Mutsu, was signed. The Japanese spent the indemnity money on a new navy
and proceeded to gird themselves for their next war with another giant,
and to show again the difference between bulk and brain.
Corea suffered surprisingly little from the presence of two great
armies on her soil. Her people were paid liberally for labor and
materials which they so grudgingly furnished to the Japanese, who were
not, in this instance, sufferers on account of their own excess of
politeness, while the Chinese troops were within her borders too short
a time to be a very heavy tax. Only around Ping-an was there much
public or private suffering.
In Seoul, the Mikado’s envoy, as early as August, began to insist upon
a programme of reforms, which, had they been carried out, would have
amounted virtually to a new constitution.
In the reconstruction of the administration of the seven departments,
that of Public Works was broadened to include Agriculture and Commerce,
and in place of the Department of Ceremonies there was created one of
Education co-ordinate with the others. A mighty programme of reforms,
twenty-three in number, was prepared, but enough to make up several
social tornadoes, some of which were possible, while others seemed too
radical and absurd on their faces. A new mint began to issue coins in
European form.
The second son of the King was sent to Tokio to bear the thanks of the
nation and Government for having secured the independence of Chō-sen.
The Corean sovereign, on January 8, 1895, with tremendous
picturesqueness of procession, pomp, and circumstance, proceeded to the
temple of his ancestors and with imposing ceremonies solemnly adjured
all vassalage and dependence upon China. The official name of the new
empire is Dai Han or Ta Han, that is, the Great Han, single and
sovereign, as contrasted with the three (San Han) of ancient history.
With this royal act vanished from history the strangest anomaly in
diplomacy, and one of the last of the dual sovereignties in Asia.
Furthermore, from this time forth, the whole tissue and complexion of
Corean politics altered. The native scholars began to seek a new
intellectual climate and the culture of the West. Scores of students
were sent abroad and many foreigners were employed, as in the new Japan
of 1868.
When, however, Count Inouye, one of the purest and best statesmen in
Japan, in co-operation with the Reform Committee of the Corean
Government began his labors, the old chronic difficulties at once
presented themselves and in legions. There seemed to be no real
patriotism in the country. Rare indeed was the native of ability who
was not hopelessly inoculated with the vices of the old clans and noble
families, whose only idea of the relation between government and office
holders was that of the udder and the sucking pig. Plots and jealousies
continually hampered reform. The real problem was to separate the
functions of the Court from those of the Government, which in Corea, as
in China, had never been fully done. In Japan the holding of office by
females in the palace had been abolished. In the palace at Seoul their
influence could secretly nullify public business. The question of
succession to the throne without Court intrigue through the influence
of the Queen and the mob of palace underlings, and the reconstruction
of the military system and that of civil and criminal law were grappled
with. Over one hundred young men were sent to Japan to study. On June
20, 1895, a royal ordinance was issued dividing the kingdom into
thirteen prefectures, five of the large provinces being divided into
two parts, with 151 districts and 339 magistracies. A cabinet, with
nine boards of administration, was organized, and a judiciary system
for the entire country formed, a postal system inaugurated, and the
army, consisting of 5,000 men, was put under the instruction of
Japanese and American officers. For all these enterprises, money was of
the first necessity. Attempts, therefore, were made to reform the
revenue, making taxes payable in money instead of in kind, while lands
illegally seized were restored to their rightful owners.
All seemed to promise well, notwithstanding that many of the old-style
gentry, who saw in the change a lessening of their income, still
opposed what they called the “civilization nonsense.” The Chinese
merchants gradually returned after the war and resumed business.
Foreign trade in 1895 amounted to nearly thirteen million dollars.
Commercial prosperity seemed to be general and increasing. A fitful
insurrection of the Tong Haks, in the summer of 1895, was completely
subdued by Japanese troops. All was proceeding auspiciously until Count
Inouye left Corea for a visit home. The Queen, who feared that her
father-in-law, the Regent, might make a bad use of the Japanese troops,
was anxious. Count Inouye assured her that the Mikado’s Government
“would not fail to protect the royal house of Corea.” Thus allaying her
well-grounded suspicions, Count Inouye left Seoul about September 15th.
There were still living in the peninsula the two ablest characters, man
and woman, in modern Corean history; the Queen, bound to overcome, and
nullify by her craft and the power of the Min clan, the reforms begun
by the Japanese, and the old Regent, who was bent on getting his son’s
wife out of the way, by fire, sword, poison, or dynamite. Nominally
about seventeen thousand useless persons in Government employ and pay
had been discharged, and the Queen’s palace attendants reduced from
hundreds to a dozen. But after Inouye had gone away, these parasites
gradually returned at her invitation, until the palace was crowded
again as of old with her women, eunuchs, servants, and underlings of
all sorts, while her clansfolk prepared for another of those plots so
characteristic of unregenerated Corea. At the signs of danger, Prince
Pak Yong Hio, minister of Home Affairs, fled the capital. It looked to
the Japanese as if all their work and influence were to come to
nothing. They had been foiled by a woman.
The Tokio Government had appointed as its envoy, in place of Count
Inouye, a military officer named Miura, who, like the French Zouave de
Bellonet, of whom we have read before, brought to his work in Seoul the
habits of the camp and the methods of the soldier, rather than the
patience, tact, and civil abilities of his immediate predecessor. About
this time there were in Seoul many Japanese, of all grades of
character, especially soshi, political bullies or “heelers” from Tokio,
angry at the Queen, who, as they professed to believe, was the friend
of Russia. These men gathered many other spirits like unto themselves
from among the native soldiers who had been discharged through the
Queen’s influence. Soon both the native and the foreign worthies
concluded, with the Tai-wen Kun, that for the good of Corea the Queen
would have to be killed. On the early morning of October 8th the
Japanese troops were conveniently and purposely posted so as to make
possible the entrance into the palace of a motley band of ruffians,
some sixty in number. Seizing the Queen in her own apartments, they
murdered her, dragged her corpse into one of the areas outside, poured
petroleum over the rice straw mats and clothing and set the heap on
fire. Thus perished one of the ablest women in Corean annals. A new
Government was quickly formed under the instigation of the Tai-wen Kun.
A radical programme of reforms was published, new officers were
appointed at home and envoys sent abroad. With horrible mockery of
history and justice, this “rebel cabinet”—as the King later stigmatized
it in public documents—pretended that the Queen was alive and forthwith
conducted an absurd travesty of publicly trying some native accused of
her murder. In the name of his Majesty a proclamation was forged
degrading the Queen to the level of a servant. All this was done by
men, some of whom, it seems impossible to doubt, were implicated in the
palace slaughter. When on November 27th some ultra-patriotic Coreans,
opposed to the Japanese and the policy of the Tai-wen Kun, made an
effort to drive out their new rulers by an attack on the palace and
failed, the chief participants, as well as those alleged on trumped-up
charges to have been in the affair of October 8th, were executed
December 8th. Meanwhile there were anti-Japanese riots in many parts of
the country.
On hearing of the strange use of the Mikado’s soldiery in Seoul, the
Japanese Government promptly recalled Miura and arrested forty-seven
persons supposed to have taken part in the assault on the palace in
Seoul. Nevertheless, in the court at Hiroshima, technical evidence
against them was lacking and the whole band of this new I-ro-ha of
modern Japanese heroism was discharged free of blame, or at least
without the stigma of condemnation. It is probable that the whole
affair of October 8th was connived at by a reckless diplomatic
blunderer, to the regret and mortification of the Mikado’s ministers
and the national sentiment of Japan. In any event, it proved the
death-blow, for a time at least, of Japanese prestige in Corea. In
December the troops of Japan evacuated the country.
This was almost the last appearance in public of “Yi Ha-eung, Prince of
Heung Song,” the Tai-wen Kun, or Prince Parent. He emerged fitfully on
one occasion before the police authorities to secure the release of one
of his retainers, and then retired to his estate in Kiodang. He died
peacefully, on the 22d of February, 1898, and was buried with due
ceremonies. His mausoleum, made according to all the proprieties of
Corean taste and mortuary art, makes an attractive sight on the
landscape of Corea. On August 18, 1900, Corea being now an empire, he
was by imperial decree raised to the rank of Wang, or King. He will
ever be remembered by the Coreans as one of the most powerful
personalities in the modern history of their nation. According to
traditional usage, Corean princes cannot hold office, and for that
reason many of them decline the title, in order to avoid the poverty
which acceptance of it brings, and get Government appointments to
office with salary. The Tai-wen Kun, born in Seoul, January 22, 1811,
made good use of his opportunity, which came both with his title and
his office. Besides doing a great many bad things, to the injury of his
country, he made some great improvements. He was, according to his
lights, a statesman and a patriot, and he foresaw to some extent the
designs of Russia. In methods he never rose above the atmosphere of the
environment within which he had been educated. In person he was five
feet six inches in height, but looked a leader of men. He was the
great-grandson of one king, the nephew of another, and the father of a
third. “He became the leader of the small remnant of the imperial clan
left, and really preserved it from extinction.” [60]
The passing away of these two eminent characters, Queen Min and Tai-wen
Kun, marked the end of an era.