Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World

Righteous Armies

About an hour by car south of Seoul is one of South Korea’s peculiar tourist attractions — Independence Hall. Set in extensive, attractive grounds with a small lake it is a massive fifteen-story-high structure the size of a soccer field, focused on the country’s struggle for independence against Japanese rule. One can walk past one vivid, graphic illustration of the brutalization and subjugation of the Korean people after another. One wax figure scene shows jackbooted Japanese officers resting their feet on a small wooden cage containing a Korean whose head is bent almost to his feet in the confined space. As a monument to a people’s sense of victimization, Independence Hall is truly impressive. But it is not unique. There is a similar museum in North Korea.

Independence Hall may be a good place to start this account of Korea’s endless war, a conflict rooted in the nation’s experience as a victim of modern imperialism. In the late nineteenth century, the great powers terminated Korea’s isolation, shattered its ancient society, and turned the peninsula into a battleground of rival imperialist powers. Koreans responded to this and the subsequent loss of their sovereignty in varied ways. And these different responses sowed the seeds of its internal division.

Land of the Morning Calm

When the British, Russians, and other Western powers first approached Korea they found a land long at peace and uninterested in all but the most minimal engagement with the outside world. Korea was called by the Chinese Chao Xian which can be liberally translated as land of the morning calm. This was a fitting description of nineteenth-century Korea. But it was not always so calm. Ancient Korea was a land of warrior-aristocrats, descendants of the hunters and nomads of the Inner Asian steppes and the Manchurian plains. After they settled in the peninsula and adopted farming, three kingdoms arose each ruled by warrior aristocracies that resembled, and most likely introduced, many of the traditions of the samurai of Japan. These kingdoms fought with each other until one of them, Silla, unified the peninsula in 676. Korea remained politically unified until 1945.

The ancient Koreans loved horses. They were mounted archers and swordsmen who competed in contests of martial skills. Their society included aristocratic women who, possessing considerable freedom of movement by the standards of pre-modern times, competed with men in polo. Buddhism was the state religion, and monks too had martial traditions and fought to defend the kingdom. They had much defending to do since Korea bordered some of the most formidable warriors of history: the Khitans, the Jurchens, and the Mongols as well as their far more populous and sometimes aggressive neighboring states—China and Japan. Fiercely independent, Koreans successfully turned back more than one invasion; in the seventh century they twice defeated armies from China, and in the thirteenth century the Koreans fought off the Mongols for nearly four decades before finally submitting.

Over the centuries this martial tradition changed under the influence of Confucianism which entered Korea from China. Confucianists promoted the ideal of rule by meritorious, scholarly officialdom not by warrior aristocrats. The increasingly Confucianized aristocracy became divided into the two hereditary groups: munban, who were scholars and civil officials, and muban, who were warriors that defended the kingdom, but the status of the latter declined. Confucianization and the decline of military culture accelerated under the Joseon dynasty that came to power in 1392. However, there was a brief awakening of the warrior spirit with the Japanese invasions of the 1590s. After being quickly overrun by the massive Japanese army in 1592 the Koreans put up a spirited resistance to the samurai warriors and under Admiral Yi Sunsin won a string of naval victories. But then Korea turned inward, towards isolationism and its military weakened.

By the 1860s Korea had not fought a war in more than two centuries and had not had a major domestic rebellion or upheaval since the fourteenth century. Once a land of warriors, it was now ill-prepared for war. Military training in Joseon did not help since it was often based on mastery of ancient texts on warfare rather than on practical training and experience. The country’s army became small and by the late 1800s, much of it existed solely on paper. People simply collected salaries without serving. The handful of troops manning the country’s fortresses had only the most antiquated weapons. The need for a strong military was not apparent since, as a member of the tributary system, Korea fell under the Chinese protective umbrella, which was sometimes leaky, but mostly served to insulate the country from foreign invasion. So, a combination of factors—the absence of serious external threats, popular disdain for soldiers, the fact that serving in the military was not a vehicle for advancement in society but a dead-end, and being a society dominated by scholar-bureaucrats who had little appreciation for martial skills—led to the atrophy of the country’s military. There were few countries in the world in the nineteenth century less military-oriented than Korea.

Koreans lived in self-imposed isolation, engaging with the outside world as little as possible. There were no foreigners living in Korea and few Koreans ever traveled abroad. Foreigners were forbidden to enter. The only exceptions were the Chinese emissaries who followed a prescribed route through the country, entered Seoul through a special gate and while visiting stayed in a special compound. They had only limited contact with non-authorized Koreans. Then there were the Japanese who were allowed to trade as long as they stayed in their walled compound outside Busan.

Koreans traveled only to China on diplomatic missions where they engaged in trade, saw the sights in Beijing, and met with Chinese officials, merchants and scholars. There were also the occasional, actually rare, official visits to Edo, Japan. Koreans did not have relations with any other countries. Since the country was closed to Westerners, Korea became known in the West as the Hermit Kingdom. It was an apt name, for Koreans engaged only in a modest amount of trade with its neighbors and felt little need to concern themselves with the rest of the world. But Koreans were unable to insulate themselves from the restless, and relentless, expansion of Western imperialism.

Abrupt Entry into the World of Modern Imperialism

Koreans were not entirely unaware of the West despite their isolation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some Korean visitors to Beijing encountered the European Jesuits who had a mission there. They brought back telescopes, clocks, maps, and a few Chinese translations of Western books on math and science, which were read with interest. Koreans so liked clocks that they made pretty good replicas of them, even of cuckoo clocks. So impressed were they with the accurate Western calendar that at one point they considered inviting Jesuits to come and share their mathematical and astronomical skills. At the start of the nineteenth century one Korean scholar, Dasan, wrote a treatise on Western medicine. A small number of Koreans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries converted to Catholicism, although their grasp of Christianity was a bit shaky.

Nonetheless, Koreans, like most East Asians, were unaware of the extraordinary advancements that were transforming the West and leading it on a path of global domination: the Industrial Revolution, global capitalism, the rapid advance of science and technology, and new ideas about political and social organization. Several things did make them notice. From 1839 to 1842, the Chinese suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War. In 1858–60 the Middle Kingdom suffered a second defeat culminating in a brief Anglo-French occupation of Beijing, while the Russians annexed a section of Chinese territory giving it a short border with Korea. In 1854, Japan was forced to open itself to trade and diplomacy with the United States and Koreans took note of the subsequent upheaval in the years that followed.

Korea rebuffed attempts by the British, French, and Russians to open their country to trade. When the boy-king Gojong came to the throne in 1864 his father, the regent Daewon’gun, took special pride in resisting any attempts to change its policy of isolation. He cracked down on Christianity and executed several thousand Korean Catholics including some French priests who had smuggled themselves into the country. When the French learned about this they launched a punitive expedition in 1866. The poorly-armed Koreans resisted the invaders so fiercely that the French withdrew without accomplishing much. For Daewon’gun it was a great victory. In the same year, a heavily-armed American merchant ship, the General Sherman, with a crew of Americans, British, Malays, and Chinese, sailed up the Daedong River to Pyongyang hoping to trade. They were politely told by the local official, Pak Gyusu, that foreigners were not permitted, and they had to leave. The ship got stuck on a sandbar, there was an exchange of fire, and at some point, the locals set fire to the ship killing the crew as they jumped off. There were no survivors.

When the Americans learned the fate of the missing ship several years later, they carried out their own punitive expedition. In what the American press called the splendid little war against the heathen five ships and 1,200 men under Admiral John Rodgers and Frederick Low, the U.S. minister to China, sailed off to Korea with a letter demanding an account of the General Sherman. Landing on Ganghwa island they killed hundreds of Korean defenders yet were unable to find their way to Seoul and withdrew. For Koreans, it was another victory.

The two incidents—the French and the American attacks—reveal a couple of things about Koreans. They were capable of fighting very bravely, even to death, rather than surrender. Yet they also illustrated that, despite these victories, they were hopelessly weak militarily, in no position to defend themselves against modern invaders. Korean soldiers were armed with pikes, arrows, and ancient matchlock firearms which hadn’t been used in the West since the invention of the musket in the sixteenth century. So poorly armed and manned was the Korean army that Daewon’gun had to call upon private tiger hunters to defend the fortresses. They too were only armed with ancient matchlocks.

Korea was able to resist half-hearted attempts by the French and the Americans to open the country, but not the determined effort of their modernizing neighbor Japan. In 1868, in what would be called the Meiji Restoration, a group of reform-minded samurai overthrew the Shogunate and began the revolutionary transformation of Japan into a modern industrial and military power. In one of their first foreign initiatives, they sent an envoy to Busan to announce the new government and seek to open direct diplomatic relations. The Koreans were disgusted by the Western dress of the officials, which was not only culturally offensive but reinforced the old idea that the Japanese were semi-barbarians. They also were offended by the idea of imperial restoration since that implied the Japanese king outranked Korea’s king. The Japanese leadership who regarded Korea, the closest land bridge to Japanese islands, to be of vital concern for their country’s security was frustrated by Seoul’s refusal to deal with them.

In 1873, Meiji leaders seriously considered provoking an incident and invading Korea. The idea of an invasion was called off but in the spring of 1875, the newly-acquired modern warship Unyo sailed into Busan and demonstrated its power by firing its guns. Then, accompanied by other ships, it began surveying the coast. When it was fired upon by Korean shore batteries it returned fire and destroyed them. It then landed troops and took a small fort. The Japanese returned with more forces and demanded an apology for firing on its ships.

Faced with this demonstration of power, the Korean court decided to begin negotiations. With the support of the young king Gojong who with his father out of the way was now able to assert himself, the Koreans signed the Treaty of Ganghwa in February 1876. Its twelve articles permitted Japan to survey coastal waters, allowed Japanese to reside in treaty ports, and to have rights of extraterritoriality; that is to be immune to Korean law. A further trade agreement was signed opening the country to Japanese trade and investment. Korea’s isolation ended and its entry into the modern world began at gunpoint. It would not just be the end of isolation, but the end of peace. The Korean people entered not just the modern world but a century and a half of violent upheavals and perpetual war.

Ganghwa Island

The treaty that marked the end of Korea’s isolation is named for the island of Ganghwa. Less than an hour’s drive from Seoul, Ganghwa today is a popular day trip, famous among Koreans for a kind of turnip with medicinal properties that grows there, for its setting on the sea, and its history. And it has a lot of history. Ganghwa is not a big island, about 116 square miles (304 square km), about twice the size of Staten Island in New York. It is 17 miles (28km) long and 14 miles (22km) wide; the highest point is Mani Mountain about 1,500 feet (470m). Its importance stems from a strategic location in an estuary of the Han River where Seoul is situated. It is separated by the land by just less than a mile and is today connected by two bridges.

In 1232, when the Mongols were invading Korea, the rulers of the country ordered the court to retreat to the easily defended island. The entire government was transferred there, with palaces, offices, temples, arsenals, and residences. For almost four decades the Korean kingdom used it as a base for the country’s remarkably stubborn resistance to the Mongols. From across the narrow strait that separates the island from the mainland, Korean soldiers would jeer at and taunt the Mongol forces. Again, in the seventeenth century, during the time of the Manchu invasions, the government fled there. The island thus became a symbol of Korea’s determination to be free of outside control.

This strategic island blocking the entryway into Seoul is the spot where the French arrived in 1866 only to meet fierce resistance from its defenders, and it was where the Americans landed five years later. Then the Japanese came in 1876, captured a small fort on the island, and killed and wounded its defenders. Today Ganghwa is no longer a symbol of resistance and isolation but administratively part of the city of Incheon, a bustling port, and is not far from Incheon International Airport, one of the busiest in the world. It is also not far from Songdo, a newly created high-tech city designed as a place to welcome international businesses and organizations. Once a bastion to keep the foreigners out, it is now part of the country’s main gateway to the world.

Opening to the World

In 1882, Korea opened diplomatic and trade relations with the United States and sent a mission to Washington the following year. Soon it had diplomatic ties with Russia, Britain, France, Germany, and several other countries. Foreigners arrived, diplomats from Europe, merchants from China and Japan, Russian timber cutters and tiger hunters, as well as American missionaries. The missionaries opened schools, and modern medical clinics and converted some Koreans to Presbyterianism and Methodism. Foreign businesses sought concessions for mines, railroads, streetcars, electrification projects, and telegraph and telephone lines. A steady flow of young Koreans began to go abroad for education. The largest number went to Japan; it was nearby, culturally similar, and cheaper than Western countries. Many of these came back impressed with that country’s swift modernization and saw it as a model for Korea. Smaller but not insignificant numbers went to the United States where they encountered racism but were also impressed with what they saw as a wealthy, advanced, and powerful society. A handful went to Russia and Western Europe for study, and they too were impressed. Almost all came away with a sense of just how weak, vulnerable, and backward their country was. However, they also came with a belief that Koreans could emulate these new centers of civilization just as they had successfully emulated, and in some respects surpassed, China in the past.

This sent into motion a search for external models to restore the country’s place in the hierarchy of civilized societies. The problem was there was not just one model but several. Thus, from the earliest beginnings of its modernization Koreans were united in their goal to make their homeland a prosperous autonomous society that was strong enough to defend itself and a proud member of the civilized world, but not on the methods of achieving this. Naturally, some conservatives resisted or sought to minimize innovation, to hold on to old values, but their influence waned after it became increasingly clear that the world had changed too much to maintain the old ways.

The Korean government realized it had a weak military and understood the importance of addressing this. At first, the steps it took were very modest. Gojong in 1881 created a Special Skills Force, a small group of soldiers trained in modern weapons. The following year, regular soldiers, angry over not being paid and resenting this privileged group, murdered the Japanese officer in charge. The Special Skills force was then abolished. In 1883, the court created a Special Guards Command trained by a Chinese officer Yuan Shikai. These were pathetically small efforts yet part of something more fundamental: a change in attitude toward the military by the educated elite. Many Korean officials and professionals were also quick to grasp the importance of broader reforms to strengthen the state. Some admired how the Japanese were developing an industrial state with a modern military. In 1884, a group of young Koreans who had traveled to Japan attempted a coup with plans to emulate the Japanese Meiji Restoration. The event, called the Gapsin Coup, failed when the Chinese intervened with a military force. Most of the coup’s leaders fled to Japan.

A Shrimp among Whales

Koreans have a saying that their country is a shrimp among whales, and indeed as Koreans began to grapple with the need for radical reform, they found themselves in an extraordinarily difficult geopolitical position. Korea was surrounded by three empires, each seeking to gain control over their country, each meddling in its internal affairs: Russia, China, and Japan. A declining China was desperate to protect its periphery and that meant keeping control over the Korean Peninsula. The Russians expanding in Asia needed warm water ports for their empire in the Far East. The Japanese sought to protect their periphery seeing Korea as a dagger pointing to the heart of Japan. This meant taking control over the peninsula before other powers did, and Japanese imperial ambitions started with Korea. For all three empires, Korea also was a useful market for goods and resources. The Russians sought timber; the Chinese, ginseng; the Japanese, rice. But it was above all the strategic location of Korea that interested them.

At first, the struggle for the mastery of Korea went in China’s favor. The Gapsin Coup provided Beijing with an excuse to intervene militarily. Chinese troops removed the short-lived reform government and restored the old regime to power. From 1884 to 1894 the Chinese exercised a great measure of control over Korea through their representative Yuan Shikai, a young general who would later become the ruler of China. It was a lost decade for Korea, which didn’t have much time to lose if it was to modernize fast enough to survive. For ten years, the Chinese hindered efforts by Koreans to carry out reforms that might lessen their grip on the country. They made it difficult for Koreans to travel abroad, pressured the Joseon government to order students abroad to return home, and blocked efforts by Seoul to open embassies in Western countries. But the Chinese could not keep out the foreign missionaries who opened schools and hospitals and exposed young Koreans to new ideas. Nor could they keep out the Japanese and Russians who opened businesses and engaged in political intrigue.

China’s period of dominance came to an end in 1894 when the Donghaks revolted. The Donghak (Eastern Learning) movement was founded in 1864 by Choe Je-u, who mixed Korean religious practices and Confucian ethics and cosmology with ideas derived from Christianity: belief in a single divinity and the concepts of universal brotherhood and equality. A panicked government in Seoul called for Chinese assistance but before troops could arrive, Korean officials were able to negotiate with the Donghaks, promising to look into their grievances, and things quieted down. Though they were no longer needed, the Chinese forces arrived anyway and as they did, so did uninvited troops from Japan. Tokyo was not going to allow China to consolidate its hold on the peninsula. Instead of fighting the Donghaks, the Japanese and Chinese fought each other, and Japan’s modernized forces carried out a crushing defeat of the Chinese forces. With the Chinese driven out and the Japanese in effective control of Seoul, Tokyo sponsored a new reform government, which included Gapsin veterans who returned from exile in Japan.

Japan’s elimination of China from the Korean scene briefly gave it a dominant position in the peninsula. Japanese troops in Seoul began to intervene in the government, helping to install a pro-Japanese reform-minded cabinet. This new cabinet carried out sweeping changes, establishing equality under the law by doing away with the legal privileges of the old aristocratic yangban class and abolishing slavery. But as well-intentioned as these Korean reformers were, their credibility was undermined by the fact they operated under the protection of Japanese bayonets. Then the Japanese overplayed their hand when they murdered one of their formidable opponents, Queen Min.

Queen Min

One of the events that galvanized the opposition to the Japanese was the horrifically brutal murder of Queen Min. Queen Min was staunchly anti-Japanese, rightly seeing them as the chief threat to the independence of her kingdom. Born in the aristocratic Yeoheung Min clan in 1851, she was selected by Gojong’s father to be the wife of the young king, fifteen at the time. She was a good choice, attractive, intelligent, and from a good family, but not one of the more powerful clans that could be a rival to the monarchy. Furthermore, she was an orphan so she had no meddlesome immediate family for the king and his clan to deal with. But Daewongun underestimated her. As the young princess entered her twenties, she formed a faction that helped engineer the ousting of the regent and put her husband in charge. Queen Min then appointed relatives and acquaintances to key positions although they never dominated the state. Too realistic to be an isolationist like her father-in-law, she supported sending military officials and officers to China for training, and she promoted the teaching of the English language. She was deeply suspicious of the Japanese and since Gojong was increasingly reliant on her advice, she represented a threat to the Japanese effort to control Korea.

In 1895, the Japanese minister to Korea, Miura Goto, plotted her assassination. In the early hours of October 8, about fifty Japanese ronin assassins entered the Gyeongbok Palace with the collaboration of pro-Japanese guards who let them enter through one of the gates. As they burst in, they caused a commotion since they were not sure where in the large palace complex the queen was. Gojong unsuccessfully tried to distract them to allow her to escape. After beating some court ladies and threatening the crown prince at sword point, they found Queen Min and stabbed her to death. Then the assassins dragged the body of the dead queen and those of two court ladies they had also murdered into nearby woods, doused them with kerosene, and burned them. The incident shocked the Korean and international public. Miura was recalled, and 56 Japanese thugs were put on trial in Hiroshima. But when international attention waned all were acquitted.

In 1897, Queen Min was posthumously declared Empress Myeongseong and buried in a proper tomb in an elaborate royal ceremony. The Eulmi Incident, as it became known to Koreans, did as much as anything to instill hatred and distrust of the Japanese. Queen Min’s death became a rallying cry for later Korean resistance fighters.

The Short-lived Empire

The Japanese elimination of China and the death of Queen Min served to draw Russia in. In early 1896, a pro-Russian faction at court spirited King Gojong out of the palace and past the watchful eyes of the Japanese over to the Russian legation, positioning the king to rule from a location protected by Cossacks. At this point, a group of Korean progressives formed the Independence Club, led by the American mission school-educated Yun Chiho. Later, a Gapsin Coup veteran, Seo Jaepil, who returned from the U.S. with an American education, an American wife, and an American name (Philip Jaisohn) would join the Club. The Club called for a modern representative government and an independent foreign policy. In 1897, they named their nation the Great Korean Empire, and Gojong was proclaimed emperor. This put Korea on an equal footing with its imperial neighbors. However, before the Independence Club could enact more reforms, the king, worrying about its power, shut it down; its leaders fled back into exile. But Gojong kept the imperial title.

Meanwhile, Tokyo had invested too much in Korea to let it slip under the control of Russia. In 1904, it attacked the Russians, launching the Russo-Japanese War. To the amazement of the West, Japan emerged victorious from this conflict in the following year. Russia conceded Korea and much of Manchuria as a Japanese sphere of influence. President Theodore Roosevelt, who brokered the peace settlement, tacitly gave Tokyo a free hand in Korea in return for its recognition of the American presence in the Philippines. Britain, too, as part of an alliance it made with Japan in 1902, recognized its primacy over the peninsula. In 1905, with the blessing of the great powers, Japan declared Korea a protectorate. Western states closed their embassies, and Korea became a Japanese possession in all but name.

The Militarization of Korea

While the great powers were fighting over control of Korea, the Koreans were developing a new understanding of the need for military strength if they were to safeguard their independence. Despite the elite’s Confucian disdain for soldiers, Koreans were quick to understand they had to strengthen their country’s military to survive. When the kingdom sent officials to China, Japan, and the West, they reported on the militaries in those countries and urged their kingdom to emulate them. Japan’s martial traditions and military prowess were admired by many younger members of the elite. Since much of the Sino-Japanese War was fought in Korea, the Koreans had observed the power of a modernizing military as the Japanese forces routed the Chinese.

At first, efforts to create a modern military were small-scale, half-hearted, and woefully underfunded. After 1894, Korea created a modern-style Ministry of War that had considerable power. Gojong himself, reflecting the change in attitude, adopted the title of Gwangmu (Brilliant and Martial) when he declared himself Emperor in 1897 and frequently appeared in a military uniform, something unthinkable just a short time earlier. The amount of the budget devoted to the military increased. The army, while remaining small, with the help of foreign advisors became more professional. It was, of course, too little too late but did reflect a growing appreciation of the importance of a modern military.

The new positive view of the