On the night of October 8, 1895, a force of more than fifty Japanese agents, including military officers, entered the royal palace in Seoul with the silent cooperation of hundreds of Korean soldiers stationed around the grounds. Their target was the Queen of Korea. Hearing the commotion as the intruders closed in, she tried to disguise herself and flee, but the attempt failed. She was cornered in one of the outer chambers and killed by troops led by a Korean collaborator.
Her body was burned and buried, apparently in an effort to conceal the manner of her death. The assassination, orchestrated by the Japanese minister to Korea, Miura Goro, was the culmination of a decade of tension between Japan and a woman who had become the most formidable obstacle to Japanese ambitions on the Korean Peninsula. The woman who would come to be known to history as Queen Min was born on November 17, 1851, in the central region of the Korean Peninsula, a kingdom ruled by the Joseon dynasty since 1392. She was born into the Yeoheung Min clan, one of the major aristocratic families that had occupied senior governmental positions for generations, and it was through this lineage that she acquired her popular name, Queen Min.
The title Empress Myeongseong, by which she is also widely known, was granted only after her death, when the kingdom of Korea was elevated to the status of an empire. Very little is known about her early life, but she clearly received a substantial education that exposed her to many values associated with the West. By later accounts, she was small and physically fragile, a contrast to the strong will she displayed in political affairs. Her path to the throne began in 1866, when she married King Gojong, who had been born a year after her and had assumed the throne in 1864 at just twelve years of age.
Their marriage was difficult for many years. Queen Min was said to despise her husband’s lifestyle, while Gojong preferred drinking and banqueting to the business of government and reserved his affections for a series of concubines rather than his wife. Despite this troubled beginning, the royal couple eventually formed a close alliance during the 1880s. By the time the queen turned twenty in 1871, Korea’s relations with its neighbors were shifting in ways that would have profound consequences.
The most significant changes were taking place in Japan. In 1868, a political revolution there had ended the shogunate, a form of military rule that had dominated the country for more than two hundred fifty years, and restored the Japanese emperor as head of state. In practice, however, real power after the Meiji Restoration rested with a group of reforming ministers who were convinced that the only way to prevent Japan from being conquered by European powers was to adopt Western military, political, and economic practices themselves. The roots of the Korean conflict with Meiji Japan lay in Korea’s refusal to recognize the new government in the years after 1868, including its rejection of Japanese diplomats sent to the mainland.
By 1873, the Japanese government was already considering whether to invade Korea. No such war was undertaken at that time, but the origins of Japanese interventionism can be traced to this period. King Gojong assumed his formal responsibilities when he reached fifteen in 1867, and his early reign was difficult. Japan used gunboat diplomacy to gain a foothold on the island of Ganghwa in southern Korea in 1876, while France and Russia also attempted to intervene in Korean affairs.
Throughout this period, Queen Min was demonstrating her political acumen. Korean politics was dominated by an intricate system of palace intrigue, and by 1880 she had risen to prominence and removed Gojong’s powerful concubines from the palace. The royal couple’s relationship steadily improved, and by the early 1880s Queen Min was effectively ruling in place of her husband, who was far less active than his wife. She then set out on an ambitious reform program intended to fundamentally change Korean society.
Her thinking was influenced by the writings of Huang Zunxian, a Chinese diplomat and political theorist whose book Korean Strategy advocated modernizing Korea along lines similar to those Japan had adopted over the previous twenty years as the best means of protecting the country from outside interference. Convinced by these arguments, Queen Min opened Korea to Western trade and diplomacy and, more significantly, began reforming the military with modern armaments and artillery, recognizing that the traditional fighting forces of the Joseon dynasty could not stand against the armies of Japan or the European powers. Following another of Huang’s suggestions, she also began aligning Korea more closely with Russia, its northern neighbor, in order to counter Japanese efforts on the mainland. To support these efforts, Queen Min invited teachers from the United States into Korea beginning in the early 1880s and sent fact-finding missions to America to learn how to modernize the kingdom, a method Japan had itself used in its own modernization during the early 1870s.
Schools for girls and women were established across Korea in an effort to afford women a greater position in society. Other reforms were more mundane but equally consequential. A modern system of bureaucracy and administration was developed to replace the labyrinthine politics of the Korean palace, which made it possible to collect far higher levels of taxation throughout the kingdom. Trade and industry were developed to pay for a more efficient military, with steam engines imported from the United States and Europe to establish basic factories.
The mid-1880s saw the construction of significant communications infrastructure, notably telegraph lines connecting Korea to China and Japan. Korean coinage was reformed, and a new central mint was established to aid the economy. Modern agricultural methods were introduced to avoid food shortages and increase the productivity of what remained a largely agrarian society. Taken as a whole, these measures were designed to make Korea capable of defending itself against the threat of invasion, particularly from Japan.
But they did not go unopposed. In 1882, a rebellion led by the traditional Korean military caste erupted in response to resentment over changes in the Joseon army. It was eventually put down, but the turmoil of what became known as the Imo Incident allowed China and Japan to further meddle in Korea’s internal affairs. In 1884, an attempted overthrow was undertaken by certain members of the yangban, the traditional Korean aristocracy, who had become disillusioned with the reforms Queen Min and King Gojong had implemented.
That coup failed, but it was indicative of things to come. In 1894, a broader revolt broke out among a wide range of disaffected groups, combining elements of the yangban and the Korean peasantry against the Joseon monarchy. This insurrection, known as the Donghak Peasant Revolution, was put down in the spring of 1895, but it became a pretext for renewed interference in Korean affairs by both Japan and China and led to the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War between Korea’s two most powerful neighbors. With its interest in Korea given fresh energy by these events, Japan set its course toward making the peninsula a vassal state of the Meiji regime in Tokyo.
As it did so, Japanese leaders realized that the primary obstacle to their dominance was the Korean Queen, who had driven the modernization of the country in the 1880s and fended off Japanese intervention at that time. They concluded that she needed to be removed and believed that by assassinating her, their objectives could be achieved without military conquest. The plan was that with the queen gone, the king, a far weaker figure than his strong-willed wife, could be encouraged to permit Japanese incursions and effectively make the kingdom a vassal state of Japan. The murder was carried out with the complicity of hundreds of Korean soldiers, many of them from the yangban class, who allowed the Japanese assassins into the central chambers of the royal palace.
Many of these Koreans were directly involved in the killing. The queen died immediately from her wounds at the Okhwa Pavilion in Gyeongbokgung Palace, in what is now Seoul. The assassination, known as the Eulmi Incident, came as a direct result of her years of opposition to Japanese encroachment. In the aftermath, there was widespread outrage both within Korea and internationally.
The Japanese attempted to counter this by conducting a sham investigation in which fifty-six individuals were charged with complicity in the murder, but all were acquitted in Japanese courts on the dubious basis of lack of evidence. The assassination had the opposite effect from what the Japanese had intended. Rather than diminishing resistance, the queen’s murder led to widespread opposition to Japan within Korea during the late 1890s. In 1897, the kingdom of Korea was declared the Empire of Korea, with Gojong as its emperor, and Queen Min was posthumously elevated to the rank of empress.
To protect itself from further Japanese aggression, the new empire drifted closer to Russia. But this arrangement lasted only a short time. In 1904, war broke out between Japan and Russia, and when Russia was defeated the following year, Korea’s fate was largely sealed. Unable to prevent further encroachment, Korea signed the Japan-Korea annexation treaty in 1910, becoming the first major part of the Empire of Japan, which would expand significantly over the following thirty-five years.
The reforms Empress Myeongseong had undertaken to protect her country ultimately proved unsuccessful. The empire she had worked to strengthen was absorbed by the very power she had spent her political life resisting.